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.