James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists
on the lookout for the magic mushroom. For three years after Morse Allen's
man returned from Mexico with his tales of wonder, Moore and the others
in the Agency's network pushed their lines of inquiry among contacts and
travelers into Mexican villages so remote that Spanish had barely penetrated.
Yet they found no magic mushrooms. Given their efforts, it was ironic that
the man who beat them to "God's flesh" was neither a spy nor a scientist,
but a banker. It was R. Gordon Wasson, vice-president of J. P. Morgan &
Company, amateur mycologist, and co-author with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms,
Russia and History. Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian-born
wife had become fascinated by the different ways that societies deal with
the mushroom, and they followed their lifelong obsession with these fungi,
in all their glory, all over the globe.[1]
They found whole nationalities, such as the Russians and the Catalans,
were mycophiles, while others like the Spaniards and the Anglo-Saxons were
not. They learned that in ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that
certain kinds of mushrooms were brought into being by lightning bolts.
They discovered that widely scattered peoples, including desert Arabs,
Siberians, Chinese, and Maoris of New Zealand, have shared the idea that
mushrooms have supernatural connections. Their book appeared in limited
edition, selling new in 1957 for $125. It contains facts and legends, lovingly
told, as well as beautiful photographs of nearly every known species of
mushroom.
Inevitably, the Wassons heard tell of "God's flesh,"
and in 1953 they started spending their vacations pursuing it. They took
their first unsuccessful trek to Mexico about the time James Moore got
connected to the CIA and Morse Allen met with the Pennsylvania mushroom
executives. They had no luck until their third expedition, when Gordon
Wasson and his traveling companion, Allan Richardson, found their holy
grail high in the mountains above Oaxaca. On June 29, 1955, they entered
the town hall in a village called Huautla de Jimenez. There, they found
a young Indian about 35, sitting by a large table in an upstairs room.
Unlike most people in the village, he spoke Spanish. "He had a friendly
manner," Wasson later wrote, "and I took a chance. Leaning over the table,
I asked him earnestly and in a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence.
Instantly curious, he encouraged me. 'Will you,' I went on, 'help me learn
the secrets of the divine mushroom?' and I used the Indian name nti
sheeto, correctly pronouncing it with glottal stop and tonal differentiation
of the syllables. When [he] recovered from his surprise he said warmly
that nothing could be easier."
Shortly thereafter, the Indian led Wasson and Richardson
down into a deep ravine where mushrooms were growing in abundance. The
white men snapped picture after picture of the fungi and picked a cardboard
box-full. Then, in the heavy humid heat of the afternoon, the Indian led
them up the mountain to a woman who performed the ancient mushroom rite.
Her name was Maria Sabina. She was not only a curandera, or shaman,
of "the highest quality," wrote Wasson, but a "señora sin mancha,
a woman without stain." Wasson described her as middle-aged and short,
"with a spirituality in her expression that struck us at once. She had
a presence. We showed our mushrooms to the woman and her daughter. They
cried out in rapture over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance
of our young specimens. Through the interpreter we asked if they would
serve us that night. They said yes."
That night, Wasson, Richardson, and about 20 Indians
gathered in one of the village's adobe houses. The natives wore their best
clothes and were friendly to the white strangers. The host provided chocolate
drinks, which evoked for Wasson accounts of similar beverages being served
early Spanish writers. Maria Sabina sat on a mat before a simple altar
table that was adorned with the images of the Child Jesus and the Baptism
in Jordan. After cleaning the mushrooms, she handed them out to all the
adults present, keeping 26 for herself and giving Wasson and Richardson
12 each.
Maria Sabina put out the last candle about midnight,
and she chanted haunting, tightly measured melodies. The Indian celebrants
responded with deep feeling. Both Wasson and Richardson began to experience
intense hallucinations that did not diminish until about 4:00 A.M. "We
were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were
open or closed," Wasson wrote:
They emerged from the center of the field of our vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly at the pace that our will chose. They were vivid in color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens-resplendent palaces with semiprecious stones.... Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played some important part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the vision, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.
Thus Gordon Wasson described the first known
mushroom trip by "outsiders" in recorded history. The CIA's men missed
the event, but they quickly learned of it, even though Wasson's visit was
a private noninstitutional one to a place where material civilization had
not reached. Such swiftness was assured by the breadth of the Agency's
informant network, which included formal liaison arrangements with agencies
like the Agriculture Department and the FDA and informal contacts all over
the world. A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that reached both
CIA headquarters and then James Moore. In the best bureaucratic form, the
CIA description of Wasson's visions stated sparsely that the New York banker
thought he saw "a multitude of architectural forms." Still, "God's flesh"
had been located, and the MKULTRA leaders snatched up information that
Wasson planned to return the following summer and bring back some mushrooms.
During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote
Wasson-"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls-and expressed a desire to look
into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore eventually suggested
that he would like to accompany Wasson's party, and, to sweeten the proposition,
he mentioned that he knew a foundation that might be willing to help underwrite
the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter Fund, made
a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for the divine mushroom
became Subproject 58.
Joining Moore and Wasson on the 1956 trip were the
world-renowned French mycologist Roger Heim and a colleague from the Sorbonne.
The party made the final leg of the trip, one at a time, in a tiny Cessna,
but when it was Moore's turn, the load proved too much for the plane. The
pilot suddenly took a dramatic right angle turn through a narrow canyon
and made an unscheduled stop on the side of a hill. Immediately on landing,
an Indian girl ran out and slid blocks under the wheels, so the plane would
not roll back into a ravine. The pilot decided to lighten the load by leaving
Moore among the local Indians, who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Later
in the day, the plane returned and picked up the shaken Moore.
Finally in Huautla, sleeping on a dirt floor and
eating local food, everyone reveled in the primitiveness of the adventure
except Moore, who suffered. In addition to diarrhea, he recalls, "I had
a terribly bad cold, we damned near starved to death, and I itched all
over." Beyond his physical woes, Moore became more and more alienated from
the others, who got on famously. Moore was a "complainer," according to
Wasson. "He had no empathy for what was going on," recalls Wasson. "He
was like a landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all."
Moore states, "Our relationship deteriorated during the course of the trip."
Wasson returned to the same Maria Sabina who had
led him to the high ground the year before. Again the ritual started well
after dark and, for everyone but Moore, it was an enchanted evening. Sings
Wasson: "I had the most superb feeling-a feeling of ecstasy. You're raised
to a height where you have not been in everyday life-not ever." Moore,
on the other hand, never left the lowlands. His description: "There was
all this chanting in the dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms around,
and we chewed them up. I did feel the hallucinogenic effect, although 'disoriented'
would be a better word to describe my reaction."
Soon thereafter, Moore returned to Delaware with
a bag of mushrooms-just in time to take his pregnant wife to the hospital
for delivery. After dropping her off with the obstetrician, he continued
down the hall to another doctor about his digestion. Already a thin man,
Moore had lost 15 pounds. Over the next week, he slowly nursed himself
back to health. He reported in to Bortner and started preliminary work
in his lab to isolate the active ingredient in the mushrooms. Bortner urged
him on; the men from MKULTRA were excited at the prospect that they might
be able to create "a completely new chemical agent." They wanted their
own private supply of "God's flesh." Sid Gottlieb wrote that if Moore succeeded,
it was "quite possible" that the new drugs could "remain an Agency secret."
Gottlieb's dream of a CIA monopoly on the divine
mushroom vanished quickly under the influence of unwanted competitors,
and indeed, the Agency soon faced a control problem of burgeoning proportions.
While Moore toiled in his lab, Roger Heim in Paris unexpectedly pulled
off the remarkable feat of growing the mushrooms in artificial culture
from spore prints he had made in Mexico. Heim then sent samples to none
other than Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who quickly isolated
and chemically reproduced the active chemical ingredient. He named it psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the CIA,[2]
and the men from MKULTRA found themselves trying to obtain formulas and
supplies from overseas. Instead of locking up the world's supply of the
drug in a safe somewhere, they had to keep track of disbursements from
Sandoz, as they were doing with LSD. Defeated by the old master, Moore
laid his own work aside and sent away to Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin.
This lapse in control still did not quash the hopes
of Agency officials that the mushroom might become a powerful weapon in
covert operations. Agency scientists rushed it into the experimental stage.
Within three summers of the first trip with James Moore, the CIA's queasy
professor from America, the mushroom had journeyed through laboratories
on two continents, and its chemical essence had worked its way back to
Agency conduits and a contractor who would test it. In Kentucky, Dr. Harris
Isbell ordered psilocybin injected into nine black inmates at the narcotics
prison. His staff laid the subjects out on beds as the drug took hold and
measured physical symptoms every hour: blood pressure, knee-jerk reflexes,
rectal temperature, precise diameter of eye pupils, and so on. In addition,
they recorded the inmates' various subjective feelings:
After 30 minutes, anxiety became quite definite and was expressed as consisting of fear that something evil was going to happen, fear of insanity, or of death.... At times patients had the sensation that they could see the blood and bones in their own body or in that of another person. They reported many fantasies or dreamlike states in which they seemed to be elsewhere. Fantastic experiences, such as trips to the moon or living in gorgeous castles were occasionally reported.... Two of the 9 patients . . . felt their experiences were caused by the experimenters controlling their minds....
Experimental data piled up, with operational
testing to follow.
But the magic mushroom never became a good spy weapon.
It made people behave strangely but no one could predict where their trips
would take them. Agency officials craved certainty.
On the other hand, Gordon Wasson found revelation.
After a lifetime of exploring and adoring mushrooms, he had discovered
the greatest wonder of all in that remote Indian village. His experience
inspired him to write an account of his journey for the "Great Adventures"
series in Life magazine. The story, spread across 17 pages of text
and color photographs, was called "Seeking the Magic Mushroom: A New York
banker goes to Mexico's mountains to participate in the age-old rituals
of Indians who chew strange growths that produce visions." In 1957, before
the Russian sputnik shook America later that year, Life introduced
its millions of readers to the mysteries of hallucinogens, with a tone
of glowing but dignified respect. Wasson wrote movingly of his long search
for mushroom lore, and he became positively rhapsodic in reflecting on
his Mexican "trip":
In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous, primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of God.
The article caused a sensation in the United
States, where people had already been awakened to ideas like these by Aldous
Huxley's
The Doors of Perception. It lured waves of respectable
adults-precursors of later hippie travelers-to Mexico in search of their
own curanderas. (Wasson came to have mixed feelings about the response
to his story, after several tiny Mexican villages were all but trampled
by American tourists on the prowl for divinity.) One person whose curiosity
was stimulated by the article was a young psychology professor named Timothy
Leary. In 1959, in Mexico on vacation, he ate his first mushrooms. He recalls
he "had no idea it was going to change my life." Leary had just been promised
tenure at Harvard, but his life of conventional prestige lost appeal for
him within five hours of swallowing the mushroom: "The revelation had come.
The veil had been pulled back.... The prophetic call. The works. God had
spoken."
Having responded to a Life article about
an expedition that was partially funded by the CIA, Leary returned to a
Harvard campus where students and professors had for years served as subjects
for CIA- and military-funded LSD experiments. His career as a drug prophet
lay before him. Soon he would be quoting in his own
Kamasutra from
the CIA's contractor Harold Abramson and others, brought together for scholarly
drug conferences by the sometime Agency conduit, the Macy Foundation.
With LSD, as with mushrooms, the men from MKULTRA
remained oblivious, for the most part, to the rebellious effect of the
drug culture in the United States. "I don't think we were paying any attention
to it," recalls a TSS official. The CIA's scientists looked at drugs from
a different perspective and went on trying to fashion their spy arsenal.
Through the entire 1960s and into the 1970s, the Agency would scour Latin
America for poisonous and narcotic plants.[3]
Earlier, TSS officials and contractors actually kept spreading the magic
touch of drugs by forever pressing new university researchers into the
field. Boston Psychopathic's Max Rinkel stirred up the interest of Rochester's
Harold Hodge and told him how to get a grant from the Agency conduit, the
Geschickter Fund. Hodge's group found a way to put a radioactive marker
into LSD, and the MKULTRA crew made sure that the specially treated substance
found its way to still more scientists. When a contractor like Harold Abramson
spoke highly of the drug at a new conference or seminar, tens or hundreds
of scientists, health professionals, and subjects-usually students-would
wind up trying LSD.
One day in 1954, Ralph Blum, a senior at Harvard
on his way to a career as a successful author, heard from a friend that
doctors at Boston Psychopathic would pay $25 to anyone willing to spend
a day as a happy schizophrenic. Blum could not resist. He applied, passed
the screening process, took a whole battery of Wechsler psychological tests,
and was told to report back on a given morning. That day, he was shown
into a room with five other Harvard students. Project director Bob Hyde
joined them and struck Blum as a reassuring father figure. Someone brought
in a tray with six little glasses full of water and LSD. The students drank
up. For Blum, the drug did not take hold for about an hour and a half-somewhat
longer than the average. While Hyde was in the process of interviewing
him, Blum felt his mind shift gears. "I looked at the clock on the wall
and thought how well behaved it was. It didn't pay attention to itself.
It just stayed on the wall and told time." Blum felt that he was looking
at everything around him from a new perspective. "It was a very subtle
thing," he says. "My ego filter had been pretty much removed. I turned
into a very accessible state -accessible to myself. I knew when someone
was lying to me, and the richness of the experience was such that I didn't
want to suffer fools gladly." Twenty-four years later, Blum concludes:
"It was undeniably a very important experience for me. It made a difference
in my life. It began to move the log jam of my old consciousness. You can't
do it with just one blast. It was the beginning of realizing it was safe
to love again. Although I wouldn't use them until much later, it gave me
a new set of optics. It let me know there was something downstream."[4]
Many student subjects like Blum thought LSD transformed
the quality of their lives. Others had no positive feelings, and some would
later use the negative memories of their trips to invalidate the whole
drug culture and stoned thinking process of the 1960s. In a university
city like Boston where both the CIA and the Army were carrying on large
testing programs at hospitals connected to Harvard, volunteering for an
LSD trip became quite popular in academic circles. Similar reactions, although
probably not as pronounced, occurred in other intellectual centers. The
intelligence agencies turned to America's finest universities and hospitals
to try LSD, which meant that the cream of the country's students and graduate
assistants became the test subjects.
In 1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
published a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use.
The authors wrote that the drug's "early use was among small groups of
intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to
undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have
been introduced to the drug by persons of higher status. Teachers have
influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower-classmen." Calling
this a "trickle-down phenomenon," the authors seem to have correctly analyzed
how LSD got around the country. They left out only one vital element, which
they had no way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers
and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found
the men of MKULTRA.
Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out
of getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith,
head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this
cozy little world where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized
the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands.
Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's former husband, his
first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend
of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located
of f the Stanford campus. No stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of
peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what he describes as "the closed little
doctor's room full of instruments," where he took the drug. Although he
was allowed to listen to records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein
reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he "was being connected
to Big Brother's brain." He says that the experience resulted in "a slight
paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until
I learned from meditation how to disperse that."
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then
worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959
on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at that same hospital. Hollister
says he entered the hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the "unscientific"
work of the early LSD researchers. He refers specifically to most of the
people who attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and
military-funded work, Hollister tried drugs out on student volunteers,
including a certain Ken Kesey, in 1960. Kesey said he was a jock who had
only been drunk once before, but on three successive Tuesdays, he tried
different psychedelics. "Six weeks later I'd bought my first ounce of grass,"
Kesey later wrote, adding, "Six months later I had a job at that hospital
as a psychiatric aide." Out of that experience, using drugs while he wrote,
Kesey turned out One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He went on to
become the counterculture's second most famous LSD visionary, spreading
the creed throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe would chronicle in
The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test.
CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary,
Kesey, and Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men were, and they,
along with many of the lesser-known experimental subjects, like Harvard's
Ralph Blum, created the climate whereby LSD escaped the government's control
and became available by the early sixties on the black market. No one at
the Agency apparently foresaw that young Americans would voluntarily take
the drug-whether for consciousness expansion or recreational purposes.
The MKULTRA experts were mainly on a control trip, and they proved incapable
of gaining insight from their own LSD experiences of how others less fixated
on making people do their bidding would react to the drug.
It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame
on-or give all the credit to-the CIA for the spread of LSD. One cannot
forget the nature of the times, the Vietnam War, the breakdown in authority,
and the wide availability of other drugs, especially marijuana. But the
fact remains that LSD was one of the catalysts of the traumatic upheavals
of the 1960s. No one could enter the world of psychedelics without first
passing, unawares, through doors opened by the Agency. It would become
a supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons among drugs-fueled
by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with
genius and machines-would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable
minds of the counterculture.