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.