Part 2:Operation Mind Control....Without Knowledge or Consent...Pain-Drug Hypnosis....The Guinea Pig Army

Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart

Chapter Four 

WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT 

"I can hypnotize a man—without his knowledge or consent—into committing treason against the United States," boasted Dr. George Estabrooks in the early 1940s. 

Estabrooks, chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, was called to Washington by the War Department shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since he was the ranking authority on hypnosis at the time, they wanted his opinion on how the enemy might be planning to use hypnotism. "Two hundred trained foreign operators, working in the United States," Estabrooks told the military leaders, "could develop a uniquely dangerous army of hypnotically controlled Sixth Columnists."1 

At that time, only a handful of men knew of the government's experiments with hypnosis for the purpose of controlling minds in the interest of "national security." In that decade there had been no concentrated assassinations of presidents, candidates, or civil rights leaders. There had not yet been Watergate, nor any disclosures of government agencies invading the privacy of United States citizens. The CIA had not yet been conceived, and even its parent, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), did not exist. 

It was unthinkable at the time that an agency of the U.S. government would employ mind-control techniques on its own people. Therefore it was natural for George Estabrooks to believe that if America were threatened by hypnotic mind control, the threat would be posed by a foreign enemy working within the United States. 

So in 1943 Estabrooks sounded bis public alarm, and planted the seed for what would become priority top-secret research for the next twenty-five years. Couching his disclosure in hypothetical terms and saying that the hypnotized mind "could be" put to military use, he then portrayed a scene which he said could "very easily take place." 

It would be possible, he said, for "the enemy" to plant a foreign agent as a doctor in a hospital or his own office. This "doctor" could, by means of fake physical examinations, place thousands of people under his power over a period of time. Estabrooks projected how, by hypnotizing key officers and programming them to follow suggestions, this "masked maneuver" could enable a lowly first lieutenant to take over the reins of the entire U.S. Army. 

His alternate scenario depicted the General Staff summoning a colonel from Intelligence to an emergency meeting in the Pentagon two days after an outbreak of war. Shortly after entering the room where Pentagon "brain trusters" were gathered, the colonel is put into hypnotic trance by an army psychologist and told there has been a change of plans for the defense of major territory. The details of the plan have to be conveyed in absolute secrecy to the Pacific Command. Since the enemy has been very successful in monitoring U.S. communications, a new, highly reliable procedure is needed to slip the message past the enemy. The colonel, under the influence of hypnosis, will carry the top-secret message. 

"When you wake up," the hypnotized colonel is told, "you will no longer have the slightest knowledge of the secret information carried in the lower layers of your mind." The colonel is then given instructions to proceed by airplane to Honolulu. He is told that in his normal waking state he will hold the impression that he is on a routine mission and must report after his arrival to General Y. 

"He is the only man in the world who can hypnotize you again. Put to sleep by General Y—and only him—you will correctly recall all the details of this conversation and disclose the secret instructions we have just given you." 

Estabrooks said later he had given the Pentagon episode only as a practical example of how the new science of hypnotism could be used for military purposes. 

Going even further with his alarming predictions, Estabrooks told how disguised techniques of hypnosis could be employed to create an entire army of saboteurs within our  own country. "Let us suppose that in a certain city there lives a group of a given foreign extraction. They are loyal Americans but still have cultural and sentimental ties to the old country. A neighborhood doctor, working secretly for a foreign power, hypnotizes those of his patients who have ties favorable to his plans. Having done this he would, of course, remove from them all knowledge of their ever having been hypnotized. 

"Next comes a one-month period of indoctrination under hypnosis. By various means, including the offer of substantial rewards and educational processes designed to strengthen their ancestral loyalties, their cooperation is obtained." 

Estabrooks explained how individuals so controlled would have no conscious aversion to Americans and would continue to behave as good citizens. Subconsciously, however, they would be saboteurs and agents of the enemy. 

"All right, you say. This sounds beautiful on paper. But what about the well-known 'psychological principle' that no one will do anything under hypnosis that he wouldn't do when he's awake?" Estabrooks asked. 

"My experiments have shown this assumption is poppycock. It depends not so much on the attitude of the subject as on that of the operator himself .. . In wartime, the motivation for murder under hypnosis doesn't have to be very strong," Estabrooks warned. 

"During World War I, a leading psychologist made a startling proposal to the navy. He offered to take a submarine steered by a captured U-boat captain, placed under bis hypnotic control, through enemy mine fields to attack the German fleet. Washington nixed the stratagem as too risky. First, because there was no disguised method by which the captain's mind could be outflanked. Second, because today's technique of day-by-day breaking down of ethical conflicts brainwashing was still unknown. 

"The indirect approach to hypnotism would, I believe, change the navy's answer today. Personally," Estabrooks concluded, "I am convinced that hypnosis is a bristling, dangerous armament which makes it doubly imperative to avoid the war of tomorrow."2 

George Estabrooks may have greatly contributed to the U.S. government's interest in hypnosis. For during the years that followed, seeking ways both to improve the mind  and to control it, various government agencies, many of them with intelligence functions, secretly pursued research in hypnotic techniques. 

A number of related events during the 1940s demonstrated the extent of the government's interest in hypnosis. Beyond changing beliefs, they sought ways to motivate people to commit acts which they would not commit in a normal state. 

Dr. Bernard C. Gindes wrote of an amnesia experiment he undertook for the U.S. Army in the late forties. "A soldier with only grade school education was able to memorize an entire page of Shakespeare's Hamlet after listening to the passages seven times. Upon awakening, he could not recall any of the lines, and even more startling was the fact that he had no remembrance of the hypnotic experience. A week later he was hypnotized again. In this state, he was able to repeat the entire page without a single error. In another experiment to test the validity of increased memory retention, five soldiers were hypnotized en masse and given a jumbled 'code' consisting of twenty-five words without phonetic consistency. They were allowed sixty seconds to commit the list to memory. In the waking state, each man was asked to repeat the code; none of them could. One man hazily remembered having had some association with a code, but could not remember more than that. The other four soldiers were allowed to study the code consciously for another sixty seconds, but all denied previous acquaintance with it. During re-hypnotization, they were individually able to recall the exact content of the coded message."3 

In 1947, J. G. Watkins induced criminal behavior in deeply hypnotized subjects during an army experiment. Watkins suggested a distorted view of reality to his subjects by inducing hallucinations which allowed them to avoid direct conflict with their own moral concepts. He carefully chose his suggestions to be in line with his subjects' preexisting motivational structures, and so was able to induce so-called antisocial behavior. 

Watkins took a normal, healthy army private, a young man whose tests indicated a most stable personality, and put him in a deep trance. Though merely striking a superior officer is a court-martial offense in the army, Watkins wanted to see if he could get his subject to strangle a high ranking officer. 

After the subject was deep into trance, Watkins told him that the officer sitting across from him was a Japanese soldier who was trying to kill him. He must kill or be killed, Watkins suggested, and immediately the private leapt ferociously at the officer and grabbed him by the throat. In his waking state, the private would have been aghast at the thought of trying to strangle a superior officer. But under hypnosis, believing the officer was a dangerous Japanese soldier, the young private had to be pulled off his superior by three husky assistants. The officer came within a hairsbreadth of being strangled, as the young man was most persistent in his attempt to kill what he regarded as the enemy. 

Watkins repeated this experiment with other subjects. The second time he used two officers who were good friends. One of them was given the hypnotic suggestion that the other was a Japanese soldier and that he must "kill or be killed." The man who had received the command not only made a powerful lunge at his friend, but as he did, he whipped out and opened a concealed jack knife, which neither the doctor, his assistants, nor his friend knew he had. Only the quick action of one of the assistants, who was a judo expert, prevented a potentially fatal stabbing. 

In both cases, reality was so distorted that the subjects took murderous and antisocial action. If they had accomplished their "defensive" acts, both men could have been convicted of murder, since the law did not recognize motivation through hypnosis as a fact. The courts, in all but a few cases, had adopted the traditional scientific view that criminal behavior cannot be induced under hypnosis. That view still stands today. 

To test the premise, which was then widely held, that a normal person under hypnotic trance could not be made to divulge information which would be self-incriminating, Watkins conducted a number of experiments where a monetary bribe was offered to withhold information. Watkins discovered that "when placed in a trance they 'spilled' every time, either verbally or in writing." 

The subject of one of these experiments was an enlisted WAC in military intelligence. Her commanding officer ordered her not to reveal a list of what were made to appear  to be real military secrets. Under hypnosis she "spilled" everything. 

Another experiment was discontinued when it was discovered that a research worker in the government arsenal was spilling vital and top-secret war information to the friendly army hypnotist, who did not have a "need to know." He did this loud and clear while in a trance before an audience of 200 military professionals. If the subject had been allowed to continue, the disclosures of information would have resulted in a general court martial, no matter how the doctor might have tried to persuade intelligence headquarters that this was "just a test." 

Much of the army's experimentation with manipulation by hypnosis was inspired by the reports of Wesley Raymond Wells, a doctor at Syracuse University. Wells's research, in turn, had been inspired by the fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, which described criminal acts as being induced by hypnosis. Wells was taken by the idea that "the most striking feature in a hypnotized subject is his automatism." Although earlier experiments had elicited no immoral or criminal behavior from subjects under hypnosis, the results of experiments which asked subjects to resist various suggestions indicated to Wells that people might be more suggestible than was generally believed. 

In the late 1930s, Wells conducted a simple experiment with a student volunteer. He chose a subject who had stated that he expected he would be below average in hypnotizability and claimed he could not be put into a trance. Before inducing trance, Wells urged him to do his utmost to resist, in every possible way, first going into the trance, and then doing anything against his own moral code. 

When the student told Wells that he was ready to begin the contest, the doctor put his hand on the subject's chest, counted to seven, and found that the subject had already fallen into a deep trance! After testing the subject's muscle control and ability to obtain amnesia and hallucinations, Wells proceeded to suggest that the subject get up from his chair, go over to Wells's overcoat which was on a coat rack across the room, and take a dollar from the right-hand pocket. Wells suggested that the subject see the coat as his own, and take the dollar thinking that he had left it in the pocket. When the subject followed all of Wells's suggestions, he then told him to put the dollar in his own breast pocket and return to his chair. As he was about to sit, Wells said to him that when he sat in the chair he would remember only that he had had this extra dollar when he came into the office, and that later- he would spend the dollar, just as if it were his own. 

Afterwards, during the student's recall of his experiences, Wells found that everything had worked according to the hypnotic program he had implanted. This was, of course, a clinical sort of test for amnesia. 

"Whether his amnesia would have withstood 'third degree' methods of the police or the lie detector methods of the psychological laboratory is another question," Wells said. "On the basis of my previous experimental study of posthypnotic amnesia, I would state it as my opinion that hypnotically induced amnesia in the case of so good a subject . . . would have withstood any possible tests, or at least it might have been made to withstand any possible tests if added precautions had been taken in the hypnotic production of the amnesia."4 

Wells' report of this experiment, published in a psychology journal in 1941, brought a negative reaction from the scientific community. Milton Erickson was among the first to say that Wells's experiments were at best inconclusive. Erickson reported that after attempting to duplicate similar hypnotic inducements of crime with fifty subjects, he had failed. He concluded from his own investigations that "hypnosis cannot be misused to induce hypnotized persons to commit actual wrongful acts either against themselves or others ... " The so-called antisocial acts induced by Wells and others, Erickson maintained, were most likely motivated by factors other than hypnosis or suggestion. 

"We know that it is possible, without recourse to hypnosis, for one person to induce another to commit a wrong, a fact we may explain loosely as the influence of one personality upon another," Erickson explained. "To settle this question is difficult, since it involves three inseparable factors of unknown potentialities—specifically, the hypnotist as a person, the subject as a person, and hypnosis as such, to say nothing of the significant influence upon these three, both individually and collectively, of the suggestion and the performance of a questionable act."5 

But even Erickson conceded that the primitive being, the libido, which dwells in everyone, makes almost any crime possible. When a hallucinatory state has been induced and the subject thinks he or she is acting out of self-preservation, the primitive mind takes over and the killer instinct is unleashed. 

In the late 1930s psychologists began grappling with the problem of human will, as the theologians before them had done for centuries. Some maintained that "will" meant conscious volition; others, that it meant nothing but the manifestation of the belief system, that is to say, the result of the earliest conditioned responses. The area of will still lies outside the limits of modern psychology. Many experts are loath even to use the word "will" since it represents a most ill-defined dimension of human nature. 

Summing up a carefully constructed semantic argument, psychologists often say, "A person cannot be made to do anything against his will or basic moral precepts." That statement, taken at face value, is certainly true. A normal person would not wittingly kill a friend. But if he was made to hallucinate that his friend was an enemy, and it was a "kill or be killed" situation, he would initiate a natural response to preserve his own life. In the process he might even take the imagined enemy's life. After the hallucination passed, he would realize he had killed his friend. This criminal act would be considered, in one sense, an act of will; but the real cause of the action would not be understood outside the hallucinated state. Only the killer's grief would remain, to attest to his knowledge of what he did, and that he really did not want to do it. 

Whether or not hypnosis can be used to deeply motivate people to commit antisocial acts despite the call of their own conscience is still an open question in academic circles. 

George Estabrooks had evidence which made him conclude that "one in every five of the human race are highly suggestible, at least half are suggestible to a very considerable degree." And he warned, ". . . mere figures do not tell the story. That one fifth has a power far beyond its numbers; for this type of man, acting under direct suggestion, is no mere average person. He is a fanatic, with all that fanaticism may imply for good or evil . . . Can this prospective subject—this one in five individual—be hypnotized against his will?" "The answer to this very vital question," Estabrooks concluded, "is 'yes' though we prefer to say 'without his consent' instead of 'against his will.' We do not need the subject's consent when we wish to hypnotize him for we use 'disguised' technique . . ."6 

Believing in Estabrooks' logic, pragmatists in the government began to explore the possibilities of ways to change belief and motivate behavior. They let scores of contracts for research into hypnosis, behavior modification, conditioning, and virtually anything that held even a slim chance of being able to give them control over the individual human mind and will. 

Meanwhile foreign governments unfriendly to the United States were involved in similar psychological research. But the U.S. government's fear of losing superiority in this new and untested field ran away with them. Intelligence analysts believed a "mind-control gap" existed, and to close it they mobilized "think tanks" to develop a usable program of experimental research, at once. 

From one such think tank, the Rand Corporation, came a report entitled Are the Cominform Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession In Public Trials? Dated April 25, 1949, it helped set the stage for using national security as the rationale for resorting to mind control to motivate criminal acts, both at home and abroad. 

"The successful use of hypnosis," the report said, "would represent a serious threat to democratic values in times of peace and war. In addition, it might contribute to the development of unconventional methods of warfare, which will be widely regarded as immoral. The results of scientific research in the field under discussion would obviously lend themselves to offensive as well as defensive applications and to abuse no less than to use. It must be assumed that almost all of the scientific personnel in the field of hypnosis are keenly aware of these social implications of their work and that they are interested in limiting the practice of "hypnosis to therapeutic applications." That assumption proved to be untrue. 

The Rand report recommended "that these moral and Political implications of experimental research on hypnosis be explored as fully as possible prior to official encouragement or sponsorship of such research, so as to establish the most effective safeguards against its unintended consequences." 

The Rand study dwelt at length upon Soviet experiments in hypnosis dating back to 1923. "At the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow," the report stated, "it was demonstrated that hypnosis could be used in inducing an innocent person to develop intense guilt feelings and to confess to a criminal or immoral act which he did not commit. In 1932 the experiments on hypnotically implanted 'crimes' were reported (in English translation) by A. R. Luria, who at that time was a professor in the Academy of Communist Education." 

Quoting Luria, the report described how hypnosis was used as a device for producing emotional disturbances in order to control behavior. "We suggested to the person under test, while in a sufficiently deep hypnotic state, a certain situation, more often a disagreeable one, in which he was playing a role irreconcilable with bis habits and contrary to bis usual behavior—we thus obtained an actual and rather sharply expressed acute effect. After awakening the person under test .. . we had a subject who was 'loaded' with certain definite affective complexes, which mostly remained unknown to himself ... " 

Luria described an experiment with a twenty-year-old female college student who was told under deep hypnosis that she was sitting in her room studying when a neighbor child, a boy of six, came into the room. She was told that the child shouted when he came into the room and disturbed her studies. She asked him to stop, but he did not listen. The young woman was then told that she would get angry and forget herself. She would take a stick and beat the boy, first on the back and then on the head. The boy would cry out from the wounds on his head, but she would keep on beating him. She would then feel very ashamed and would be unable to understand how such a thing could happen, how she could beat up a child. Finally, she was told that she must try to forget the incident altogether. 

Luria explained that he had chosen this situation with a definite purpose. Since the hallucinated event was entirely unacceptable by the moral standards of the young woman's personality, it was natural that she would feel repentant. He reinforced her natural desire to forget by suggesting to her that she remove the memory of the event from her mind. 

In subsequent trances the subject was questioned about the "beating." With great difficulty she reconstructed the event, but shifted the emphasis on several points so that the imagined event would conform more to her basic moral code. At first she refused to remember that she had "beaten" the child. She then conceded that she had "pulled his ears." Then, finally, she admitted she had "beaten him," but she maintained she had not beaten him with a stick. Luria said that this showed how unacceptable the situation was to her personality. The student said twice, "my conscience has tortured me." Luria said this showed the effectiveness of the hypnotic suggestion. 

Of the experiment, Irving Janis, author of the Rand report, observed, "in this particular case, the implanted memory was initially referred to by the examiner as a 'dream' rather than as a real event. But from the detailed reports of other investigators, this procedure does not appear to be necessary for eliciting a false confession: a hypnotized subject will often accept and confess to an implanted memory as a real event in his own past life." 

The Rand report itself suggested that this trick of hypnotic suggestion might be used on a defendant awaiting trial. The defendant could be "prepared" in a series of hypnotic sessions to accept guilt about a criminal act he did not commit, and then, if placed in a hypnotic trance while in the courtroom, the prosecutor's interrogation would elicit a false confession. 

Fearing the Communists' use of hypnosis, the Rand report warned that hypnosis, once accomplished, is hard to detect. Contrary to reports in the nineteenth century, "a hypnotized subject is not blindly obedient, nor does he act like an automaton when in trance. Hypnotic suggestions are acted out and elaborated in a way that is consonant with the individual's habitual social behavior and his basic Personality traits." The report stated that while often "the hypnotized subject seems literal and humorless . . . he appears entirely unselfconscious, and very often he acts abstracted, inattentive, almost as if he were insulated against his surroundings," this is not always the case. A number of experienced hypnotists had been able to train their subjects to perform "in such a way that observers could not tell that the subject was in a trance or that he was acting under hypnotic suggestions." 

The Rand report outlined the following procedure that would elicit a false confession. "First, make the subject feel guilty about some acts he had thought about or had actually carried out in the past. Second, make him feel guilty about having committed some crime of which he was actually innocent. The implanted guilt would compel the subject to confess when examined by a hypnotist or anyone else designated by the hypnotist. Third, train the subject, by means of posthypnotic suggestion, to go into the trance whenever a simple signal was encountered." The subject would be trained to give his false confession in a normal, convincing manner, so that observers would not be able to detect the trance state. 

To induce hypnosis in an unwilling subject, the report suggested any of three possibilities which were then well supported by research findings: 

1. As part of a medical examination, talk relaxation to the subject, thus disguising the hypnotic induction. For example, the person could be given a blood pressure test, told that he must relax completely in order to give an adequate test record, and then be given suggestions to go to sleep which would result in a hypnotic trance. 

2. Induce hypnosis while the person is actually asleep from normal fatigue. This could be done by simply talking softly into the sleeper's ear. 

3. Use injections of drugs to induce hypnosis. The hypnotic drugs would relax the subject and put him in a "twilight state" where the subconscious mind is very susceptible to suggestion. 

Subjects who refuse or resist the simple "talking" methods of hypnotic induction could be given a few grams of paraldehyde or an intravenous injection of sodium pentothal or sodium amytal. The appropriate dosage of these drugs invariably induces a state of light hypnotic sleep. During sleep, the subject could then be given suggestions which would produce the characteristic deep hypnotic trance. While in the first drug-induced trance, the patient could be given posthypnotic suggestions to the effect that he would be susceptible to hypnosis thereafter without the use of drugs. 

Subsequently the subject could be allowed to practice carrying out posthypnotic suggestions. He could then be re-hypnotized, still without bis conscious cooperation, but this time without the use of drugs. The report admitted that at the time of its writing there  was no certain knowledge of just how successful each of the three methods described might prove to be with individuals "who are on their guard against being victimized by hostile authorities." 

"The drug technique," suggested the report, "would probably turn out to be the simplest and most efficient of the three and so it would be the most likely candidate for . . . hypnotizing defendants against their will." 

Another important use of hypnosis for the government, the report said, would be the induction of amnesia: "Once a deep hypnotic trance is achieved, it is possible to introduce posthypnotic amnesia so that [a subject] . . . would not know . . . that he had been subjected to hypnosis, to drugs, or to any other treatment." 

The report then turned to the problem of producing the deep hypnotic trance essential to posthypnotic amnesia. It stated that, based on research reports of that time, "in about 90 percent of any unselected population it should be possible to produce the deepest (somnambulistic) type of trance. According to numerous authorities, a light trance is sufficient to elicit a 'confession' of actual misbehavior which might otherwise be withheld; but, for carrying out complete posthypnotic amnesia, it is a somnambulistic trance that is required." 

The Rand document expressed fear that Soviet investigators had found other techniques which could produce deep hypnosis in perhaps 90 percent or more of all individuals. Anticipating future advances, the report speculated on more efficient ways to develop greater depth in hypnotic trance. It suggested that a subject could be placed in a trance many times each day until a sufficient depth of trance was achieved. It was thought that hypnotizing the subject and then awakening him several times in the same session might speed up the process. This technique of successive and rapid trance induction would, it was hoped, make the subject easily susceptible to deep trance in a few days. 

To increase speed and depth of hypnosis, special uses of hypnotic drugs were also suggested. "For example, a series of drug-induced trances, as against only one such treatment, might serve to develop the majority of cases into somnambules. Moreover, certain unique drug compounds  may be especially effective in inducing very deep states of hypnosis." 

The report then said, "Conceivably, electroshock convulsions might be used as an adjunctive device to achieve somnambulism in a very high percentage of the cases. Many studies have shown that there is a temporary intellectual impairment, diffuse amnesias, and general 'weakening of the ego' produced during the period when a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered. From my own and others' investigations of the psychological effects of such treatments, I would suspect that they might tend to reduce resistance to hypnotic suggestions. It is conceivable, therefore, that electroshock treatments might be used to weaken difficult cases in order to produce a hypnotic trance of great depth." 

In 1958 the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR), a subcontractor to the Rand Corporation, issued a "technical report" on hypnosis to the air force that took up where the earlier Rand report had left off. Once again a "think tank" was calling for action in the mind-control race against the Communists. 

"To both the lay person and the behavior scientist," the author, Seymour Fisher, wrote in the introduction, "hypnosis has long been regarded as a potentially powerful instrument for controlling human behavior. Undoubtedly, the intelligence divisions of many countries have given serious thought to this potential and have done classified research in various areas of hypnosis .. . it is conceivable . . . that these techniques could have been used and covered up so successfully that they might be impossible to recognize . . ." 

Fisher outlined areas of future research where Americans could advance in the mind-control race. He urged the government to develop tests to determine who was and who was not a good hypnotic subject. He urged further research in pharmacology, suggesting that a number of drugs little known at the time might be effective in inducing hypnosis. 

He predicted that some drugs would prove useful in reducing the amount of time required to induce complex hypnotic behavior and that others would be useful in reinforcing the lasting effects of hypnotically induced behavior control. He predicted that drugs would be developed which would permit far greater control over autonomic processes, Some drugs, he suggested, would be found to permit control over learning and perception as well. He also predicted that new drugs would be discovered which would be capable of inducing deep hypnosis in virtually any individual regardless of bis degree of cooperativeness.7 

All of these techniques, involving drug-induced hypnosis and electroshock convulsions, were eventually developed and used to reduce some of our own citizens to a zombie state in which they would blindly serve the government. Regardless of the Constitution and the laws which supposedly protect the individual against government coercion, "zombies" were covertly created to do the government's more unsavory bidding. Such "zombies" asked no questions about the legality of their assignments. Often their assignments were never consciously known. And if they were ever questioned about their own actions, amnesia protected them from self-incrimination. 

What had started out a race against the Communists slowly turned into a private war from within.

Chapter Five 

PAIN-DRUG HYPNOSIS 

In 1951, a former naval officer described "a secret" of certain military and intelligence organizations. He called it "Pain-Drug-Hypnosis" and said it "is a vicious war weapon and may be of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb. This is no exaggeration. The extensiveness of the use of this form of hypnotism in espionage work is now so widespread that it is long past the time when people should have become alarmed about it.. . Pain-Drug-Hypnosis is a wicked extension of narcosynthesis, the drug hypnosis used in America only during and since the last war . . ."1 

That statement was the tip of a vast iceberg of mind control research using drugs as an aid to hypnotic induction. In the 1950s, under air force (and ultimately CIA) guidance, a series of papers was written defining the limits to which a government (ours or an enemy's) could go "to make persons behave against their will." In the introduction to one of these, the authors stated that the purpose of their study was "to review available scientific knowledge on the use of pharmacologic agents to influence the communication of information which, for one reason or another, an informant does not wish to reveal." 

They went on to say that, contrary to the alleged necessity for conducting such drug experiments, "no published reports have come to our attention . . . detailing the scientific application of drugs by intelligence agencies of any nation as a means of obtaining information. The methods of Russian interrogation and indoctrination are derived from age-old police methods that have been systematized, and are not dependent on drugs, hypnotism, or any other special procedure designed by scientists." 

The report, expressing concern over "proper" drug experimentation, urged that control placebos be administered "silently" so that no one would know who was getting what or when. Also discussed were the effects of drugs on different individuals in various settings, the relation between dosage levels, the effects of food, drink, and other physiological needs, and the effects of individual variables, such as sex, intelligence, medical and psychiatric status, life situation, and so forth upon drug reactions. 

The top priority for testing in mind control were those drugs which were found to induce hypnosis. The administration and effects of barbiturates, amobarbital, secobarbital, pentothal, and sodium amytal were studied. Nonbarbiturate sedatives and calmatives such as ethchlorvynol, glutethimide, methyprylon, methyl parafynol, captodramin, and oxanamide were also tested. A whole range of amphetamines and their derivatives were discussed as good tools to "produce a 'push'—an outpouring of ideas, emotions, memories, and so forth." New drugs such as ritalin, marsilid, and mescaline were thought to hold great promise for mind-control applications. Perhaps the most promising of this last group was a "consciousness-expanding" drug called LSD-25.2 

Four months after the first nuclear reaction was created in a pile of uranium ore in Chicago, the psychotropic effects of LSD-25 were discovered by a thirty-seven-year-old Swiss chemist working at the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel, Switzerland. On April 16, 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann accidentally absorbed a minute quantity of the rye fungus byproduct with which he was experimenting. He later filed a report which described history's first LSD "trip." 

"I was forced to stop my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and to go home, as I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with a sensation of mild dizziness .. . a kind of drunkenness which was not unpleasant and which was characterized by extreme activity of imagination . . . there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscope like play of colors . . ."3 

Sandoz Laboratories had actually been manufacturing LSD since 1938, when it was first used in an experiment with monkeys. Their scientists observed then that the substance caused a marked excitation of the animals, but these results did not motivate scientists to follow up with further research. Work with LSD fell into abeyance until the spring of 1943 when Hofmann prepared a new batch for the storeroom, and accidentally ingested some himself. 

Dr. Hofmann described that LSD experience: ".. . I did not know what was going to happen, if I'd ever come back. I thought I was dying or going crazy. . . . My first . . . experiment with LSD was a 'bum trip' as one would gay nowadays." 

Dr. Hofmann's new discovery was investigated by the European psychiatrists as a possible key to the chemical nature of mental illness. In 1950 LSD was introduced to American psychiatrists, and interest spread rapidly in the scientific community here. 

In 1953, the CIA made plans to purchase ten kilograms of LSD for use in "drug experiments with animals and human beings." Since there are more than 10,000 doses in a gram, that meant the CIA wanted 100 million doses. The CIA obviously intended to "corner the market" on LSD so that other countries would not be ahead of the U.S. in their potential for "LSD warfare." 

That year Sandoz Laboratories filled many orders for LSD from both the CIA and the Department of Defense. According to Hofmann, they continued to do so up until the mid-sixties. The army would visit the labs every two years or so, to see if any technological progress had been made towards the manufacture of LSD in large quantities. Dr. Hofmann said that he had never been told the reason for the army's interest in the drug, but he assumed, from the large quantities being discussed, that it was to be used for weapons research. 

As an employee of the pharmaceutical house Dr. Hofmann was in no position to warn the army researchers sway from the drug despite his belief that it would be extremely dangerous if used improperly and despite his personal distaste for their work. 

"I had perfected LSD for medical use, not as a weapon," he said. "It can make you insane or even kill you if it is not Properly used under medical supervision. In any case, the research should be done by medical people and not by soldiers or intelligence agencies." 

In 1963 Hofmann received a letter from a scholar at Harvard requesting twenty-five kilograms of psilocybin for research purposes. Psilocybin was a psychedelic substance similar in effect to LSD but more subtle and much less powerful. Before the sales department at Sandoz would act on this order for "the extraordinarily large quantity of psychedelic compounds," they asked the scholar to provide them with the necessary import license from U.S. health authorities. He failed to provide it. Later Hofmann commented on "the unrealistic manner with which he handled this transaction [which] left the impression of a person unconcerned with the regulations of society."4 The scholar's name was Timothy Leary. 

Leary had been experimenting with psychedelic substances for several years by the time he wrote to Hofmann. In 1961 he had conducted experiments with LSD at the Concord Correctional Facility in Concord, Massachusetts. That research was funded by the Uris Brothers Foundation in New York City, under the auspices of Harvard University. What Leary learned from the Concord prisoners was published in 1962 in his paper entitled "How to Change Behavior." In it, Leary explained what a powerful tool LSD was for changing ways of thinking and living. 

While Leary did receive NIMH grants while at the University of California at Berkeley from 1953-56 and while working for the U.S. Public Health Service from 1954-58, he denies that any of his psychedelic research projects at Harvard were funded by the government. However, they may have been indirectly supported by it. In response to my query, National Institute of Mental Health Director Bertram Brown said that, although such research at Harvard University was funded by HEW and NIMH grants from the period of 1956-63, "records available for projects supported during that period generally do not go below the major institution level; e.g., awards are identified as being made to Harvard University, but not to departments or centers within that institution . . ." Here we encounter another example of the government's built-in deniability. 

Harvard claimed that its records on Leary's research could not be located. 

Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard  in 1963, ostensibly for giving LSD to an undergraduate, but basically because of increasing controversy over the nature of their research. Leary and Co. retreated to Mexico, where they attempted to carry on LSD experiments outside the U.S. government's purview. In June of 1963 they ran afoul of even the notoriously corrupt Mexican government and were expelled from that country for "engaging in activities not permitted to a tourist." 

From Mexico they moved to Millbrook, New York, and established the International Federation for Internal Freedom (later the Castalia Foundation), which served as a platform for Leary to propagandize for LSD which, he now believed, could save the world from nuclear perdition by 'blowing the mind." 

Leary frequently took LSD himself. His speeches, which were addressed to overflow audiences, were tailor-made for true believers in the new drug cult. Leary issued many public statements on the benefits to the individual and society of LSD. Always politically naive, he predicted that there would come a day when "a new profession of psychedelic guides will inevitably develop to supervise these experiences." 

Finally, in the mid-sixties, Leary coined his famous slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and spoke at college lectures to the legions of young people who had illegally experimented with LSD and other psychedelic substances. Through magazine interviews, television appearances, movies, records, and books Leary projected himself as the culture hero of a new generation which was fighting for an individual's right to alter his own consciousness—a right which Leary maintained was guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. 

A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 and obtained by John Marks under a Freedom of Information suit in August, 1977, featured Dr. Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert and their organization which advocated the expansion of consciousness through psychedelic chemicals, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In alarming tones the memo ordered all CIA groups involved in mind control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA. 

By 1968, society seemed to become divided into those who had taken illegal drugs and those who hadn't. Eventually LSD, marijuana, and cocaine were available on street corners and schoolyards throughout the land. If the government had covertly supported the unwitting Leary and associates, the snowballing effects of their LSD propaganda now caused a reversal of policy. It became obvious to them that LSD and the other psychoactive drugs were politically dangerous. They allowed people to see through the indoctrination of the government, the credibility gap, and the government propaganda for the Vietnam War. The "acid heads" adopted a visionary fervor and began actively criticizing the war in Vietnam and calling for many social reforms. The "psychedelic revolution" embarrassed the government at every turn. 

If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down. It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs. Underground LSD labs were raided, and it wasn't long before its quality degenerated and the supply dried up. Several studies have shown that when LSD became illegal (October 6, 1966) real LSD ceased to be available on the street. What was sold as LSD was every other kind of chemical, including several forms of veterinary tranquilizers! Often methedrine was sold as LSD, as well as heroin mixed with amphetamines. 

Simultaneously, as the LSD supply dried up, large supplies of heroin mysteriously became available. It was strong heroin, imported from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia (largely under CIA control). Many young people who had had their "consciousness expanded" too far to distinguish between one drug and another turned to heroin. The government-inspired hysteria over drugs had led many to think, "Well, they lied to us about pot, they must be lying about heroin." And so when psychedelics were no longer easily obtained, and heroin was, many young people became addicts. 

The political visions of the psychedelic generation faded, as many who had "turned on" dropped out of city life and fled to the country. Those who stayed in the cities followed Leary's advice and dropped out from participation in the main stream of the society. Many of them followed an alternate route in the American tradition by living as pushers and bootleggers, making large sums of money from the newly created demand for illegal drugs. 

In 1958, Dr. Louis Gottschalk, the CIA's "independent contractor," had prepared a think tank report which suggested that the intelligence agencies might control people through addiction. 

The report put it this way: "The addiction of a source to a drug which the interrogator could supply, obviously would foster the dependence of the source on the interrogator. Where the source was addicted previous to the situation, the interrogator might find already established a pattern of evasion of laws and responsibilities which the addict had developed to meet his need for the drug in a society which ; proscribes its use." 

The report went so far as to recommend that wounded GIs who had become addicts to pain-killing drugs be recruited from hospitals. It stated: "Where the source had become addicted in the setting as a sequel to the treatment of injuries, the ability of the interrogator to give or withhold the drug would give him a powerful weapon against the source . . ."5 

In the late sixties, when it became known that thousands of GIs serving in Vietnam had become addicted to Laotian heroin, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics tried sending a team of agents to Laos, but its investigations were blocked by the Laotian government, the State Department, and the CIA. While the Laotian government's hostility toward the bureau is understandable, the reticence shown by the American government and the CIA requires some explanation. According to U.S. narcotics agents serving in Southeast Asia, "the Bureau encountered a good deal of resistance from the CIA and the Embassy when it first decided to open an office in Vietnam . . ." Did this policy bear some relation to Gottschalk's think-tank statement, made some thirty years earlier—to create an army of drug dependent people who could be controlled by their suppliers—in this case the CIA? 

The CIA also contributed indirectly to the heroin traffic by training men who then turned to smuggling. In the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the heroin trade by the staff and editors of Newsday, it was revealed that U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) agents in Miami cross-checked a list of men who landed at the Bay of Pigs against police records. They found that at least 8 percent of the 1,500-man CIA-trained force had subsequently been investigated or arrested for drug dealing. 

"If it hadn't been for their CIA training," one BNDD agent was quoted as saying, "some of these might never have gone into the [smuggling] business." He added that their training in paramilitary operations, weapons use, and smuggling of equipment and men from one place to another is well suited for illegal drug importing. 

The head of the Office of Strategic Intelligence at BNDD, John Warner, said, "The key to heroin trafficking is the principle of compartmentability. It's the same way the CIA operates. Most people don't know what the whole project involves; most just know their particular job."6 

Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti was reported as stating "The CIA is implicated in the drug traffic in several countries. The Mafia, thanks to the CIA, has a free hand in the vast opium traffic from Turkey through Italy to the United States."7 

On July 19, 1975, Sen. Charles H. Percy, (R., Ill.) released a letter charging that the CIA had the Justice Department drop a drug case to protect its own involvement in drugs. Percy's letter said that the CIA refused to give federal prosecutors evidence in a case against Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a CIA employee, and one other person. Percy complained that "apparently CIA agents are untouchable—however serious their crime or however much harm is done to society." 

The senator's letter said he had written the Justice Department to find out why charges were dropped against the two men, who were allegedly attempting to smuggle fifty nine pounds of opium into the United States from Thailand. The reply he received, from Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Kenney, stated that CIA Associate General Counsel John Greany had "insisted that there were other considerations at stake and that the material sought by the prosecutors would not be turned over." Kenney said Greany had explained that if Khramkhruan and his associate went on trial, "the situation could prove embarrassing because of Mr. Khramkhruan's involvement with CIA activities in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere." 

The CIA knew that heroin causes no "consciousness expansion." It brings on a physical feeling, a warm, glowing  "high," and then dullness and insulation. But the government was interested in behavior control, and heroin, like LSD, was an important tool in gaining such control. 

While some clandestine agencies of government were busy distributing drugs to pleasure-seeking underground America, in the laboratories they were studying drugs for their capacities to provide access to the mind for purposes of behavior control. Seeking the perfect "incapacitating agent," army chemists at Edgewood Arsenal came up with a drug known as "BZ" whose effects were ten times more powerful than LSD. Described as a hallucinogenic "superdrug," BZ was said to be so powerful that a person who took it often experienced amnesia for long periods of time afterwards. 

To test its effects BZ was given to 2,490 "volunteers." General Lloyd Fellenz, former commander of the Edgewood facility, said that the purpose of the BZ experiment was to produce an incapacitating gas or drug which could be placed in an enemy's water supply. 

Dr. Solomon Snyder, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, had formerly worked at Edgewood. "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ," Dr. Snyder said. "Nobody can tell you for sure it won't cause a long lasting effect. With an initial effect of eighty hours, compared to eight hours for LSD, you would have to worry more about its long-lasting or recurrent effects."8 

Dr. George Aghajanian, who had also worked at Edgewood, confirmed Snyder's opinion. "With LSD," Aghajanian explained, "you tend to dwell on the experience and recall it and that can lead to flashbacks. But with BZ an amnesia occurs afterwards that blocks the experience out."9 

Predicting the course of future events, Gottschalk's report stated: "The volume of effort devoted to studying the behavioral effects of drugs has expanded tremendously in recent years and will probably continue to grow. In part, this may be attributed to the ready financial support such activities have achieved. The interest of scientists in employing drugs in research, however, transcends an interest in drug effects, per se. Drugs constitute valuable tools for experimentation directed toward developing basic physiological and psychological knowledge. Work by scientists in  several such areas, in particular, will increase knowledge of drugs which may be exploitable by interrogators." 

Gottschalk's conclusion was that "drugs can operate as positive catalysts to productive interrogation. Combined with the many other stresses in captivity that an individual may be obliged to undergo, drugs can add to the factors aimed at weakening the resistance of the potential informant . . . But for many reasons, the use of drugs by an interrogator is not sure to produce valid results. The effects of drugs depend to a large extent on the personality makeup and physical status of the informant and the kind of rapport that the interrogator is able to establish with the informant. Knowing the predominating pharmacologic actions of a number of psychoactive drugs, an interrogating team might choose that chemical agent which is most likely to be effective in view of the informant's personality, physical status and the various stressful experiences he has already undergone . . ."10 

This study and subsequent ones verified the fact that a number of drugs could conveniently be used to take over the human mind against the will of the individual. Through the use of drugs, the skilled mind controller could first induce a hypnotic trance. Then, one of several behavior modification techniques could be employed with amplified success. In themselves, without directed suggestions, drugs affect the mind in random ways. But when drugs are combined with hypnosis, an individual can be molded and manipulated beyond his own recognition. 

The government's interest in controlling minds and motivating involuntary behavior was focused not only on individuals but also on large groups. Mass hypnosis and "crowd psychology" were well-known phenomena, and to that end propaganda techniques had already been developed. But mass "narcosis" was a new concept out of which grew the idea of "non kill" warfare, where vast populations could simultaneously, or in one action, be drugged into submission. 

In 1961, in an appearance before the Subcommittee on Science and Astronautics of the House of Representatives, Maj. Gen. Marshall Stubbs, head of the Army Chemical Corps, gave a speech cautioning that "we have not gone far enough in our research on these incapacitating compounds to be confident that they have real potential in warfare. We do not want to exaggerate claims for them to create the impression that we are on the verge of bloodless war." 

General Stubbs admitted, "We are attempting to completely separate the incapacitating agents from the lethal agents so that any castigation normally given to toxic agents will not be associated with them, since they do not maim or kill. As a result we hope to have a weapon which will give the commander much freer rein in its use as compared to the toxic agents. It is my hope that through the use of incapacitating agents, the free world will have a relatively clear and rapid means of both fighting and deterring limited war, which has come to the forefront in the international political scene in the last several years. It is one means by which we can maintain some degree of equality in the face of overwhelming manpower superiority of the Communist-dominated nations." 

One idea consistently expressed in the utterances of government employees was the idea that "we must beat the Commies to the punch." To that end the army launched a crash program investigating nerve gases, riot control gases, defoliants, herbicides, and biological agents such as anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and bubonic plague. It also developed what it called "harassing agents"— chemicals that cause headaches, vomiting, and severe pain. 

The idea was that one saboteur would be able to carry enough in his pocket to temporarily incapacitate the population of a city the size of New York. A two-suiter piece of luggage could hold enough drugs to disable every man, woman, and child in America. Most of the drugs the government experimented with were odorless, colorless, and tasteless and therefore undetectable They were easily soluble in water, and only slowly would they lose their potency in chlorinated water supplies. Food which came in contact with these chemicals remained contaminated for days unless thoroughly washed. The inhalation of particles of these drugs suspended in the air produced the same effects as ingestion. Dissolved, they could penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream without having been ingested. 

The army assumed that a city exposed to such chemical attack would cease to function, the inhabitants so confused by the "trip" that the army could march into the city and  take over, facing only minimal resistance. And the next day, the populace would return to normal consciousness and be fit to work for the occupying army. 

To test their assumption, the army gave a squad of soldiers LSD in coffee without their knowledge. After the drug effects began, the soldiers were ordered by their sergeant to perform normal and routine tasks while they were filmed by a hidden camera. They could not follow even the simplest command nor accomplish the most ordinary task with an acceptable degree of competency. Two of the men simply giggled helplessly throughout the entire afternoon. As the platoon sergeant was not a coffee drinker, he did not receive the drug. Neither had he been told about the test. Accordingly he grew more and more frustrated and perplexed as his men acted more and more erratically. 

Further studies indicated, however, that in actual warfare things would not be that easy. Urban populations spend relatively little time out of doors. Since most of these drugs settled out of the atmosphere quickly and did not pass through air-conditioning systems, they would therefore not affect everyone. If the water supply were lightly laced with a psychedelic, an individual would have to drink a pint of tap water before being affected. The concentration could be made heavier, enough so that one would only have to brush his teeth or wash his face before getting "high," but with concentrations that large, even an infant's formula or a cup of tea would be a dangerous poison. 

Further, those exposed to minute amounts of these "incapacitating agents" might be able to fight off the symptoms. Those heavily dosed would suffer enormous mental distortions and could become wildly irrational. Mildly intoxicated persons might go about as if in a normal state, unaware that their judgment and motor skills were impaired. The resulting number of accidents would be monumental. Thus, it became clear to the government that even the supposed "non-kill" type of warfare could take thousands of lives.

Eventually the army did shelve its plans for drug "non-kill" warfare. But the major obstacle, as they saw it, was not that it might kill the enemy, but that as of yet the army was unable to immunize its own troops against drug effects. Not until 1975 was a reliable LSD antidote developed.

Chapter Six 

THE GUINEA PIG ARMY 

In June, 1975, it was revealed publicly for the first time what many had suspected—that the CIA and a number of government agencies under its direction had actually been giving behavior-influencing drugs to citizens within the United States for more than twenty years. 

I was in Washington at the time, searching the catalogue card files at the National Technical Information Service. A previous search by friends in military intelligence of the M.I. Classified Index had revealed nothing but peripheral references to the object of my study: government research in drugs, hypnosis, behavior modification, and related subjects. 

The NTIS file is supposed to contain a complete numerical listing of all government contracts, by contract number, whether or not they are classified. The contract cards were indeed numbered in consecutive order, but the ones I was looking for were missing; the index simply skipped over them and continued on in numerical sequence. Other cards in the index were marked "classified," and I would not have been able to obtain the papers to which they referred. But the reports I was looking for were not even cited in the index, although references to them in scientific journals indicated that they had once existed. Classified or not, these documents had been removed from the record. 

That afternoon press accounts of the Rockefeller Report to the President on CIA Activities said, "Beginning in the late 1940s, the CIA began to study the properties of certain behavior-influencing drugs (such as LSD) and how such drugs might be put to use in intelligence activities." 

Further, according to the report, "The primary purpose of the drug program was to counter the use of behavior influencing drugs clandestinely administered by an enemy, although several operational uses outside the United States were also considered." 

"The drug program," the report went on to say, "was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances." 

As it would do two years later, the press played up the drug angle and ignored the other experiments. The CIA had been actually experimenting with all kinds of mind control techniques for twenty-odd years. 

It gave me little comfort, but it reaffirmed my sanity, to read in the report that "unfortunately only limited records of the testing conducted in these drug programs are now available. All the records concerning the program were ordered destroyed in 1973, including a total of 152 separate files." 

As I left NTIS, George Orwell's prophecy in 1984 came to mind: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." How long would it be before our society would perfectly mirror that state Orwell envisioned when he said: "All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control,' they called it .. . 'double-think.' " 

In 1984, the government continually changed its past by creating new historical fictions to justify its present. I wondered if we had already gone beyond 1984, where, as Orwell said, "truth is falsehood," and "ignorance is strength." 

Five days after the Rockefeller Report was released, the public flap began. The children of Dr. Frank Olson were informed by the CIA that their father had been the individual the Report cited as the "employee of the Department of the Army who was given LSD without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project." Olson had died when he fell, jumped, or somehow exited from a twelfth-floor hotel window in New York, while still under the influence of what was then  billed as the most powerful mind-altering drug known to man. 

For twenty-two years the cause of Olson's death had been concealed. His family had been led to believe that he had committed suicide because of a mysterious, unexplained "mental breakdown." At no time after Olson's death was his family offered a true explanation of the real circumstances which had caused it. 

Eric, the eldest son of Dr. Olson, said, "I'm very angry at the CIA because they let us grow up thinking our father had inexplicably committed suicide." Young Olson said that his family had decided to sue the government, not only out of a desire to collect monetary damages but because "we think there's more information involved in this. It's also a way of holding the CIA publicly accountable for what they did." 

The Olson family discovered that an individual damaged while in government employ cannot sue the government. But this didn't stop them. They asked the Senate to vote them a special bill of recompense for the death of the head of their household. On May 18, 1976, the full Senate approved S.B. 3035 by voice vote and sent it on to the House. Senate Bill 3035 specifically authorized appropriations totaling $1.25 million to be paid to the Olson family. The House of Representatives, being more conservative at the time, cut the Senate's generous award and the Olson family eventually received only $750,000. A similar case, tried in a civil court, might have brought the Olson family as much as three million dollars. 

Months before Olson plunged to his death, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, died after being given repeated doses of experimental psycho-chemicals by the army at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. For years the Blauer family had been trying, to no avail, to find out the true cause of Harold Blauer's death. In the wake of the Olson scandal, the army relaxed its cover-up and finally surrendered Mr. Blauer's medical file to his daughter, Mrs. Elisabeth Barrett. 

The chemical identities of the drugs he had received were not given; the drugs were listed only by number. The numbers were said to represent various hallucinogens, but because of "national security" it has never been revealed what the chemicals were that killed Harold Blauer. 

The crucial part of the army's medical report stated: "Prenarcosis:apprehensive—considerable persuasion required—injection administered at 9:53 A.M.; post-narcosis:—9:59, subject so restless has to be restrained by nurse—out of contact with reality—arms flailing—sweating profusely; 10:01, rapid oscillation of eyeballs; 10:11, body rigid all over, 10:15, stimulant administered; 10:20 to 11:45, deep coma; 11:50, artificial respiration administered; 12:15, doctor pronounces subject dead; 12:30, hospital authorities notified; 3:30, body transferred to city morgue." 

Harold Blauer died without ever knowing what drug he'd received. And from the words in the report— "considerable persuasion required"—it looks as though he hadn't volunteered, either. 

Frank Olson died without really knowing he'd been given a drug. It had been slipped into his drink and he was told it was LSD only after the mind-bending effects had begun. 

Both Blauer's and Olson's deaths were covered up by the excuse of "national security." Their families were deliberately misled about the cause of death. No monetary compensation was offered except for the pensions or allotments due the families under normal circumstances. 

In the wake of these personal tragedies, increasing public pressure led other government agencies to make their confessions. The army announced that since 1956 it had tested LSD on nearly 1,500 unwitting servicemen, and on several thousand more volunteers, a total of 6,940 in all. At the same time the army made this disclosure, it requested permission from the Defense Department to conduct further tests with at least two new drugs—drugs which were many times more powerful than LSD. Permission was granted with the stipulation that the "guinea pigs" be volunteers only. 

Within days of the army's admission of drug testing, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare revealed that it had administered LSD to about 2,500 prisoners, mental patients, and paid volunteers between 1954 and 1968. HEW said further that it had given seven and a half million dollars in grants to more than thirty university researchers who independently ran LSD tests on human subjects. 

What was not revealed until much later was that the CIA had used every possible military and civilian agency or government, as well as a number of universities and private research groups, to test LSD and other drugs, plus a whole array of psycho-technologies in an all-out search for reliable methods of controlling the human mind. 

But the CIA's record was pretty good; for out of all the thousands of individuals who were given LSD or other drugs without their knowledge, only three are known to have died. 

In 1955 a new drug-testing program was begun at the Edgewood Army Chemical Center. Volunteer soldiers were recruited but were not told what drugs they would be given, nor that men had died as a result of similar experiments. They were told they'd suffer only temporary discomfort. Seven thousand soldiers underwent the Edgewood Arsenal's tests. Five hundred eighty-five men were given LSD; the rest were administered other unspecified drugs. 

Dr. Gerald Klee was one of the first psychiatrists to work on the drug-testing program for the army. When questioned by television crews as to how the volunteers had been recruited, he said that he didn't really know. They had come from all over the country, believing only that they were going to the Chemical Center to be used as subjects in chemical experiments. 

"Most of them were not highly educated, and even if they had been told exactly what they were to be given, they wouldn't have understood it," Dr. Klee said. "The advantage to them was time off to get away from some place they didn't want to be, to be near their family, girlfriends, whatever, and they had a pretty good life while they were there, as a matter of fact. They spent very little of their time in the experiments and had a lot of free time . . ." 

Wendell Queen was an army sergeant in 1964 when he volunteered for the drug experiments at Edgewood. Years later, when the Olson case was made public, Mr. Queen tried to find out what drugs he had been given. He ran into a wall of security. The army stated that it had no record that he was ever given drugs. 

But Sergeant Queen remembers differently. He had been given a drug that penetrated his skin, not through injection but simply by being placed on his arm with an eye dropper. 

"They just took a small drop and put it on my arm, and my arm became inflamed and kinda itchy, something like a  bad mosquito bite," he said. He was not told what drug it was. He was told only that the effects would be temporary. 

Several hours afterwards, he began to float. "I began to feel kinda happy and the room started turning around," Sergeant Queen related. "I had lost all my senses. I had no sense of balance or sense of the environment around me. . . . Later on that night I really got paranoid and if anybody would come close to me I would think that they were going to kill me ... " 

Sergeant Queen had "flashbacks" for several months after that experiment when he would relive the states of mind he had experienced on that day. 

"My roommate told me later that one night I woke up screaming and hollering 'don't kill me, don't kill me.' He said I became so violent that I began tearing my bed up," Sergeant Queen said. 

Sergeant Queen remembers that at Edgewood he tried making a joke about being a human guinea pig. The medic administering the test didn't appreciate his sense of humor. "He said that the doctors were the only human guinea pigs around there because they took every new drug first. He said that they always got a bigger dose than anyone else ever did." 

According to the army, their LSD testing program came to an end in 1967. An army spokesman promised a followup study on the 585 men who had been given LSD, but actually carried it out with only thirty-five officers—and superficially, at that. Still, the army maintained that there had certainly been no LSD deaths since Olson and Blauer. Once again it was not telling the whole truth. 

George Donald, a colonel at the Army Chemical School in Fort McClellan, Alabama, agreed to become a guinea pig in 1959. He believed in progress, and he believed that without experimentation and research there could be no progress. Thus, when the opportunity presented itself to him, he readily submitted to an injection of what was said to be LSD. 

Immediately after he took the drug, according to his wife, "his overall characteristics seemed to change, his attitude changed, mannerisms changed, and I'm sure a great deal more that I didn't notice at the time." 

A year after Colonel Danald's psychedelic experience he was transferred to Edgewood Chemical Center. Every day it was his habit to pick up his daughter Dawn promptly after school. One day he didn't meet her and Dawn walked to the Officers' Club looking for him. His car was in the parking lot, so assuming her father was inside, she went into the club and asked if anyone had seen him. When nobody seemed to remember that he'd been there that day, she went up to their apartment on the floor above and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so she went in. 

The sitting room was littered with papers. She walked into the bedroom and noticed that the twin beds were apart. When she turned on the lights, she saw her father's body slumped at the foot of the bed. 

In shock, she went to her room next door and telephoned her mother, who was at work. "Mommy, I found Daddy," she said. "He's on the floor and he looks awful white." 

Colonel Donald had been dead for five hours when Dawn found him. He had taken his own life by putting a .25 caliber bullet through his temple. The pistol was still in his hand. 

Colonel Donald did not have a history of mental instability. Until the time of his experience at Fort McClellan, he had never had a depressed moment. The only clue his family had to his apparent mental anguish was that, a few months before he died, he had once threatened to kill himself in a family argument. No one had paid any attention to that since he had been such a stable person in the past. 

Mrs. Donald believes that her husband's death was caused by the mind-bending effects of the experiment, but she has so far been unable to prove her case. She and her family have received no compensation except the benefits which would normally accrue to a lifetime army officer. 

Mary Ray was a research assistant at a psychiatric hospital which held military contracts to test LSD from 1958 to 1969. She helped doctors conduct experiments on more than 900 people. Some of them were mental patients. In 1966 she offered herself for LSD testing. Her description is typical of a "bum trip." 

I was in a state of becoming the universe. I became objects," she said. "I was no longer a person. Then, I got to  a state of absolute terror. The closest thing I can remember being like that was as a child, when I was given ether . . it was the feeling like just before losing consciousness." 

But Mary was able to bring herself back from the LSD void: "I realized that I was a person, out of this billowing black seething weirdness, this horror . . . 

"I looked down and I saw my arms which were two white rivers with black threads and they were my veins. I realized that, and I felt that if I tried really hard, somehow I could sever the veins. I realized even though I was not really a person that I could end all this living nightmare, this hell, by cutting my veins. 

"Then I concentrated on this problem for what seemed centuries, because time did not exist. It was a strange time distortion. I tried desperately to try to kill myself. There is no question in my mind, that if I had had some sort of sharp instrument, and if I were alone, I would have killed myself . . ." 

The doctors and medics in attendance were helpless. "No one seemed to know how to handle the situation. No one knew what to do. It seemed like they were kids playing scientists."1 

Mary Ray reported no amnesia, and no recurring after affects. She never felt another overwhelming compulsion to commit suicide, nor any compulsion to keep her experience secret. 

In June of 1958, William F. Chaffin was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. He had been a basic training instructor in biological, chemical, and radiological (CBR) warfare earlier in his career and thought, when he read the bulletin offering volunteers a thirty day tour of duty at Edgewood Arsenal, that it would be easy duty. It would be a nice break in his dull routine and a thirty-day leave at government expense. He assumed that he'd be involved in a program much like the one he'd taught in basic military training on chemical and biological warfare tactics and defenses. 

On September 10, 1975, before a joint session of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, Chaffin testified to the lasting effects of his volunteer tour of duty at Edgewood. 

He told the committee that upon his arrival at Edgewood, he was placed in a barracks with approximately thirty' other volunteers. Daily, some of the volunteers were taken to various points on the base, given gas masks, and used in experiments involving DDT and other relatively mild chemicals. But at first Chaffin was simply ordered to report to a certain station each morning, and then he would be released for the remainder of the day to pursue his own interests. 

Today Chaffin cannot say with any certainty how long this procedure went on. He can't remember whether he was there for one week, two weeks, or three weeks before he was actually used in a test. 

"At some point around the middle of the month of July [1958]," Chaffin told the committee, "myself and four or five other individuals were taken to a hospital on the base. We were, at that time, taken into a room and a psychologist or psychiatrist—I cannot remember which—who I believe was associated with the University of Maryland, informed us that we would be administered a drug or a substance in distilled water. We were further informed that this drug or substance would be odorless, tasteless, and colorless. We were asked to perform certain tests prior to the ingestion of the substance. My best recollection of these tests is that we were simply asked to estimate certain amounts of elapsed time by any means other than a watch or clock. We were then taken back to our various wards and a short time thereafter, I was given a beaker of colorless, odorless, and tasteless substance by an orderly or an attendant. 

"I have no recollection whatsoever that I was informed of the nature or qualities of the substance. Certainly, no reference was made to any possibility of detrimental psychological or physical effects on myself, or my future family, by taking of the substance. 

I cannot estimate adequately the length of time that elapsed after I took the drug until I first began to notice the effects, but my best recollection is that it was in the nature of one-half hour. 

"At that time, I remember being taken back to the psychiatrist or psychologist and again asked to estimate various lengths of time by any means except observing a clock or watch. It is extremely difficult for me to describe ade- 96 Walter Bowart quately what occurred in the next hours of that day. I have, to this day, distinct recollections of vivid and colorful events that made no sense whatsoever to me. I have distinct recollections of either myself hallucinating or other individuals hallucinating and imagining that they were seeing certain objects and things. I do not recall if they were in fact hallucinating, or if I was simply imagining they were. 

"I was obsessed with a feeling that I can only describe as utter and total depression. I don't think these words adequately convey the meaning of that which I experienced, but I simply do not have the words to set forth the occurrences of that day. 

"Later, I was released from the hospital. I cannot recall if this was after a period of twelve hours, twenty-four hours, or thirty-six hours or more. It is simply impossible to adequately determine what lengths of time elapsed." 

Shortly thereafter, Chaffin returned to his base. His life returned to its usual routine, but for some reason, he found it extremely difficult to talk to anyone. He could not even bring himself to tell his wife about his Edgewood experience. 

"Since that time," Chaffin said, "I have experienced what I believe to be LSD flashbacks on at least three separate occasions. The feelings that encompassed me on those three different occasions were again what I can only describe as a total depression accompanied by nearly uncontrollable desire to take my life . . ." 

After Chaffin's return, his wife became pregnant. In November of 1958, she miscarried. The Chaffins' doctor informed them that in all likelihood the fetus had been deformed. "I do not know at this time if this was attributable to LSD which I was administered at Edgewood, Maryland, or not. We do not at this time know if various other problems which have arisen in one of my children are directly attributable to LSD or not. Conversely, we do not at this time know that there is no relation.* 
* Actually there is no conclusive scientific evidence that ingestion of even large amounts of LSD-25 can cause genetic malformation. There is only evidence that if laboratory animals and eggs are saturated with a pure concentration of LSD, chromosomal damage can occur. 
"After the ingestion of the substance in July of 1958," Chaffin said, "my personality and behavior began to change [emphasis added]. After seven years of marriage, I was certainly not an individual that tended to depression. However, after the ingestion of LSD, I have undergone, as I mentioned earlier, several occasions of the same total and extreme depression that occurred when I was given the LSD initially. Additionally, my wife has related to me one incident that occurred and which I have no recollection of whatsoever. This incident involved my actually taking a gun and attempting to leave our home for the purpose of taking my own life." 

Then Chaffin told the Joint Committee, "I would like to state for the record that I believe that the United States Air Force was always extremely fair to me in my military career. I enjoyed my military career and consider myself to be a loyal member of the United States Air Force, retired. I must also state that the trauma that I have undergone as a result of being surreptitiously administered this drug is something I consider to be totally out of keeping with my concept of the service. I can only hope that the Committee will take every means available to make sure that the other individuals who were administered LSD receive notification and help." 

Army records show that William Chaffin was given a drug known only as EA1729. On August 5, 1975, after the Olson disclosure, Chaffin wrote a letter to the army stating that he thought he might have been given LSD. He requested the medical follow-up the army had promised. Michael V. Johnston of the Army Surgeon General's office responded to his letter. "In checking our records," Johnston wrote, "we find that you did receive LSD in the army research program. Medical consultants in the Office of the Surgeon General are now making plans for a follow-up study of persons who took LSD. You will be contacted within the next few months and invited to be examined . . ." 

Chaffin was called in for a physical subsequently but he feels the examination was inadequate. He has only the army's word that the drug he received was LSD. Probably it was not. LSD is not known for its abilities to induce amnesia, to cause depression, or to place a lock on the tongue. If anything, LSD could be used in interrogation to loosen the mind and the tongue. 

Until that day in Edgewood, William Chaffin had always  had a firm grip on reality. Either he was given one of several drugs far more powerful than LSD, and with different properties to affect the mind, or he was given LSD and put through some extreme behavior modification procedure which programmed him to remain silent, and later, after his connection with the Edgewood experiment had been severed, to wish to take his own life.

next
THE MKULTRANS


footnotes
Chapter 4 
1. George Estabrooks, Argosy, February, 1950. 
2. Estabrooks, Hypnotism, 3d ed. (New York, Dutton, 1944) 
3. Bernard C. Gindes, New Concepts in Hypnosis (Wilshire Books, N. Hollywood, Cal., 1973) 
4. Wesley Wells, The Journal of Psychology, 1941. 
5. Milton Erickson, Journal of Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations, August, 1939. 
6. Estabrooks, Hypnotism. 
7. Seymour Fisher, The Use of Hypnosis in Intelligence and Related Military Situations. 

Chapter 5 
1. L. Ron Hubbard, The Science of Survival (Church of Scientology, L.A. Cal., 1951) 
2. Louis Gottschalk, The Use of Drugs in Information Seeking Interviews. 
3. Albert Hofmann, High Times, July, 1976. 
4. Ibid. 
5. Gottschalk, op. cit. 
6. Alfred W. McCoy, Cathleen B. Reed, and Leonard P. Adams, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, Harper, 1973) 
7. Victor Marchetti, Freedom News Service, August, 1976. 
8. Solomon Snyder, Zodiac News Service, July 29, 1975. 
9. Washington Post, July 25, 1975. 
10. Gottschalk, op cit. 

Chapter 6 
1. Mary Ray, Documentary, "Guinea-Pig Soldiers," Granada Television, Ltd.