4 Crazy Stories from MK-ULTRA

Don't conspiracy theorists piss you off? I'm talking the crazy ones: flat earth, lizard people, moon-landing-was-a-hoax. What are they getting out of this? What annoys me is the amount of effort I tend to put into seeing their point of view, before realising they haven't put in nearly this effort themselves. Did they just want my attention? Why?

My larger grievance is that they muddy the waters. One conspiracy theory I absolutely believe is that governments like them. Remember that Roswell thing, when the USA were testing new aircraft to use against the Russians, and a few got noticed by the public, and they said it was weather balloons, and everyone believed them apart from a small, dedicated group who said it was aliens, and the government decided to play up to this - even "leaking" documents suggesting it was some grand cover-up - knowing they'd lucked into a convenient way of not only hiding their real, much more boring secrets, but also be seen as all-powerful puppet masters capable of such a massive feat in the first place? Well, that's definitely what happened. FACT.

This brings me to MK-ULTRA. I've only ever heard this mentioned in the same breath as the stuff above. When I finally got around to looking into it, I was amazed. It was legitimately a campaign of state-sanctioned, drug-fuelled torture and murder across the globe, and the facts as we know them need no embellishment. I'd like to share what I've learned.

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND

I've written already about how by 1951, the CIA had become convinced that mind control is not only possible, but a holy grail to be pursued at all costs, lest the Communists get to it first. To this end, they'd been working with a top-secret research lab at Camp Detrick, Maryland, under codename MK-NAOMI. Sidney Gottlieb, a scientist who now headed the project, soon became aware of the existence of LSD.

LSD had been brought to the CIA just over a year earlier, having been created in a Swiss lab in 1943. It was earmarked for use in treating mental illness, but of course the first American of note it was introduced to saw potential instead as a weapon. L. WIlson Greene, a technical director at Edgewood Arsenal, pitched to the Agency: "[The enemies'] will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue... [including] fits or seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania." A far cry from the hippie dream that acid would help create, then. Yes, he wasn't looking to provoke some spiritual awakening and love for life in the enemy; he was looking to drive them insane. The CIA was on board, and the process of testing this out would be a nightmare for the poor innocents involved.

THE PLAYERS

To say Allen Dulles was born into power would be an understatement. Both his grandfather and uncle served as Secretary of State. He was sitting to dinner with world leaders before he was ten years old. A wannabe James Bond and a shameless womaniser, he was every stereotype of the rich playboy sowing chaos on the global stage. As the longest-serving director of the CIA, he directed covert operations to violently overthrow democratic governments, most notably in Iran and Guatemala. His key role in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion would see him sacked in 1961.

The more you learn about Sidney Gottlieb, the harder it is to square him with the monstrous things he did over two decades. He was the polar opposite of Dulles and other top CIA officers. Whereas they knew each other from Ivy League colleges and cocktail parties and whatever else the elite get up to, Gottlieb was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents. He had been a socialist in college, and now lived on an isolated goat farm with his preacher's-daughter wife and their kids. A scholar of religion with a keen interest in Eastern mysticism and folk dancing, he was by every measure a true proto-hippie. A biochemist of ten years, he was recruited by Dulles in 1951, and a bizarre double life would begin.

1) THE PARTY GETS STARTED

About 6 months after he was hired, Gottlieb asked to be guided through his first acid trip. Now, you may be aware that a certain type of person (artsy, intellectual, introverted, liberal etc etc etc) is very much drawn to hallucinogens. Gottlieb ticked all these boxes, and from this moment on he was fixated on the drug. In the name of science, he would trip continually over the following years. Excited at the potential, he began dosing others. "His first subjects were volunteers, either CIA colleagues or scientists from [Camp Detrick]. Some agreed to be dosed at specified moments in controlled environments. Others gave permission to be surprised, so different reactions might be observed. Later, Agency trainees were given LSD without forewarning."

(With no oversight, it would get so out of control that in December 1954 the CIA would send an internal memo warning all its staff. "Given its potency, and the unpredictable enthusiasms of officers who had access to it, the Office of Security said it would 'not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at Christmas office parties'.")

It would take another few years for American chemists to crack the recipe, so for now the CIA bought up almost the entire supply from Sandoz. For the rest of the 50s and 60s, all the acid doing the rounds among the bourgeoise, and later the hippies, the Beatles, Hunter S Thompson etc, all came from the CIA. Not necessarily in a sinister way (although John Lennon was first dosed without his knowledge by his dentist) - more that, with so many scientists and researchers dosing themselves and each other, it was natural that they would also share it with friends, who would share it with friends.

So what you'd think would be a fiercely-secret affair in some island basement was by all accounts a pretty wild party. Albeit one still fuelled by fear at the highest level. Despite their best efforts, the CIA knew the Soviets also had this drug, and with no evidence decided it "must be assumed" (recurring theme) that they were up to no good with it. Less than a year after being hired, Gottlieb left to tour some black sites and crack some heads.

2) EARLY AMERICAN VICTIMS

What made the kindly, goat-farming family man do the horrific things he would do? In his book, Kinzer makes the argument that he was a frustrated patriot. In a strange twist of fate, both he and Dulles were born club-footed. Gottlieb's was more severe, and despite four operations he was unable to walk unassisted until he was 12. He stuttered and was bullied. He was of course unable to serve his country in the war - but this was his chance to make up for that. Could this have been it? Or did he simply have the same serial killer mindset as people like John Wayne Gacy or the BTK guy? No one could have suspected his dark secret... We will never know.

"In 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr Gottlieb flew to Tokyo...Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly bought 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. The CIA team flew to Seoul in South Korea and repeated the experiment on twenty-five North Korean prisoners-of-war. They were asked to denounce communism. They refused and were executed." Throughout the winter of '52, scores of expendables at a safe house in Munich were "given massive amounts of drugs... to see if their minds could be altered. Others were given electro-convulsive shocks. Each experiment failed. The 'expendables' were killed and their bodies burned." Again, Gottlieb is tripping consistently during this time. For all his grand ideas, it was all so unscientific, and returned so little useable data, that they may as well have just been hitting people like the Soviets and saved all that money.

Artichoke scientists had been wondering for a while whether people with hepatitis were more susceptible to the effects of LSD. It turns out, they are. The CIA had a partnership with a hospital in Paris, who would report to them which of their patients might be potential guinea pigs, and they found one in Stanley Glickman, a young New York artist there on a scholarship. In October '52, Gottlleib himself travelled out to meet him. He and another American found him at a bar and they began talking. They suggested moving across the street to the world-famous Le Select. "Talk turned to politics and grew heated. Glickman rose to leave, but one of the men insisted on buying him a last drink to show there were no hard feelings... Rather than call the waiter, the man walked to the bar, ordered [the drink] himself, and carried it back to their table. He walked with a limp, Glickman later recalled. The next few minutes were the last of Glickman's productive life." Tripping hard and fearing he'd been poisoned, he fled. The hallucinations didn't stop, and the next morning he was taken to their friends at the American hospital. "Records say he was given sedatives, but he later asserted that we was treated with electroshock and possibly given more hallucinogenic drugs." He never recovered, and lived the rest of his life as a terrified recluse in Manhattan.

In November 1952, Eisenhower became president and promoted Allen Dulles to head of the CIA. He also

chose his brother, Foster Dullles, as Secretary of State. This meant the state department could now be relied upon to support whatever Gottlieb did abroad. Still dosing himself on the regular, he had imagination and confidence as boundless as his ambition. In December he asked a New York psychiatrist to inject mescaline into his a patient so he could observe the effects. He chose a tennis player named Harold Blauer, who had come to him seeking treatment for depression following a divorce. He was dosed without any explanation or warning. After 5 more doses he asked for this to be stopped, but was told that discontinuing the course would be disastrous. On January 8th 1953 he was given a dose fourteen times greater than the previous, which killed him. "'We didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him', one of the medical assistants later confessed."

Gottlieb now proposed a new project giving him authority over all CIA research into mind control, testing "every imaginable drug and technique, plus some not yet imagined... He would be free not only to experiment on 'expendables' at secret prisons abroad, but also to feed LSD to witting and unwitting Americans... All experiments would be conducted under the umbrella of a single program that he would run." Dulles of course agreed. It's perhaps testament to Gottlieb's growing God complex that he dismissed previous cryptonyms like Artichoke, Bluebird, Naomi, and called it MK-ULTRA.

3) FRANK OLSON

With this mandate to drug Americans at home without their consent (which he'd already been doing in secret, and hadn't magically become legal) and a massive 6% of the CIA's entire budget, Gottlieb went to work. One thing he wanted to know was just how much LSD a human brain can take. Could a large enough dose shatter consciousness, leaving a blank slate? He sent out batches to hospitals and prisons for controlled experiments. At a Kentucky addiction recovery centre, inmates were offered rewards in the form of the opium they were supposed to be getting off. In one experiment, 7 patients were given up to 4 times the normal doses of LSD every day for 77 days, suffering overwhelming hallucinations for that desperately-needed hit. At a federal prison in Atlanta, future crime boss Whitey Bulger was given LSD nearly every day for fifteen months. Harold Abramson, who had guided Gottlieb through his first trip, dosed 14 children, aged between 6 and 11 and diagnosed as schizophrenic, every day for 6 weeks.

Abramson was soon to discover that not everyone at the CIA was cut out for the horrors they wreaking. Frank Olson is probably the name, second to Gottlieb, most commonly associated with MK-ULTRA. He'd begun as a Detrick scientist and soon become acting chief of the army's Special Operations Division. He resigned this post due to stress (probably due to all the dead monkeys he had to step over every morning to get to his desk, according to his son), by which time he was already working for the CIA. Perhaps not the best move, as he was now accompanying Gottlieb on his black site tours, watching as expendables were tortured to death using methods he had helped develop. This started to break him.

In November 1953, Olson and eight others were invited for a weekend gathering at a lakeside retreat, where on the second day they were all dosed with acid. On hearing they'd been dosed, Olsen became very agitated. We don't know what was said, but once back home, he was very on-edge and paranoid, telling his wife "I've made a terrible mistake". He never clarified what he meant, but over the next week his colleagues too noticed this change in him. He would talk about resigning, or ask to be fired. Gottlieb had him escorted to New York to meet with Abramson and talk things over. Olson said this helped, but all signs pointed otherwise. Back in Washington, in the car back to his family for Thanksgiving, he had a sudden panic and asked for the car to be stopped. He wanted to get out and turn himself over to the police. After some discussion, it was agreed they would all go back to New York for another session with Abramson. Gottlieb cancelled his plans and joined them. By the end of the second session he had agreed to be committed voluntarily to a mental health facility, and seemed happy with the idea. In the early hours of that night, he went through the tenth-floor window of his hotel, to his death.

We don't know for certain that he was murdered, but based on what we do know, it would be surprising if he wasn't. In later interviews with colleagues he was described as being very open, not giving a damn, speaking up any time he wanted to. Maybe the weekend retreat was their way of getting a measure of where he was at. His son felt his 'terrible mistake' was not playing ball. "In a broader sense, it was that he really didn't understand the people he was dealing with. He thought his opinions would count for something... It wasn't until the last minute that he realized what he was up against." A second autopsy in 1994 revealed blunt force trauma to the head and a large injury to the chest, which most agreed had occurred before the fall.

4) OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX

Olson's death seems to have spurred Gottlieb on. He knew he was heading a runaway train and quitting was not an option. Another boost came in late 1954 when chemists at Eli Lilly reported they had cracked the recipe for LSD. He now had an endless supply of it. When Allen Dulles' son suffered brain damage in the Korean war, Dulles assigned yet another maniac, neurologist Harold Wolff, to his care, and was so impressed with him that he introduced him to Gottlieb. Eager for CIA sponsorship, Wolff wrote several research proposals. In one, he offered to test "special methods" of interrogation, including "threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing', 'black psychiatry', hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents."

With a steady flow of patients and seemingly no soul, he impressed Gottlieb, who gave the go-ahead to every proposal he submitted. This idea grew, and under the "Human Ecology Fund", universities and hospitals across the country would carry out secret tests on their own subjects. But Gottlieb wanted subjects who were more expendable.

George Hunter White had been hired by Gottlieb back in 1952. You may recognise the name as the man who destroyed Billie Holliday. He was every stereotype of a corrupt narcotics agent: the alcoholism, the wanton violence, the bitter ex-wife, the sadomasochist fetishes, the keen addiction to every drug under the sun, the enforcing of the law by completely ignoring it. He was basically Bad Lieutenant played by The Guv'nor.

He was such an irredeemable prick that the Office of Security took over a year to approve his clearance. They'd hoped Gottlieb and his guys would forget the idea, but no: they were fascinated by him. Said Gottlieb later: "[White] was always armed to the teeth with all sorts of weapons... He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs... He was a pretty wild man." He would take them on ride-alongs, exposing them to the criminal underworld and a pool of down-and-outs ripe for exploiting (and another source of whores for Gottlieb - oh yeah, on top of his apparent sadism he was thirsty as they come). They established a safehouse in New York from which White would dose friends and foes alike. His connections at both the CIA and the Bureau of Narcotics meant that anyone reporting to hospital with accusations would be dismissed without investigation. When the Bureau promoted White to district supervisor, Gottlieb had him set up a similar safehouse in San Francisco. Of course, White would test rigorously on himself any new drug sent to him, before using it on his unsuspecting marks. Let no one say he wasn't a team player.

See if you can guess what Operation Midnight Climax entailed. Yeah, they'd completely abandoned being cryptic with their codes by now. The San Francisco pad was a brothel, complete with red lacy drapes and whips on the walls and all that shit, from which they wanted to test whether drugs plus prostitutes might return results. Could a man's post-coital glow make him more susceptible to a drug, more willing to spill his secrets? To this end, the place was wired up to the nines and a two-way mirror installed through which White could observe from a small room with a chemical toilet and a bar. The prostitutes were instructed to stick around after sex - a big ego boost to the guy, who combined with whatever he'd been drugged with, would tend to "get pretty vulnerable". Bonuses were given as literal "get-out-of-jail-free" cards (with White's phone number and a promise to "take care of it").

White himself was a party-hard kind of guy, if that much wasn't already clear. After a hard day keeping drugs off the streets or slipping them to others in his CIA-funded funhouse, he would often invite his narco buddies to one of several other properties he managed - "much to the chagrin of the neighbours, who began to complain about men with guns in shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD... White had quite a scene going for a while." At a Christmas party at the Federal Building in 1957, a deputy marshal named Wayne Ritchie was spiked. Out of his mind, he grabbed his two service revolvers, left the building and tried to rob a bar. He was spared prison, but spiralled into depression and would have no idea what happened to him until decades later when he read Gottlieb's obituary. White had died by then, but his sidekick Ira Feldman admitted to drugging people. "I didn't do any follow-up... You don't give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry, like this nitwit Ritchie."

So a core group of people were having a pretty wild time. Countless hospital and prison staff were doing shady things without knowing exactly why. Clueless victims all over were at best questioning their sanity and at worst being tortured to death. Stay tuned for part 3, where the house of cards comes crashing down, the bad guys are punished and justice prevails!