MKULTRA and The CIA's War On The Human Mind

[grarpamp]

https://mises.org/wire/mkultra-and-cias-war-human-mind
https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Chaos-Deserters-Brainwashers-Themselves/dp/1627794638

Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute,

[Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the
CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The
author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations,
the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,”
regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla
wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including
against Americans, even inside the United States.

But “fearsome” does not mean “flawless.” The CIA has failed at least
as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so
flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters
behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia
during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders
wryly refer to their organization as “Clowns In Action.”

Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible
mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief, is any
indication, the answer is both.

A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times
correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In
his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps
the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret,
long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind.

    “History’s most systematic search for techniques of mind control,”
Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II.

At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira
Baldwin - “America’s first bio-warrior” and a part-time Quaker
preacher - was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the
University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a
bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out
of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons
for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin’s bigger
projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston
Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the
Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19).

For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the
last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons
against an enemy. Kinzer’s book tells the tale of how the targeting of
unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the
Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich.

The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for
MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA—formed out of the
Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice. The Germans
and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ
warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies
prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects,
or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the
Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit
approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were
allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency,
decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in
order to counter the new adversary in Moscow.

For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis’ director of biowarfare research
and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler,
was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors’ Trial in
Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work - as part of Operation Paperclip
designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US - at Camp
Detrick (pp. 20–24).

It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the
CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had
been a star student of Ira Baldwin’s at Wisconsin, is the main figure
in Kinzer’s book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA.
Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA’s laboratories at Camp
Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons—often using unwitting
American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper
“specially equipped with large aerosol hoses” spent six days spraying
the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog,
infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37–38)—to drugs
which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA’s sister CIA
project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the
CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb
provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome’s nefarious knowledge
of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and
with the help of former Nazi doctors, America’s “poisoner in chief.”

The CIA’s mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger
importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was
originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by
CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47)

At first, the Bluebird team experimented with “hypnosis, electroshock,
and sensory deprivation,” along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA
sites in “secret prisons in Germany and Japan,” looking for a way to
extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48–49).
But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the
young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird’s updated
iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51–52). The goal of Artichoke was
to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state
secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of
full-scale war against the human mind.

Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after
launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside
world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments
thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to
achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all
reality and tactical limitation. If the US didn’t win the race to the
mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American
population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets.
Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year
“Artichoke” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri
Dimitrov, “had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques
exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a
mortal threat to the rest of the world” (pp. 52–53).

Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within
reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on
prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under
Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then
heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet
brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester
psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin
on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever,
despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with
opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind
for the CIA (p. 59).

Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other
narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered
hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had
discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel,
Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot
enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects,
Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug’s
effects. Washington learned of Hofmann’s discovery in 1949, and one of
the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of
the new substance (pp. 34–35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson,
who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World
War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same
psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were
tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit
similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60–61).
Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would
allow the CIA to control the psyche, and therefore to beat the Soviets
at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at
least, was) the Soviets’ own game.

The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb’s
conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often
ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports
that

    in 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to
Tokyo….Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were
secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them
with a variety of depressants and stimulants….Under relentless
questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were
taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. (p. 64)

The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea
and Germany (p. 64). Gottlieb was usually personally involved.

Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued. An American artist
named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by
CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink. Glickman
began to hallucinate wildly. He fled in a state of panic and remained
in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding
until his family came to take him home, and then he spent the rest of
his life as a near invalid. The chemical which the CIA had slipped
into Glickman’s drink was almost certainly LSD, and Glickman, Kinzer
suggests, had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered
from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on
the effects of hepatic infection on the efficacy of LSD (pp. 66–67)

Things got worse from there. In 1952, the CIA commissioned underworld
denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a
human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich
Village, New York (pp. 74–75). White’s job was to bring to the CIA’s
apartment “expendables” on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD.
White “knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the
drugs,” as one of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA colleagues later explained, and
this made him invaluable for procuring the “drug users, petty
criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about
what had happened to them” when the CIA’s experiments were finished
(pp. 76–77). Many of these “expendables” suffered nervous breakdowns,
and some died.

In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing, CIA agents went to Basel,
where LSD had been discovered, and tried to buy all the LSD in stock.
Allen Dulles authorized a $240,000 outlay to pay for it (p. 86).
Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann’s 1943 discovery, but Sandoz wanted
nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb, freed of
any need to scruple over IP infringement, tasked US pharmaceutical
company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States (pp. 85–86) With their
mind control serum in production, MKULTRA agents could focus on how to
dose experimental subjects. The CIA even hired a professional
magician, John Mulholland, to teach Gottlieb and his agents how to
deliver LSD into unsuspecting subjects’ drinks and food without being
detected (pp. 89–94)

Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist, Dr. Harry Isbell,
to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients.
More lives were destroyed (pp. 94–96). Among the victims of another of
Gottlieb’s agent-doctors was none other than James “Whitey” Bulger,
the mafioso who, along with “nineteen other inmates” at the Atlanta
Federal Penitentiary, beginning in 1957 “was given LSD nearly every
day for fifteen months, without being told what it was” (pp. 98–99).
Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares, suicidal
thoughts, and “deep depression” (p. 98). Bulger, who had been told
that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for
schizophrenia, did not learn the truth about what had happened until
1979 (pp. 263–64).

The human toll of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA experiments continued to mount.
One of Gottlieb’s closest associates in the project, Frank Olson—a
bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also
been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb’s mentor Ira Baldwin—began to
express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing. He told his wife
that he had made a “terrible mistake” in his work (p. 114). He shared
his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well. Olson’s conscience
appeared to be getting the better of him, and he became a liability to
the team.

In late 1953, Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a
backwoods MKULTRA gathering, “Deep Creek Rendezvous,” outside Camp
Detrick (p. 113). Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation,
and early in the morning on November 28, 1953—a few days after
Thanksgiving—Olson “fell or jumped” from a window of the Statler Hotel
in Manhattan, dying few moments after hitting the concrete below.
Another MKULTRA agent, Gottlieb’s lieutenant Robert Lashbrook, was the
only other person in the room when Olson “fell or jumped” (pp.
120–21). Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped
out of the window and Olson’s death was originally designated a
suicide, but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an
investigation was carried out, including a new autopsy on Olson’s
body. The forensic pathologist, after a month’s examination of the
corpse, declared: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally,
deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window” (p.
250). Wounds on Olson’s body were consistent with methods taught in
CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order
to make their deaths look self-inflicted.

Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson’s demise, but they carried
on with their work. They spent the next few years looking for magic
mushrooms in Mexico (157); arranging suicide capsules for American
agents, including U-2 pilot Gary Powers (who chose not to use his when
he was shot down over the Soviet Union) (pp. 172–75); attempting, at
the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy, to assassinate
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (after exploding cigars and exploding
conch shells were ruled out, Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with
fungi and bacteria) (p. 184); and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other
radicals on LSD (pp. 188–90). Gottlieb personally delivered to the
American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb
had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the
Belgians and the Africans beat the CIA to it (pp. 176–80).

Gottlieb’s career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of
people, many of them innocent. He retired from the CIA in 1973 after
receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (p. 211). Lifelong
devotees of folk dance, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, moved to the
countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small
community there, volunteering, dancing, and experimenting with radical
ecology. However, “investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a
Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam,” learned
of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans, and the Congress was
forced to act. Gottlieb’s career, long a well-kept secret, was being
brought into the open, and his retirement would therefore be far from
peaceful.

But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the
other MKULTRA agents had done. In 1975, after the outcry caused by the
Hersh reporting, President Gerald Ford deputized Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA. The new CIA director,
William Colby, was remarkably frank. Colby informed the Rockefeller
Commission that “the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted
in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots” (p. 216). Nelson
Rockefeller, attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too
much, buttonholed Colby later: “Bill, do you really have to present
all this material to us?” (p. 216).

In 1977, in the wake of the Church Report on further American
intelligence excesses, Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert’s brother,
spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result
of a FOIA request (Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned, but
some undetected copies remained), called Admiral Stansfield Turner to
testify before Congress on MKULTRA. The walls were closing in.
Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify—albeit in a
closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange—but Gottlieb
essentially pleaded amnesia (nearly all of his answers to questions
about MKULTRA were some version of “I do not recall”) and the matter
seemed to end there.

Still, the skeletons in Gottlieb’s closet would not go away. In 1984
Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson, the former
MKULTRA colleague who had “fallen or jumped” from his Manhattan hotel
room in 1953. Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, was unconvinced by
Gottlieb’s explanation for the “accident,” and, after Frank Olson’s
widow and Eric’s mother passed away, ordered Frank’s body exhumed in
1994. As information about MKULTRA built in the public’s awareness,
other cases were reopened, including that of Stanley Glickman. (257)
The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA
to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb pushed back the trial
for Glickman’s murder as long as he could, and then, in early March,
1999, Sidney Gottlieb died.

Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the
death had been a suicide (p. 259).

Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly
researched introduction to the life and work of one of America’s most
unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked
for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the
CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “the Agency” has
committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some
of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of
just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a
sobering revelation.

Sidney Gottlieb, the person directly responsible for much, if not
most, of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years, remains
as mysterious at the end of Kinzer’s volume as at the beginning,
however. By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable
family. Kinzer speculates that perhaps Gottlieb’s having been rejected
for military service in World War II—Gottlieb stuttered and had a
clubfoot—left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism,
an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews (p. 50). Gottlieb was
heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to
have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing
his “work,” so there are indications that he was aware that the
experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were, at best,
unethical, and objectively speaking often outright crimes.

But Gottlieb was hardly alone in his endeavors, and the explanation
that Gottlieb, Allen Dulles, and many others in the CIA gave—to
themselves and to each other, and to the world around when
pressed—makes the most sense. They had a country to defend, they faced
an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union, and they were
willing to do whatever it took, even sacrificing innocent people, to
keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist
mind control.