The counterculture generation was not yet out of the nursery,
however, when Bob Hyde went tripping: Hyde himself would not become a secret CIA
consultant for several years. The CIA and the military intelligence agencies
were just setting out on their quest for drugs and other exotic methods to take
possession of people's minds. The ancient desire to control enemies through
magical spells and potions had come alive again, and several offices within the
CIA competed to become the head controllers. Men from the Office of Security's
ARTICHOKE program were struggling—as had OSS before them—to find a truth drug or
hypnotic method that would aid in interrogation. Concurrently, the Technical
Services Staff (TSS) was investigating in much greater depth the whole area of
applying chemical and biological warfare (CBW) to covert operations. TSS was the
lineal descendent of Stanley Lovell's Research and Development unit in OSS, and
its officials kept alive much of the excitement and urgency of the World War II
days when Lovell had tried to bring out the Peck's Bad Boy in American
scientists. Specialists from TSS furnished backup equipment for secret
operations: false papers, bugs, taps, suicide pills, explosive seashells,
transmitters hidden in false teeth, cameras in tobacco pouches, invisible inks,
and the like. In later years, these gadget wizards from TSS would become known
for supplying some of history's more ludicrous landmarks, such as Howard Hunt's
ill-fitting red wig; but in the early days of the CIA, they gave promise of
transforming the spy world.
Within TSS, there existed a
Chemical Division with functions that few others—even in TSS—knew about. These
had to do with using chemicals (and germs) against specific people. From 1951 to
1956, the years when the CIA's interest in LSD peaked, Sidney Gottlieb, a native
of the Bronx with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, headed this division. (And
for most of the years until 1973, he would oversee TSS's behavioral programs
from one job or another.) Only 33 years old when he took over the Chemical
Division, Gottlieb had managed to overcome a pronounced stammer and a clubfoot
to rise through Agency ranks. Described by several acquaintances as a
"compensator," Gottlieb prided himself on his ability, despite his obvious
handicaps, to pursue his cherished hobby, folk dancing. On returning from secret
missions overseas, he invariably brought back a new step that he would dance
with surprising grace. He could call out instructions for the most complicated
dances without a break in his voice, infecting others with enthusiasm. A man of
unorthodox tastes, Gottlieb lived in a former slave cabin that he had remodeled
himself—with his wife, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in India, and
his four children. Each morning, he rose at 5:30 to milk the goats he kept on
his 15 acres outside Washington. The Gottliebs drank only goat's milk, and they
made their own cheese. They also raised Christmas trees which they sold to the
outside world. Greatly respected by his former colleagues, Gottlieb, who refused
to be interviewed for this book, is described as a humanist, a man of
intellectual humility and strength, willing to carry out, as one ex-associate
puts it, "the tough things that had to be done." This associate fondly recalls,
"When you watched him, you gained more and more respect because he was willing
to work so hard to get an idea across. He left himself totally exposed. It was
more important for us to get the idea than for him not to stutter." One idea he
got across was that the Agency should investigate the potential use of the
obscure new drug, LSD, as a spy weapon.
At the top ranks of
the Clandestine Services (officially called the Directorate of Operations but
popularly known as the "dirty tricks department"), Sid Gottlieb had a champion
who appreciated his qualities, Richard Helms. For two decades, Gottlieb would
move into progressively higher positions in the wake of Helms' climb to the
highest position in the Agency. Helms, the tall, smooth "preppie," apparently
liked the way the Jewish chemist, who had started out at Manhattan's City
College, could thread his way through complicated technical problems and make
them understandable to nonscientists. Gottlieb was loyal and he followed orders.
Although many people lay in the chain of command between the two men, Helms
preferred to avoid bureaucratic niceties by dealing directly with Gottlieb.
On April 3, 1953, Helms proposed to Director Allen Dulles that
the CIA set up a program under Gottlieb for "covert use of biological and
chemical materials." Helms made clear that the Agency could use these methods in
"present and future clandestine operations" and then added, "Aside from the
offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field
. . . gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy's theoretical potential, thus
enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in
the use of these techniques as we are." Once again, as it would throughout the
history of the behavioral programs, defense justified offense. Ray Cline, often
a bureaucratic rival of Helms, notes the spirit in which the future Director
pushed this program: "Helms fancied himself a pretty tough cookie. It was
fashionable among that group to fancy they were rather impersonal about dangers,
risks, and human life. Helms would think it sentimental and foolish to be
against something like this."
On April 13, 1953—the same day
that the Pentagon announced that any U.S. prisoner refusing repatriation in
Korea would be listed as a deserter and shot if caught—Allen Dulles approved the
program, essentially as put forth by Helms. Dulles took note of the
"ultra-sensitive work" involved and agreed that the project would be called
MKULTRA.[2] He approved
an initial budget of $300,000, exempted the program from normal CIA financial
controls, and allowed TSS to start up research projects "without the signing of
the usual contracts or other written agreements." Dulles ordered the Agency's
bookkeepers to pay the costs blindly on the signatures of Sid Gottlieb and
Willis Gibbons, a former U.S. Rubber executive who headed TSS.
As is so often the case in government, the activity that Allen Dulles approved
with MKULTRA was already under way, even before he gave it a bureaucratic
structure. Under the code name MKDELTA, the Clandestine Services had set up
procedures the year before to govern the use of CBW products. (MKDELTA now
became the operational side of MKULTRA.) Also in 1952, TSS had made an agreement
with the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army's biological research
center at Fort Detrick, Maryland whereby SOD would produce germ weapons for the
CIA's use (with the program called MKNAOMI). Sid Gottlieb later testified that
the purpose of these programs was "to investigate whether and how it was
possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means. The context in
which this investigation was started was that of the height of the Cold War with
the Korean War just winding down; with the CIA organizing its resources to
liberate Eastern Europe by paramilitary means; and with the threat of Soviet
aggression very real and tangible, as exemplified by the recent Berlin airlift"
(which occurred in 1948).
In the early days of MKULTRA, the
roughly six TSS professionals who worked on the program spent a good deal of
their time considering the possibilities of LSD.[3] "The most
fascinating thing about it," says one of them, "was that such minute quantities
had such a terrific effect." Albert Hofmann had gone off into another world
after swallowing less than 1/100,000 of an ounce. Scientists had known about the
mind-altering qualities of drugs like mescaline since the late nineteenth
century, but LSD was several thousand times more potent. Hashish had been around
for millennia, but LSD was roughly a million times stronger (by weight). A
two-suiter suitcase could hold enough LSD to turn on every man, woman, and child
in the United States. "We thought about the possibility of putting some in a
city water supply and having the citizens wander around in a more or less happy
state, not terribly interested in defending themselves," recalls the TSS man.
But incapacitating such large numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical Corps,
which also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA was concentrating
on individuals. TSS officials understood that LSD distorted a person's sense of
reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic
loyalties. Could the CIA make spies out of tripping Russians—or vice versa? In
the early 1950s, when the Agency developed an almost desperate need to know more
about LSD, almost no outside information existed on the subject. Sandoz had done
some clinical studies, as had a few other places, including Boston Psychopathic,
but the work generally had not moved much beyond the horse-and-buggy stage. The
MKULTRA team had literally hundreds of questions about LSD's physiological,
psychological, chemical, and social effects. Did it have any antidotes? What
happened if it were combined with other drugs? Did it affect everyone the same
way? What was the effect of doubling the dose? And so on.
TSS
first sought answers from academic researchers, who, on the whole, gladly
cooperated and let the Agency pick their brains. But CIA officials realized that
no one would undertake a quick and systematic study of the drug unless the
Agency itself paid the bill. Almost no government or private money was then
available for what had been dubbed "experimental psychiatry." Sandoz wanted the
drug tested, for its own commercial reasons, but beyond supplying it free to
researchers, it would not assume the costs. The National Institutes of Mental
Health had an interest in LSD's relationship to mental illness, but CIA
officials wanted to know how the drug affected normal people, not sick ones.
Only the military services, essentially for the same reasons as the CIA, were
willing to sink much money into LSD, and the Agency men were not about to defer
to them. They chose instead to take the lead—in effect to create a whole new
field of research.
Suddenly there was a huge new market for
grants in academia, as Sid Gottlieb and his aides began to fund LSD projects at
prestigious institutions. The Agency's LSD pathfinders can be identified: Bob
Hyde's group at Boston Psychopathic, Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and
Columbia University in New York, Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois
Medical School, Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in
Lexington, Kentucky, Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, and Harold
Hodge's group at the University of Rochester. The Agency disguised its
involvement by passing the money through two conduits: the Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, a rich establishment institution which served as a cutout
(intermediary) only for a year or two, and the Geschickter Fund for Medical
Research, a Washington, D.C. family foundation, whose head, Dr. Charles
Geschickter, provided the Agency with a variety of services for more than a
decade. Reflexively, TSS officials felt they had to keep the CIA connection
secret. They could only "assume," according to a 1955 study, that Soviet
scientists understood the drug's "strategic importance" and were capable of
making it themselves. They did not want to spur the Russians into starting their
own LSD program or into devising countermeasures.
The CIA's
secrecy was also clearly aimed at the folks back home. As a 1963 Inspector
General's report stated, "Research in the manipulation of human behavior is
considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be
professionally unethical"; therefore, openness would put "in jeopardy" the
reputations of the outside researchers. Moreover, the CIA Inspector General
declared that disclosure of certain MKULTRA activities could result in "serious
adverse reaction" among the American public.
At Boston
Psychopathic, there were various levels of concealment. Only Bob Hyde and his
boss, the hospital superintendent, knew officially that the CIA was funding the
hospital's LSD program from 1952 on, to the tune of about $40,000 a year. Yet,
according to another member of the Hyde group, Dr. DeShon, all senior staff
understood where the money really came from. "We agreed not to discuss it," says
DeShon. "I don't see any objection to this. We never gave it to anyone without
his consent and without explaining it in detail." Hospital officials told the
volunteer subjects something about the nature of the experiments but nothing
about their origins or purpose. None of the subjects had any idea that the CIA
was paying for the probing of their minds and would use the results for its own
purposes; most of the staff was similarly ignorant.
Like Hyde,
almost all the researchers tried LSD on themselves. Indeed, many believed they
gained real insight into what it felt like to be mentally ill, useful knowledge
for health professionals who spent their lives treating people supposedly sick
in the head. Hyde set up a multidisciplinary program—virtually unheard of at the
time—that brought together psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists. As
subjects, they used each other, hospital patients, and volunteers—mostly
students—from the Boston area. They worked through a long sequence of
experiments that served to isolate variable after variable. Palming themselves
off as foundation officials, the men from MKULTRA frequently visited to observe
and suggest areas of future research. One Agency man, who himself tripped
several times under Hyde's general supervision, remembers that he and his
colleagues would pass on a nugget that another contractor like Harold Abramson
had gleaned and ask Hyde to perform a follow-up test that might answer a
question of interest to the Agency. Despite these tangents, the main body of
research proceeded in a planned and orderly fashion. The researchers learned
that while some subjects seemed to become schizophrenic, many others did not.
Surprisingly, true schizophrenics showed little reaction at all to LSD, unless
given massive doses. The Hyde group found out that the quality of a person's
reaction was determined mainly by the person's basic personality structure (set)
and the environment (setting) in which he or she took the drug. The subject's
expectation of what would happen also played a major part. More than anything
else, LSD tended to intensify the subject's existing characteristics—often to
extremes. A little suspicion could grow into major paranoia, particularly in the
company of people perceived as threatening.
Unbeknownst to his
fellow researchers, the energetic Dr. Hyde also advised the CIA on using LSD in
covert operations. A CIA officer who worked with him recalls: "The idea would be
to give him the details of what had happened [with a case], and he would
speculate. As a sharp M.D. in the old-school sense, he would look at things in
ways that a lot of recent bright lights couldn't get.... He had a good sense of
make-do." The Agency paid Hyde for his time as a consultant, and TSS officials
eventually set aside a special MKULTRA subproject as Hyde's private funding
mechanism. Hyde received funds from yet another MKULTRA subproject that TSS men
created for him in 1954, so he could serve as a cutout for Agency purchases of
rare chemicals. His first buy was to be $32,000 worth of corynanthine, a
possible antidote to LSD, that would not be traced to the CIA.
Bob Hyde died in 1976 at the age of 66, widely hailed as a pacesetter in mental
health. His medical and intelligence colleagues speak highly of him both
personally and professionally. Like most of his generation, he apparently
considered helping the CIA a patriotic duty. An Agency officer states that Hyde
never raised doubts about his covert work. "He wouldn't moralize. He had a lot
of trust in the people he was dealing with [from the CIA]. He had pretty well
reached the conclusion that if they decided to do something [operationally],
they had tried whatever else there was and were willing to risk it."
Most of the CIA's academic researchers published articles on their work
in professional journals, but those long, scholarly reports often gave an
incomplete picture of the research. In effect, the scientists would write openly
about how LSD affects a patient's pulse rate, but they would tell only the CIA
how the drug could be used to ruin that patient's marriage or memory. Those
researchers who were aware of the Agency's sponsorship seldom published anything
remotely connected to the instrumental and rather unpleasant questions the
MKULTRA men posed for investigation. That was true of Hyde and of Harold
Abramson, the New York allergist who became one of the first Johnny Appleseeds
of LSD by giving it to a number of his distinguished colleagues. Abramson
documented all sorts of experiments on topics like the effects of LSD on Siamese
fighting fish and snails,[4] but he
never wrote a word about one of his early LSD assignments from the Agency. In a
1953 document, Sid Gottlieb listed subjects he expected Abramson to investigate
with the $85,000 the Agency was furnishing him. Gottlieb wanted "operationally
pertinent materials along the following lines: a. Disturbance of Memory; b.
Discrediting by Aberrant Behavior; c. Alteration of Sex Patterns; d. Eliciting
of Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of Dependence."
Dr. Harris Isbell, whose work the CIA funded through Navy cover with the
approval of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, published his
principal findings, but he did not mention how he obtained his subjects. As
Director of the Addiction Research Center at the huge Federal drug hospital in
Lexington, Kentucky, he had access to a literally captive population. Inmates
heard on the grapevine that if they volunteered for Isbell's program, they would
be rewarded either in the drug of their choice or in time off from their
sentences. Most of the addicts chose drugs—usually heroin or morphine of a
purity seldom seen on the street. The subjects signed an approval form, but they
were not told the names of the experimental drugs or the probable effects. This
mattered little, since the "volunteers" probably would have granted their
informed consent to virtually anything to get hard drugs.
Given Isbell's almost unlimited supply of subjects, TSS officials used the
Lexington facility as a place to make quick tests of promising but untried drugs
and to perform specialized experiments they could not easily duplicate
elsewhere. For instance, Isbell did one study for which it would have been
impossible to attract student volunteers. He kept seven men on LSD for 77
straight days.[5] Such an
experiment is as chilling as it is astonishing—both to lovers and haters of LSD.
Nearly 20 years after Dr. Isbell's early work, counterculture journalist Hunter
S. Thompson delighted and frightened his readers with accounts of drug binges
lasting a few days, during which Thompson felt his brain boiling away in the
sun, his nerves wrapping around enormous barbed wire forts, and his remaining
faculties reduced to their reptilian antecedents. Even Thompson would shudder at
the thought of 77 days straight on LSD, and it is doubtful he would joke about
the idea. To Dr. Isbell, it was just another experiment. "I have had seven
patients who have now been taking the drug for more than 42 days," he wrote in
the middle of the test, which he called "the most amazing demonstration of drug
tolerance I have ever seen." Isbell tried to "break through this tolerance" by
giving triple and quadruple doses of LSD to the inmates.
Filled with intense curiosity, Isbell tried out a wide variety of unproven drugs
on his subjects. Just as soon as a new batch of scopolamine, rivea seeds, or
bufotenine arrived from the CIA or NIMH, he would start testing. His relish for
the task occasionally shone through the dull scientific reports. "I will write
you a letter as soon as I can get the stuff into a man or two," he informed his
Agency contact.
No corresponding feeling shone through for the
inmates, however. In his few recorded personal comments, he complained that his
subjects tended to be afraid of the doctors and were not as open in describing
their experiences as the experimenters would have wished. Although Isbell made
an effort to "break through the barriers" with the subjects, who were nearly all
black drug addicts, Isbell finally decided "in all probability, this type of
behavior is to be expected with patients of this type." The subjects have long
since scattered, and no one apparently has measured the aftereffects of the more
extreme experiments on them.
One subject who could be found
spent only a brief time with Dr. Isbell. Eddie Flowers was 19 years old and had
been in Lexington for about a year when he signed up for Isbell's program. He
lied about his age to get in, claiming he was 21. All he cared about was getting
some drugs. He moved into the experimental wing of the hospital where the food
was better and he could listen to music. He loved his heroin but knew nothing
about drugs like LSD. One day he took something in a graham cracker. No one ever
told him the name, but his description sounds like it made him trip—badly, to be
sure. "It was the worst shit I ever had," he says. He hallucinated and suffered
for 16 or 17 hours. "I was frightened. I wouldn't take it again." Still, Flowers
earned enough "points" in the experiment to qualify for his "payoff in heroin.
All he had to do was knock on a little window down the hall. This was the drug
bank. The man in charge kept a list of the amount of the hard drug each inmate
had in his account. Flowers just had to say how much he wanted to withdraw and
note the method of payment. "If you wanted it in the vein, you got it there,"
recalls Flowers who now works in a Washington, D.C. drug rehabilitation center.
Dr. Isbell refuses all request for interviews. He did tell a
Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he inherited the drug payoff system when he
came to Lexington and that "it was the custom in those days.... The ethical
codes were not so highly developed, and there was a great need to know in order
to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics.... I
personally think we did a very excellent job."
For every
Isbell, Hyde, or Abramson who did TSS contract work, there were dozens of others
who simply served as casual CIA informants, some witting and some not. Each TSS
project officer had a skull session with dozens of recognized experts several
times a year. "That was the only way a tiny staff like Sid Gottlieb's could
possibly keep on top of the burgeoning behavioral sciences," says an ex-CIA
official. "There would be no way you could do it by library research or the
Ph.D. dissertation approach." The TSS men always asked their contacts for the
names of others they could talk to, and the contacts would pass them on to other
interesting scientists.
In LSD research, TSS officers
benefited from the energetic intelligence gathering of their contractors,
particularly Harold Abramson. Abramson talked regularly to virtually everyone
interested in the drug, including the few early researchers not funded by the
Agency or the military, and he reported his findings to TSS. In addition, he
served as reporting secretary of two conference series sponsored by the Agency's
sometime conduit, the Macy Foundation. These series each lasted over five year
periods in the 1950s; one dealt with "Problems of Consciousness" and the other
with "Neuropharmacology." Held once a year in the genteel surroundings of the
Princeton Inn, the Macy Foundation conferences brought together TSS's (and the
military's) leading contractors, as part of a group of roughly 25 with the
multidisciplinary background that TSS officials so loved. The participants came
from all over the social sciences and included such luminaries as Margaret Mead
and Jean Piaget. The topics discussed usually mirrored TSS's interests at the
time, and the conferences served as a spawning ground for ideas that allowed
researchers to engage in some healthy cross-fertilization.
Beyond the academic world, TSS looked to the pharmaceutical companies as another
source on drugs—and for a continuing supply of new products to test. TSS's Ray
Treichler handled the liaison function, and this secretive little man built up
close relationships with many of the industry's key executives. He had a
particular knack for convincing them he would not reveal their trade secrets.
Sometimes claiming to be from the Army Chemical Corps and sometimes admitting
his CIA connection, Treichler would ask for samples of drugs that were either
highly poisonous, or, in the words of the onetime director of research of a
large company, "caused hypertension, increased blood pressure, or led to other
odd physiological activity."
Dealing with American drug
companies posed no particular problems for TSS. Most cooperated in any way they
could. But relations with Sandoz were more complicated. The giant Swiss firm had
a monopoly on the Western world's production of LSD until 1953. Agency officials
feared that Sandoz would somehow allow large quantities to reach the Russians.
Since information on LSD's chemical structure and effects was publicly available
from 1947 on, the Russians could have produced it any time they felt it
worthwhile. Thus, the Agency's phobia about Sandoz seems rather irrational, but
it unquestionably did exist.
On two occasions early in the
Cold War, the entire CIA hierarchy went into a dither over reports that Sandoz
might allow large amounts of LSD to reach Communist countries. In 1951 reports
came in through military channels that the Russians had obtained some 50 million
doses from Sandoz. Horrendous visions of what the Russians might do with such a
stockpile circulated in the CIA, where officials did not find out the
intelligence was false for several years. There was an even greater uproar in
1953 when more reports came in, again through military intelligence, that Sandoz
wanted to sell the astounding quantity of 10 kilos (22 pounds) of LSD enough for
about 100 million doses—on the open market.
A top-level
coordinating committee which included CIA and Pentagon representatives
unanimously recommended that the Agency put up $240,000 to buy it all. Allen
Dulles gave his approval, and off went two CIA representatives to Switzerland,
presumably with a black bag full of cash. They met with the president of Sandoz
and other top executives. The Sandoz men stated that the company had never made
anything approaching 10 kilos of LSD and that, in fact, since the discovery of
the drug 10 years before, its total production had been only 40 grams (about
11/2 ounces).[6] The
manufacturing process moved quite slowly at that time because Sandoz used real
ergot, which could not be grown in large quantities. Nevertheless, Sandoz
executives, being good Swiss businessmen, offered to supply the U.S. Government
with 100 grams weekly for an indefinite period, if the Americans would pay a
fair price. Twice the Sandoz president thanked the CIA men for being willing to
take the nonexistent 10 kilos off the market. While he said the company now
regretted it had ever discovered LSD in the first place, he promised that Sandoz
would not let the drug fall into communist hands. The Sandoz president mentioned
that various Americans had in the past made "covert and sideways" approaches to
Sandoz to find out about LSD, and he agreed to keep the U.S. Government informed
of all future production and shipping of the drug. He also agreed to pass on any
intelligence about Eastern European interest in LSD. The Sandoz executives asked
only that their arrangement with the CIA be kept "in the very strictest
confidence."
All around the world, the CIA tried to stay on
top of the LSD supply. Back home in Indianapolis, Eli Lilly & Company was
even then working on a process to synthesize LSD. Agency officials felt
uncomfortable having to rely on a foreign company for their supply, and in 1953
they asked Lilly executives to make them up a batch, which the company
subsequently donated to the government. Then, in 1954, Lilly scored a major
breakthrough when its researchers worked out a complicated 12- to 15-step
process to manufacture first lysergic acid (the basic building block) and then
LSD itself from chemicals available on the open market. Given a relatively
sophisticated lab, a competent chemist could now make LSD without a supply of
the hard-to-grow ergot fungus. Lilly officers confidentially informed the
government of their triumph. They also held an unprecedented press conference to
trumpet their synthesis of lysergic acid, but they did not publish for another
five years their success with the closely related LSD.
TSS
officials soon sent a memo to Allen Dulles, explaining that the Lilly discovery
was important because the government henceforth could buy LSD in "tonnage
quantities," which made it a potential chemical-warfare agent. The memo writer
pointed out, however, that from the MKULTRA point of view, the discovery made no
difference since TSS was working on ways to use the drug only in small-scale
covert operations, and the Agency had no trouble getting the limited amounts it
needed. But now the Army Chemical Corps and the Air Force could get their
collective hands on enough LSD to turn on the world.
Sharing
the drug with the Army here, setting up research programs there, keeping track
of it everywhere, the CIA generally presided over the LSD scene during the
1950s. To be sure, the military services played a part and funded their own
research programs.[7] So did the
National Institutes of Health, to a lesser extent. Yet both the military
services and the NIH allowed themselves to be co-opted by the CIA—as funding
conduits and intelligence sources. The Food and Drug Administration also
supplied the Agency with confidential information on drug testing. Of the
Western world's two LSD manufacturers, one—Eli Lilly—gave its entire (small)
supply to the CIA and the military. The other—Sandoz—informed Agency
representatives every time it shipped the drug. If somehow the CIA missed
anything with all these sources, the Agency still had its own network of
scholar-spies, the most active of whom was Harold Abramson who kept it informed
of all new developments in the LSD field. While the CIA may not have totally
cornered the LSD market in the 1950s, it certainly had a good measure of
control—the very power it sought over human behavior.
Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues at MKULTRA soaked up pools of
information about LSD and other drugs from all outside sources, but they saved
for themselves the research they really cared about: operational testing.
Trained in both science and espionage, they believed they could bridge the huge
gap between experimenting in the laboratory and using drugs to outsmart the
enemy. Therefore the leaders of MKULTRA initiated their own series of drug
experiments that paralleled and drew information from the external research. As
practical men of action, unlimited by restrictive academic standards, they did
not feel the need to keep their tests in strict scientific sequence. They wanted
results now—not next year. If a drug showed promise, they felt no qualms about
trying it out operationally before all the test results came in. As early as
1953, for instance, Sid Gottlieb went overseas with a supply of a hallucinogenic
drug—almost certainly LSD. With unknown results, he arranged for it to be
slipped to a speaker at a political rally, presumably to see if it would make a
fool of him.
These were freewheeling days within the CIA—then
a young agency whose bureaucratic arteries had not started to harden. The
leaders of MKULTRA had high hopes for LSD. It appeared to be an awesome
substance, whose advent, like the ancient discovery of fire, would bring out
primitive responses of fear and worship in people. Only a speck of LSD could
take a strongwilled man and turn his most basic perceptions into willowy
shadows. Time, space, right, wrong, order, and the notion of what was possible
all took on new faces. LSD was a frightening weapon, and it took a swashbuckling
boldness for the leaders of MKULTRA to prepare for operational testing the way
they first did: by taking it themselves. They tripped at the office. They
tripped at safehouses, and sometimes they traveled to Boston to trip under Bob
Hyde's penetrating gaze. Always they observed, questioned, and analyzed each
other. LSD seemed to remove inhibitions, and they thought they could use it to
find out what went on in the mind underneath all the outside acts and
pretensions. If they could get at the inner self, they reasoned, they could
better manipulate a person—or keep him from being manipulated.
The men from MKULTRA were trying LSD in the early 1950s—when Stalin lived and
Joe McCarthy raged. It was a foreboding time, even for those not professionally
responsible for doomsday poisons. Not surprisingly, Sid Gottlieb and colleagues
who tried LSD did not think of the drug as something that might enhance
creativity or cause transcendental experiences. Those notions would not come
along for years. By and large, there was thought to be only one prevailing and
hardheaded version of reality, which was "normal," and everything else was
"crazy." An LSD trip made people temporarily crazy, which meant potentially
vulnerable to the CIA men (and mentally ill, to the doctors). The CIA
experimenters did not trip for the experience itself, or to get high, or to
sample new realities. They were testing a weapon; for their purposes, they might
as well have been in a ballistics lab.
Despite this prevailing
attitude in the Agency, at least one MKULTRA pioneer recalls that his first trip
expanded his conception of reality: "I was shaky at first, but then I just
experienced it and had a high. I felt that everything was working right. I was
like a locomotive going at top efficiency. Sure there was stress, but not in a
debilitating way. It was like the stress of an engine pulling the longest train
it's ever pulled." This CIA veteran describes seeing all the colors of the
rainbow growing out of cracks in the sidewalk. He had always disliked cracks as
signs of imperfection, but suddenly the cracks became natural stress lines that
measured the vibrations of the universe. He saw people with blemished faces,
which he had previously found slightly repulsive. "I had a change of values
about faces," he says. "Hooked noses or crooked teeth would become beautiful for
that person. Something had turned loose in me, and all I had done was shift my
attitude. Reality hadn't changed, but I had. That was all the difference in the
world between seeing something ugly and seeing truth and beauty."
At the end of this day of his first trip, the CIA man and his colleagues
had an alcohol party to help come down. "I had a lump in my throat," he recalls
wistfully. Although he had never done such a thing before, he wept in front of
his coworkers. "I didn't want to leave it. I felt I would be going back to a
place where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty. I felt very
unhappy. The people who wrote the report on me said I had experienced
depression, but they didn't understand why I felt so bad. They thought I had had
a bad trip."
This CIA man says that others with his general
personality tended to enjoy themselves on LSD, but that the stereotypical CIA
operator (particularly the extreme counterintelligence type who mistrusts
everyone and everything) usually had negative reactions. The drug simply
exaggerated his paranoia. For these operators, the official notes, "dark evil
things would begin to lurk around," and they would decide the experimenters were
plotting against them.
The TSS team understood it would be
next to impossible to allay the fears of this ever-vigilant, suspicious sort,
although they might use LSD to disorient or generally confuse such a person.
However, they toyed with the idea that LSD could be applied to better advantage
on more trusting types. Could a clever foe "re-educate" such a person with a
skillful application of LSD? Speculating on this question, the CIA official
states that while under the influence of the drug, "you tend to have a more
global view of things. I found it awfully hard when stoned to maintain the
notion: I am a U.S. citizen—my country right or wrong.... You tend to have these
good higher feelings. You are more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea and more
susceptible to the seamy sides of your own society.... I think this is exactly
what happened during the 1960s, but it didn't make people more communist. It
just made them less inclined to identify with the U.S. They took a
plague-on-both-your-houses position."
As to whether his former
colleagues in TSS had the same perception of the LSD experience, the man
replies, "I think everybody understood that if you had a good trip, you had a
kind of above-it-all look into reality. What we subsequently found was that when
you came down, you remembered the experience, but you didn't switch identities.
You really didn't have that kind of feeling. You weren't as suspicious of
people. You listened to them, but you also saw through them more easily and
clearly. We decided that this wasn't the kind of thing that was going to make a
guy into a turncoat to his own country. The more we worked with it, the less we
became convinced this was what the communists were using for brainwashing."
The early LSD tests—both outside and inside the Agency—had
gone well enough that the MKULTRA scientists moved forward to the next stage on
the road to "field" use: They tried the drug out on people by surprise. This,
after all, would be the way an operator would give—or get—the drug. First they
decided to spring it on each other without warning. They agreed among themselves
that a coworker might slip it to them at any time. (In what may be an apocryphal
story, a TSS staff man says that one of his former colleagues always brought his
own bottle of wine to office parties and carried it with him at all times.)
Unwitting doses became an occupational hazard.
MKULTRA men
usually took these unplanned trips in stride, but occasionally they turned
nasty. Two TSS veterans tell the story of a coworker who drank some LSD-laced
coffee during his morning break. Within an hour, states one veteran, "he sort of
knew he had it, but he couldn't pull himself together. Sometimes you take it,
and you start the process of maintaining your composure. But this grabbed him
before he was aware, and it got away from him." Filled with fear, the CIA man
fled the building that then housed TSS, located on the edge of the Mall near
Washington's great monuments. Having lost sight of him, his colleagues searched
frantically, but he managed to escape. The hallucinating Agency man worked his
way across one of the Potomac bridges and apparently cut his last links with
rationality. "He reported afterwards that every automobile that came by was a
terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally," says the
veteran. "Each time a car passed, he would huddle down against the parapet,
terribly frightened. It was a real horror trip for him. I mean, it was hours of
agony. It was like a dream that never stops—with someone chasing you."
After about an hour and a half, the victim's coworkers found
him on the Virginia side of the Potomac, crouched under a fountain, trembling.
"It was awfully hard to persuade him that his friends were his friends at that
point," recalls the colleague. "He was alone in the world, and everyone was
hostile. He'd become a full-blown paranoid. If it had lasted for two weeks, we'd
have plunked him in a mental hospital." Fortunately for him, the CIA man came
down by the end of the day. This was not the first, last, or most tragic bad
trip in the Agency's testing program.[8]
By late 1953, only six months after Allen Dulles had formally created
MKULTRA, TSS officials were already well into the last stage of their research:
systematic use of LSD on "outsiders" who had no idea they had received the drug.
These victims simply felt their moorings slip away in the midst of an ordinary
day, for no apparent reason, and no one really knew how they would react.
Sid Gottlieb was ready for the operational experiments. He
considered LSD to be such a secret substance that he gave it a private code name
("serunim") by which he and his colleagues often referred to the drug, even
behind the CIA's heavily guarded doors. In retrospect, it seems more than
bizarre that CIA officials—men responsible for the nation's intelligence and
alertness when the hot and cold wars against the communists were at their
peak—would be sneaking LSD into each other's coffee cups and thereby subjecting
themselves to the unknown frontiers of experimental drugs. But these side trips
did not seem to change the sense of reality of Gottlieb or of high CIA
officials, who took LSD on several occasions. The drug did not transform
Gottlieb out of the mind set of a master scientist-spy, a protégé of Richard
Helms in the CIA's inner circle. He never stopped milking his goats at 5:30
every morning.
The CIA leaders' early achievements with LSD
were impressive. They had not invented the drug, but they had gotten in on the
American ground floor and done nearly everything else. They were years ahead of
the scientific literature—let alone the public—and spies win by being ahead.
They had monopolized the supply of LSD and dominated the research by creating
much of it themselves. They had used money and other blandishments to build a
network of scientists and doctors whose work they could direct and turn to their
own use. All that remained between them and major espionage successes was the
performance of the drug in the field.
That, however, turned
out to be a considerable stumbling block. LSD had an incredibly powerful effect
on people, but not in ways the CIA could predict or control.