ContentsBefore we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed the pack.... We sat down with a particular soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something like "This is better than being overseas and getting shot at," and we would try to break them. We started asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the folder on them... We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass. The stuff actually worked.... Everyone but one—and he didn't smoke—gave us more information than we had before.
Since World War II, the United States government, led by
the Central Intelligence Agency, has searched secretly for ways to control human
behavior. This book is about that search, which had its origins in World War II.
The CIA programs were not only an extension of the OSS quest for a truth drug,
but they also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and Albert
Hofmann's discovery of LSD.
By probing the inner reaches of
consciousness, Hofmann's research took him to the very frontiers of knowledge.
As never before in history, the warring powers sought ideas from scientists
capable of reaching those frontiers—ideas that could make the difference between
victory and defeat. While Hofmann himself remained aloof, in the Swiss
tradition, other scientists, like Albert Einstein, helped turned the
abstractions of the laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons. Jules
Verne's notions of spaceships touching the moon stopped being absurd when
Wernher von Braun's rockets started pounding London. With their creations, the
scientists reached beyond the speculations of science fiction. Never before had
their discoveries been so breathtaking and so frightening. Albert Hofmann's work
touched upon the fantasies of the mind—accessible, in ancient legends, to
witches and wizards who used spells and potions to bring people under their
sway. In the early scientific age, the dream of controlling the brain took on a
modern form in Mary Shelley's creation, Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The dream
would be updated again during the Cold War era to become the Manchurian
Candidate, the assassin whose mind was controlled by a hostile government.[4] Who could
say for certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality like
Verne's rocket stories or Einstein's calculations? And who should be surprised
to learn that government agencies—specifically the CIA—would swoop down on
Albert Hofmann's lab in an effort to harness the power over the mind that LSD
seemed to hold?
From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty
that man was capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of advancing
science and helping his country gain advantage in war. To say that the Dachau
experiments are object lessons of how far people can stretch ends to justify
means is to belittle by cliché what occurred in the concentration camps. Nothing
the CIA ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to
the callous killing of the Nazi "aviation research." Nevertheless, in their
attempts to find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents
crossed many of the same ethical barriers. 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. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for
subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis' Jews and gypsies: mental patients,
prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic
groups.
In the postwar era, American officials straddled the
ethical and the cutthroat approaches to scientific research. After an Allied
tribunal had convicted the first echelon of surviving Nazi war criminals—the
Görings and Speers—American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with "crimes
against humanity" at a second Nuremberg trial. None of the German scientists
expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else had carried out the vilest
experiments. All said that issues of moral and personal responsibility are moot
in state-sponsored research. What is critical, testified Dr. Karl Brandt,
Hitler's personal physician, is "whether the experiment is important or
unimportant." Asked his attitude toward killing human beings in the course of
medical research, Brandt replied, "Do you think that one can obtain any
worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives?" The judges at
Nuremberg rejected such defenses and put forth what came to be known as the
Nuremberg Code on scientific research.[5] Its main
points were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from all
subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of society that
can be obtained in no other way; researchers should not conduct tests where
death or serious injury might occur, "except, perhaps" when the supervising
doctors also serve as subjects. The judges—all Americans— sentenced seven of the
Germans, including Dr. Brandt, to death by hanging. Nine others received long
prison sentences. Thus, the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the
idea that there were limits on what scientists could do to human subjects, even
when a country's security was thought to hang in the balance.
The Nuremberg Code has remained official American policy ever since 1946, but,
even before the verdicts were in, special U.S. investigating teams were sifting
through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value.
The report of one such team found that while part of the data was "inaccurate,"
some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be "an important complement to
existing knowledge." Military authorities sent the records, including a
description of the mescaline and hypnosis experiments, back to the United
States. None of the German mind-control research was ever made public.
Immediately after the war, large political currents began to
shift in the world, as they always do. Allies became enemies and enemies became
allies. Other changes were fresh and yet old. In the United States, the new Cold
War against communism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping
sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were concerned. Out of
these feelings and out of that overriding American faith in advancing technology
came the CIA's attempts to tame hostile minds and make spy fantasies real.
Experiments went forward and the CIA's scientists—bitten, sometimes
obsessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjustment. Some
theories were crushed, while others emerged in unexpected ways that would have a
greater impact outside the CIA than in the world of covert operations. Only one
aspect remained constant during the quarter-century of active research: The
CIA's interest in controlling the human mind had to remain absolutely secret.
World War II provided more than the grand themes of the CIA's
behavioral programs. It also became the formative life experience of the
principal CIA officials, and, indeed, of the CIA itself as an institution. The
secret derring-do of the OSS was new to the United States, and the ways of the
OSS would grow into the ways of the CIA. OSS leaders would have their
counterparts later in the Agency. CIA officials tended to have known the OSS
men, to think like them, to copy their methods, and even, in some cases, to be
the same people. When Agency officials wanted to launch their massive effort for
mind control, for instance, they got out the old OSS documents and went about
their goal in many of the same ways the OSS had. OSS leaders enlisted outside
scientists; Agency officials also went to the most prestigious ones in academia
and industry, soliciting aid for the good of the country. They even approached
the same George White who had shot his initials in the hotel ceiling while on
OSS assignment.
Years later, White's escapades with OSS and
CIA would carry with them a humor clearly unintended at the time. To those
directly involved, influencing human behavior was a deadly serious business, but
qualities like bumbling and pure craziness shine through in hindsight. In the
CIA's campaign, some of America's most distinguished behavioral scientists would
stick all kinds of drugs and wires into their experimental subjects—often
dismissing the obviously harmful effects with theories reminiscent of the
learned nineteenth-century physicians who bled their patients with leeches and
belittled the ignorance of anyone who questioned the technique. If the schemes
of these scientists to control the mind had met with more success, they would be
much less amusing. But so far, at least, the human spirit has apparently kept
winning. That—if anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign.
World War II signaled the end of American isolation and
innocence, and the United States found it had a huge gap to close, with its
enemies and allies alike, in applying underhanded tactics to war. Unlike
Britain, which for hundreds of years had used covert operations to hold her
empire together, the United States had no tradition of using subversion as a
secret instrument of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Russians,
and nearly everyone else had long been involved in this game, although no one
seemed as good at it as the British.
Clandestine lobbying by
British agents in the United States led directly to President Franklin
Roosevelt's creation of the organization that became OSS in 1942. This was the
first American agency set up to wage secret, unlimited war. Roosevelt placed it
under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and World War I military hero, General
William "Wild Bill" Donovan. A burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great
intellectual curiosity, Donovan started as White House intelligence adviser even
before Pearl Harbor, and he had direct access to the President.
Learning at the feet of the British who made available their expertise,
if not all their secrets, Donovan put together an organization where nothing had
existed before. A Columbia College and Columbia Law graduate himself, he tended
to turn to the gentlemanly preserves of the Eastern establishment for recruits.
(The initials OSS were said to stand for "Oh So Social.") Friends—or friends of
friends—could be trusted. "Old boys" were the stalwarts of the British secret
service, and, as with most other aspects of OSS, the Americans followed suit.
One of Donovan's new recruits was Richard Helms, a young
newspaper executive then best known for having gained an interview with Adolf
Hitler in 1936 while working for United Press. Having gone to Le Rosey, the same
Swiss prep school as the Shah of Iran, and then on to clubby Williams College
Helms moved easily among the young OSS men. He was already more taciturn than
the jovial Donovan, but he was equally ambitious and skilled as a judge of
character. For Helms, OSS spywork began a lifelong career. He would become the
most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA, nurturing and
promoting it throughout his steady climb to the top position in the Agency.
Like every major wartime official from President Roosevelt
down, General Donovan believed that World War II was in large measure a battle
of science and organization. The idea was to mobilize science for defense, and
the Roosevelt administration set up a costly, intertwining network of research
programs to deal with everything from splitting the atom to preventing mental
breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston industrialist Stanley Lovell to head
OSS Research and Development and to be the secret agency's liaison with the
government scientific community.
A Cornell graduate and a
self-described "saucepan chemist," Lovell was a confident energetic man with a
particular knack for coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others
Like most of his generation, he was an outspoken patriot. He wrote in his diary
shortly after Pearl Harbor: "As James Hilton said, 'Once at war, to reason is
treason.' My job is clear—to do all that is in me to help America."
General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he expected of Lovell:
"I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the
Germans and Japanese—by our own people—but especially by the underground
resistance programs in all the occupied countries. You'll have to invent them
all, Lovell, because you're going to be my man." Thus Lovell recalled his
marching orders from Donovan, which he instantly received on being introduced to
the blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met anyone with Donovan's
personal magnetism.
Lovell quickly turned to some of the
leading lights in the academic and private sectors. A special group—called
Division 19—within James Conant's National Defense Research Committee was set up
to produce "miscellaneous weapons" for OSS and British intelligence. Lovell's
strategy, he later wrote, was "to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the
surface of every American scientist and to say to him, 'Throw all your normal
law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell.'"
Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who worked on
explosives research during the war (and who became science adviser to Presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy) remembers Stanley Lovell well: "Stan came to us and
asked us to develop ways for camouflaging explosives which could be smuggled
into enemy countries." Kistiakowsky and an associate came up with a substance
which was dubbed "Aunt Jemima" because it looked and tasted like pancake mix.
Says Kistiakowsky: "You could bake bread or other things out of it. I personally
took it to a high-level meeting at the War Department and ate cookies in front
of all those characters to show them what a wonderful invention it was. All you
had to do was attach a powerful detonator, and it exploded with the force of
dynamite." Thus disguised, "Aunt Jemima" could be slipped into occupied lands.
It was credited with blowing up at least one major bridge in China.
Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find something that would
offend Japanese cultural sensibilities. His staff anthropologists reported back
that nothing was so shameful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel movements.
Lovell then had the chemists work up a skatole compound which duplicated the
odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible tubes, flown to China, and
distributed to children in enemy-occupied cities. When a Japanese officer
appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind him and
squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the product "Who? Me?"
and he credited it with costing the Japanese "face."
Unlike
most weapons, "Who? Me?" was not designed to kill or maim. It was a "harassment
substance" designed to lower the morale of individual Japanese. The inspiration
came from academicians who tried to make a science of human behavior. During
World War II, the behavioral sciences were still very much in their infancy, but
OSS—well before most of the outside world—recognized their potential in warfare.
Psychology and psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology all seemed to offer
insights that could be exploited to manipulate the enemy.
General Donovan himself believed that the techniques of psychoanalysis might be
turned on Adolf Hitler to get a better idea of "the things that made him tick,"
as Donovan put it. Donovan gave the job of being the Fuhrer's analyst to Walter
Langer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts psychoanalyst whose older brother William had
taken leave from a chair of history at Harvard to head OSS Research and
Analysis.[6] Langer
protested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be highly
uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic methods could not
be used without direct access to the patient. Donovan was not the sort to be
deterred by such details. He told Langer to go ahead anyway.
With the help of a small research staff, Langer looked through everything he
could find on Hitler and interviewed a number of people who had know the German
leader. Aware of the severe limitations on his information, but left no choice
by General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and wrote up a final study. It pegged
Hitler as a "neurotic psychopath" and proceeded to pick apart the Führer's
psyche. Langer, since retired to Florida, believes he came "pretty close" to
describing the real Adolf Hitler. He is particularly proud of his predictions
that the Nazi leader would become increasingly disturbed as Germany suffered
more and more defeats and that he would commit suicide rather than face capture.
One reason for psychoanalyzing Hitler was to uncover
vulnerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell seized upon one
of Langer's ideas—that Hitler might have feminine tendencies—and got permission
from the OSS hierarchy to see if he could push the Führer over the gender
line.[7] "The hope
was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano," Lovell
wrote. Lovell used OSS's agent network to try to slip female sex hormones into
Hitler's food, but nothing apparently came of it. Nor was there ever any payoff
to other Lovell schemes to blind Hitler permanently with mustard gas or to use a
drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main problem in these
operations—all of which were tried—was to get Hitler to take the medicine.
Failure of the delivery schemes also kept Hitler alive—OSS was simultaneously
trying to poison him.[8]
Without question, murdering a man was a decisive way to influence his
behavior, and OSS scientists developed an arsenal of chemical and biological
poisons that included the incredibly potent botulinus toxin, whose delivery
system was a gelatin capsule smaller than the head of a pin. Lovell and his
associates also realized there were less drastic ways to manipulate an enemy's
behavior, and they came up with a line of products to cause sickness, itching,
baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor thereof. They had less success finding a
drug to compel truthtelling, but it was not for lack of trying.
Chemical and biological substances had been used in wartime long before
OSS came on the scene. Both sides had used poison gas in World War I; during the
early part of World War II, the Japanese had dropped deadly germs on China and
caused epidemics; and throughout the war, the Allies and Axis powers alike had
built up chemical and biological warfare (CBW) stockpiles, whose main function
turned out, in the end, to be deterring the other side. Military men tended to
look on CBW as a way of destroying whole armies and even populations. Like the
world's other secret services, OSS individualized CBW and made it into a way of
selectively but secretly embarrassing, disorienting, incapacitating, injuring,
or killing an enemy.
As diversified as were Lovell's
scientific duties for OSS, they were narrow in comparison with those of his main
counterpart in the CIA's postwar mind-control program, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.
Gottlieb would preside over investigations that ranged from advanced research in
amnesia by electroshock to dragnet searches through the jungles of Latin America
for toxic leaves and barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler
moustacheless, Gottlieb's office would devise a scheme to make Fidel Castro's
beard fall out; like Lovell, Gottlieb would personally provide operators with
deadly poisons to assassinate foreign leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba,
and he would be equally at ease discussing possible applications of new research
in neurology. On a much greater scale than Lovell's, Gottlieb would track down
every conceivable gimmick that might give one person leverage over another's
mind. Gottlieb would preside over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to
stress creation, and he would rise through the Agency along with his
bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.
Early in the war, General Donovan got another idea from
the British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had devised a testing program
to predict the performance of military officers. Donovan thought such a program
might help OSS sort through the masses of recruits who were being rushed through
training. To create an assessment system for Americans, Donovan called in
Harvard psychology professor Henry "Harry" Murray. In 1938 Murray had written
Explorations of Personality, a notable book which laid out a whole
battery of tests that could be used to size up the personalities of individuals.
"Spying is attractive to loonies," states Murray. "Psychopaths, who are people
who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field." The program's
prime objective, according to Murray, was keeping out the crazies, as well as
the "sloths, irritants, bad actors, and free talkers."
Always
in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray and a distinguished group of colleagues only 15
days until the first candidates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they
took over a spacious estate outside Washington as their headquarters. In a
series of hurried meetings, they put together an assessment system that combined
German and British methods with Murray's earlier research. It tested a recruit's
ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie
skillfully, and to read a person's character by the nature of his clothing.
More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in his
claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an aid in weeding out
the "horrors" among OSS candidates. Nevertheless, the secret agency's leaders
believed in its results, and Murray's system became a fixture in OSS, testing
Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray's young behavioral
scientists, like John Gardner,[9] would go on
to become prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the OSS assessment
program would be recognized as a milestone in American psychology. It was the
first systematic effort to evaluate an individual's personality in order to
predict his future behavior. After the war, personality assessment would become
a new field in itself, and some of Murray's assistants would go on to establish
OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with AT&T. They also would
set up study programs at universities, beginning with the University of
California at Berkeley.[10] As would
happen repeatedly with the CIA's mind-control research, OSS was years ahead of
public developments in behavioral theory and application.
In
the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young Oklahoma psychologist
John Gittinger, who would rise in the CIA on the strength of his ideas about how
to make a hard science out of personality assessment and how to use it to
manipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within CIA that refined both
Murray's assessment function and Walter Langer's indirect analysis of foreign
leaders. Gittinger's methods would become an integral part of everyday Agency
operations, and he would become Sid Gottlieb's protégé.
Stanley Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler—and
the OSS man was always looking for ideas—would be to hypnotically control a
German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the Nazi regime and then to give the
subject a hypnotic suggestion to assassinate the Führer. The OSS candidate would
be let loose in Germany where he would take the desired action, "being under a
compulsion that might not be denied," as Lovell wrote.
Lovell
sought advice on whether this scheme would work from New York psychiatrist
Lawrence Kubie and from the famed Menninger brothers, Karl and William. The
Menningers reported that the weight of the evidence showed hypnotism to be
incapable of making people do anything that they would not otherwise do. Equally
negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a German prisoner had a logical reason to kill
Hitler or anyone else, he would not need hypnotism to motivate him.
Lovell and his coworkers apparently accepted this skeptical view of
hypnosis, as did the overwhelming majority of psychologists and psychiatrists in
the country. At the time, hypnosis was considered a fringe activity, and there
was little recognition of either its validity or its usefulness for any
purpose—let alone covert operations. Yet there were a handful of serious
experimenters in the field who believed in its military potential. The most
vocal partisan of this view was the head of the Psychology Department at Colgate
University, George "Esty" Estabrooks. Since the early 1930s, Estabrooks had
periodically ventured out from his sleepy upstate campus to advise the military
on applications of hypnotism.
Estabrooks acknowledged that
hypnosis did not work on everyone and that only one person in five made a good
enough subject to be placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism. He
believed that only these subjects could be induced to such things against their
apparent will as reveal secrets or commit crimes. He had watched respected
members of the community make fools of themselves in the hands of stage
hypnotists, and he had compelled his own students to reveal fraternity secrets
and the details of private love affairs—all of which the subjects presumably did
not want to do.
Still his experience was limited. Estabrooks
realized that the only certain way to know whether a person would commit a crime
like murder under hypnosis was to have the person kill someone. Unwilling to
settle the issue on his own by trying the experiment, he felt that government
sanction of the process would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility.
"Any 'accidents' that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged
to profit and loss," he wrote, "a very trifling portion of that enormous wastage
in human life which is part and parcel of war."
After Pearl
Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to OSS, but they were not accepted by
anyone in government willing to carry them to their logical conclusion. He was
reduced to writing books about the potential use of hypnotism in warfare.
Cassandra-like, he tried to warn America of the perils posed by hypnotic
control. His 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, concerned a series of
seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied personnel: an American submarine
captain torpedoes one of our own battleships, and the beautiful heroine starts
acting in an irrational way which serves the enemy. After a perilous
investigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans have been
hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them to obey Nazi commands. Evans
and his cohorts, shaken by the many ways hypnotism can be used against them, set
up elaborate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the offensive.
Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this time has been brutally and
rather graphically tortured. She complains that "doing things to people's minds"
is "a loathsome way to fight." Her qualms are brushed aside by Johnny Evans, her
lover and boss. He sets off after the Germans—"to tamper with their minds; Make
them traitors; Make them work for us."
In the aftermath of the
war, as the U.S. national security apparatus was being constructed, the leaders
of the Central Intelligence Agency would adopt Johnny Evans' mission—almost in
those very words. Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and
many others would undertake a far-flung and complicated assault on the human
mind. In hypnosis and many other fields, scientists even more eager than George
Estabrooks would seek CIA approval for the kinds of experiments they would not
dare perform on their own. Sometimes the Agency men concurred; on other
occasions, they reserved such experiments for themselves. They would tamper with
many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would
minimize and hide their deeds, and they would live to see doubts raised about
the health of their own minds.