PART 1: ACID DREAMS THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD:THE CIA,THE 60'S AND BEYOND

Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond

Authors: Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain


Introduction: 

Whose Worlds Are These? 

By Andrei Codrescu 

In June 1967 the Candyman burst through the door of my pad on Avenue C on New York's Lower East Side. He always burst through the door because that was his style. He could barely contain himself. He dropped his mirrored Peruvian bag on the kitchen table and exclaimed: "Just for you! Czech acid!" The Candyman always had some new kind of acid. That month I had already sampled Window Pane and Sunshine. I didn't know if my system could handle another extended flight to the far reaches. But this Czech acid was different. For one thing, it revealed to me that the entire molecular and sub molecular structure of the universe was in fact composed of tiny sickles and hammers. Billions and billions of tiny sickles and hammers shimmered in the beauteous symmetry of the material world. I always thought of this particular "commie trip" as a rather private experience brought about by my having been born and raised in Communist Romania, where sickles and hammers were ubiquitous and unavoidable. 

I did not doubt what I had seen, but I did doubt whether there was such a thing as Czech acid for the simple reason that Czechoslovakia, like Romania, was a monochromatic world. It seemed clear that if acid had existed in Eastern Europe it would have brought about the collapse of communism there, just as it was bringing about the downfall of a certain kind of dour-faced, simple-minded America. And at that time it didn't look like communism was anywhere near collapse. Well, I was wrong. Reading this extraordinary, superbly researched, suspenseful history of LSD, I find, on page 115, that: "In September 1965 Michael Hollingshead returned to his native London armed with hundreds of copies of the updated Book of the Dead and five thousand doses of LSD (which he procured from Czech government laboratories in Prague)." And communism did collapse, though not right then, and acid did have quite a bit to do with it. Charter 77, the Czech human rights organization, was founded by Vaclav Havel in defense of the Plastic People of the Universe, a psychedelic band inspired by the Velvet Underground. Havel himself was in New York in 1968, listening to the Velvets and dreaming, no doubt, of a way out of Cold War ideology. 

This tiny revelation is but a parenthetical remark in a story full of surprises, many of which are profoundly unsettling. The drug that connected so many of us to the organic mystery of a vastly alive universe turns out to have been, at least in the beginning, a secret C.I.A project to find a truth serum. It's frightening to think that C.I.A spooks have used LSD with electroshock and torture to get information out of prisoners. It's even more frightening that they have used it themselves to little positive effect. Or perhaps not. It's ironic and still scary to think that the C.I.A tried to control the LSD experiment even though hundreds of thousands were turning on in the heyday of the sixties. Neither the ironies nor the chilling implications stop here. The authors have plowed through thousands of pages of declassified intelligence material to reveal a complex tissue of connections between secret government agencies and the academic world on the one hand, and between the Utopian hopes of a generation and the machinations of those same agencies on the other. It's a riveting story that makes the most paranoid and outlandish theories of the sixties seem insufficiently paranoid.

At the same time, in a most persuasive and closely argued way, this sharply documented chronicle tells the story of the fantastic characters of acid: Captain Al Hubbard, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Owsley, Art Kleps, Ken Kesey, and many, many more. One is quickly immersed in the vibrant collective aura of the times, which, in spite of the C.I.A and army intelligence, managed to change America forever. The undeniably metaphysical window that LSD opened for so many of us may have unwittingly been opened by those whose interests lay in keeping it shut. It may well be that, seeing their mistake, they have been endeavoring to close it ever since. But the fact is that the brilliant glimpse of a living cosmos did pour through for a while, and it resulted in an unprecedented vision of a different world. One could debate forever the question of how much of what the drug did for us was contingent on the peculiar conditions of that time. The opening, however, was real. 

The usefulness of Acid Dreams goes beyond nostalgia. In researching the effect of LSD on the psychology, sociology, and politics of the sixties, the authors have given a context to the mythos and poetry that now permeate almost every aspect of high and low American culture. For believers in capital C Conspiracy this book should prove a rich mine for reflection. For those, like myself, who believe that conspiracy and control are games that vanish once one ceases to believe in them, this book stands as a much-needed corrective. To history buffs, this is fascinating history. Best of all, this is a thriller about the great mystery of how we of a certain generation got to be who we are. 

December 4, 1991

Prologue 

October 1977. 

Thousands of people jammed the auditorium at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Those who were unable to gain admittance stood outside and pressed their faces against the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of some of the visiting dignitaries. An all-star lineup of poets, scientists, journalists, and media celebrities had convened for the opening of a weekend conference entitled "LSD: A Generation Later." Topping the bill was the man they call the "Father of the Psychedelic Age." 

At seventy-one years of age Dr. Albert Hofmann seemed miscast in his role as hero of such a gathering. His white, closely cropped hair and conservative attire contrasted sharply with the motley appearance of his youthful admirers, who could just as easily have turned out for a rock and roll concert or an anti-nuke rally. But as he strode to the podium to deliver the evening's keynote address, Dr. Hoffman was greeted by a long and thunderous standing ovation. 

"You may be disappointed," he warned the audience. "You may have expected a guru, but instead you meet just a chemist." Whereupon Hoffman launched into a serious scientific discussion of the step-by-step process that led to the discovery of LSD-25, the most potent mind drug known to science at the time. Occasionally he flashed a diagram on the screen and expatiated on the molecular subtleties of hallucinogenic drugs. While much of the technical data soared way above the heads of his listeners, they seemed to love every minute of it. 

Dr. Hofgfman first synthesized LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in 1938 while investigating the chemical and pharmacological properties of ergot, a rye fungus rich in medicinal alkaloids, for Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. At the time he was searching for an analeptic compound (a circulatory stimulant), and LSD was the twenty-fifth in a series of ergot derivatives he concocted; hence the designation LSD- 25. Preliminary studies on laboratory animals did not prove significant, and scientists at Sandoz quickly lost interest in the drug. For the next five years the vial of LSD gathered dust on the shelf, until the afternoon of April 16, 1943. 

"I had a strange feeling," Hoffmann told the assembled masses, "that it would be worthwhile to carry out more profound studies with this compound." In the course of preparing a fresh batch of LSD he accidentally absorbed a small dose through his fingertips, and soon he was overcome by "a remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication characterized by an intense stimulation of the imagination and an altered state of awareness of the world." A knowing chorus of laughter emanated from the audience as Hoffman continued to read from his diary notes. "As I lay in a dazed condition with eyes closed there surged up from me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about three hours." 

Dr. Hoffman was baffled by his first unplanned excursion into the strange world of LSD. He could not comprehend how this substance could have found its way into his body in sufficient quantity to produce such extraordinary symptoms. In the interest of science, he assured his audience, he decided to experiment on himself. Another boisterous round of applause filled the auditorium.

On April 19, three days after his initial psychedelic voyage, Dr. Hofmann swallowed a mere 250 micrograms (a millionth of an ounce), thinking that such a minuscule amount would have negligible results. But he was in for a surprise. As he bicycled home accompanied by his laboratory assistant, he realized the symptoms were much stronger than before. "I had great difficulty in speaking coherently," he recounted. "My field of vision swayed before me, and objects appeared distorted like images in curved mirrors. I had the impression of being unable to move from the spot, although my assistant told me afterwards that we had cycled at a good pace."

When Hoffman arrived home, he consulted a physician, who was ill equipped to deal with what would later be called a "bad trip." Hoffman did not know if he'd taken a fatal dose or if he'd be lost forever in the twisted corridors of inner space. For a while he feared he was losing his mind: "Occasionally I felt as if I were out of my body . I thought I had died. My 'ego' was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa." 

Somehow Hoffman summoned the courage to endure this mind-wrenching ordeal. As the trip wore on, his psychic condition began to improve, and eventually he was able to explore the hallucinogenic terrain with a modicum of composure. He spent the remaining hours absorbed in a synesthetic swoon, bearing witness as each sound triggered a corresponding optical effect, and vice versa, until he fell into a fitful sleep. The next morning he awoke feeling perfectly fine. 

And so it was that Dr. Albert Hofmann made his fateful discovery. Right from the start he sensed that LSD could be an important tool for studying how the mind works, and he was pleased when the scientific community began to use the drug for this purpose. But he did not anticipate that his "problem child," as he later referred to LSD, would have such enormous social and cultural impact in the years to come. Nor could he have foreseen that one day he would be revered as a near-mythic figure by a generation of acid enthusiasts. 

"Dr. Hofmann," said Stephen Gaskin, leader of the largest counterculture commune in America, "there are thousands of people on the Farm who feel they owe their lives to you." Gaskin was among the guests invited to participate in a panel discussion on the second day of the colloquium. Its purpose was to provide a forum for counterculture veterans to reflect back upon the halcyon days of the psychedelic movement, which had reached a peak a decade earlier during the infamous Summer of Love, and assess what had since come to pass. Poet Allen Ginsberg likened the event to a "class reunion." He decided to do some homework before joining his fellow acid valedictorians, so he took some LSD on the plane flight to the West Coast. While under the influence of the psychedelic, he began to ponder the disclosures that had recently surfaced in the news media concerning the C.l.A's use of LSD as a mind control weapon. The possibility that an espionage organization might have promoted the widespread use of LSD was disturbing to Ginsberg, who had been an outspoken advocate of psychedelics during the 1960's. He grabbed a pen and started jotting down some high-altitude thoughts. "Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the C.l.A's lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?" Had the C.I.A, "by conscious plan or inadvertent Pandora's Box, let loose the whole LSD Fad on the U.S. & the World?"

Ginsberg raised the C.I.A issue during the conference, but few seemed to take the matter seriously. "The LSD movement was started by the C.I.A," quipped Timothy Leary with a wide grin on his face. "I wouldn't be here now without the foresight of the C.I.A scientists." The one-time Pied Piper of the flower children was in top form, laughing and joking with reporters, as though he hadn't been chased halfway around the world by US narcotics police and spent the last few years in prison. "It was no accident," Leary mused. "It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence, and I'm all in favor of Central Intelligence." 

A jovial mood prevailed throughout much of the panel discussion. Old comrades who had not seen each other for a long time swapped tales of acid glory and reminisced about the wild and unforgettable escapades of yesteryear. "As I look at my colleagues and myself," said Richard Alpert, one of Leary's original cohorts at Harvard University in the early 1960's, "I see we have proceeded just as we wished to, despite all conditions. I feel that what we are doing today is partly demonstrating that we are not psychotic!" Alpert went on to declare that he didn't care if he ever took LSD again but that he appreciated what his hundreds of trips had taught him and hoped there would be a more favorable climate for serious LSD research in the near future. 

Alpert's sentiments were echoed by many of the panelists, who called on the government to reconsider its restrictive policies so that scientists and psychologists could resume studying the drug. There were frequent testimonials to the contributions LSD made to science and society. Acid was praised as a boon to psychotherapy, an enhancer of creativity, a religious sacrament, and a liberator of the human spirit. Dr. Ralph Metzner, the third member of the Harvard triumvirate, suggested that the appearance of LSD constituted nothing less than a turning point in human evolution. It was no coincidence, he maintained, that Dr. Hofmann discovered the effects of LSD shortly after the first nuclear chain reaction was achieved by the Manhattan Project. His remarks seemed to imply that LSD was some sort of divine antidote to the nuclear curse and that humanity must pay heed to the psychedelic revelation if it was to alter its self-destructive course and avert a major catastrophe. 

Author Richard Ashley elaborated on the theme of acid as a chemical messiah. As far as he was concerned, LSD provided the most effective means of short-circuiting the mental straitjacket that society imposes on its members. A worldwide police state was a virtual certainty, Ashley predicted, unless more people used psychedelics to raise their consciousness and resist the ominous specter of thought control. 

Others were somewhat more cautious in speculating upon the role of hallucinogenic drugs in advanced industrial society. "LSD came along before our culture was ready for it," asserted Dr. Stanley Krippner, a leading parapsychologist who once directed the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in New York. "I think we're still not ready for it. We haven't used it for its greatest potential. Psychedelic substances have been used very wisely in primitive cultures for spiritual and healing purposes. Our culture does not have this framework. We don't have the closeness to God, the closeness to nature, the shamanistic outlook. We've lost all that."

By the time the conference drew to a close, over thirty speakers had rendered their verdicts about LSD and the so-called psychedelic revolution. While it was clear that everyone had been deeply affected by the drug experience and the social movement it inspired, there was no overall consensus as to what it all meant. Each person had his or her ideas about why things happened the way they did and what the future might portend. Some felt that LSD arrived on the scene just in the nick of time, others saw it as a premature discovery, and there were a few who thought it might already be too late. If that wasn't enough to thoroughly confuse the audience, John Lilly, the dolphin scientist, urged his listeners to ignore everything they heard from their elders and make their own discoveries. Ginsberg seconded the motion in his concluding remarks. "We must disentangle ourselves from past suppositions," he counseled. "The words 'psychedelic revolution' are part of a past created largely by media images. We need to throw out the past images." 

Less than a month before the Santa Cruz convention, LSD was the main topic at another well-attended gathering. The setting on this occasion was an ornate Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill. The television cameras were ready to roll as Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, strolled toward the lectern flanked by a few of his aides. During the next two days he would attempt to nail down the elusive details of Operation MK-ULTRA, the principal CIA program involving the development of chemical and biological agents during the Cold War. 

In his opening statement Kennedy told a large audience that he hoped these hearings would "close the book on this chapter of the C.l.A's life." He then proceeded to question a group of former C.I.A employees about the Agency's testing of LSD and other drugs on unwitting American citizens. These activities were considered so sensitive that only a handful of people within the C.I.A even knew about them. A previously classified document explained why the program was shrouded in secrecy: "The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission." 

Although most of the testimony had been rehearsed earlier when witnesses met with a Kennedy staff member, the senator from Massachusetts still managed to feign a sense of astonishment when David Rhodes, formerly a C.I.A psychologist, recounted an ill-fated LSD experiment at a C.I.A safe house in the San Francisco Bay area. He described how unsuspecting individuals were recruited from local bars and lured to a party where C.I.A operatives intended to release LSD in the form of an aerosol spray. But as Rhodes explained, the air currents in the room were unsuitable for dosing the partygoers, so one of his cohorts snuck into the bathroom and tried the spray on himself. The audience chuckled at the thought of grown men spritzing themselves with government acid, while news reporters scribbled their renditions of the headline-making tale.

Throughout the hearings the senators listened to one account after another of bumbling and clumsiness on the part of Agency personnel. Phillip Goldman, a CIA chemical warfare specialist, could have been describing a Three Stooges routine when he told of an attempt to test a launching device for a stink bomb. The projectile hit the window ledge, and the spooks held their noses. There were more laughs when he mentioned a drug-coated swizzle stick that dissolved in a cocktail but left a taste so bitter that no one would drink it. And so forth and so on. This kind of buffoonery proved to be an effective public relations ploy for the CIA, deflecting serious scrutiny from drug-related misdeeds. By stressing ineptitude the Agency conveyed an all too human air. After all, why prosecute a bunch of regular Joes for fooling around with chemicals they could never hope to understand? 

The star witness on the second day of the hearings was the C.l.A's chief sorcerer- scientist. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the MK-ULTRA program. Gottlieb, a slight man with short gray hair and a clubfoot, agreed to testify only after receiving a grant of immunity from criminal prosecution. His testimony before the Senate subcommittee marked the first public appearance of this shadowy figure since he left the Agency in 1973. Actually his appearance was "semi-public." Because he suffered from a heart condition, Gottlieb was allowed to speak with the senators in a small antechamber while everyone else listened to the proceedings over a public address system. 

The purpose of Operation MK-ULTRA and related programs, Gottlieb explained, was "to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." When asked to elaborate on what the C.I.A learned from this research, Gottlieb was afflicted by a sudden loss of memory, as if he were under the influence of one of his own amnesia drugs. However, he did confirm earlier reports that prostitutes were used in the safe house experiments to spike the drinks of unlucky customers while C.I.A operatives observed, photographed, and recorded the action. 

When asked to justify this activity, Gottlieb resorted to the familiar Cold War refrain that had been invoked repeatedly throughout the hearings by other witnesses. The original impetus for the C.l.A's drug programs, he maintained, stemmed from concern about the aggressive use of behavior-altering techniques against the US by its enemies. Gottlieb claimed there was evidence (which he never shared with the senators) that the Soviets and the Red Chinese might have been mucking about with LSD in the early 1950's. This, he explained, had grave implications for our national security. 

At the close of the hearings Kennedy summed up the surreptitious LSD tests by declaring, "These activities are part of history, not the current practice of the C.I.A." And that was as far as it went. The senators seemed eager to get the whole show over with, even though many issues were far from resolved. Later it was revealed that some of the witnesses conferred among themselves, agreeing to limit their testimony to the minimum degree necessary to satisfy the committee. As Dr. Gottlieb admitted, "The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written." 

Shortly after the Senate forum, a Washington attorney gave us a tip about how to gain access to a special reading room that housed documents pertaining to Operation MK-ULTRA and other C.I.A mind control projects. The documents had recently been declassified as a result of a Freedom of Information request by researcher John Marks. Located on the bottom floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Rosslyn, Virginia, the reading room was smoke-filled and crowded with journalists working on deadlines, scouring through a heap of papers as fast as their fingers could turn the pages. We were not bound by such constraints, and we decided to examine the files at an unhurried pace.

Reading through the intelligence records was both exciting and frustrating. Each stack of heavily censored reports contained a hodge-podge of data, much of which seemed trivial. There was no rhyme or reason to their arrangement: financial records, inventory lists, in-house gossip, and letters of recommendation were randomly interspersed with minutes of top-secret meetings and other tantalizing morsels. 

We dug in for the long haul, intent on examining every scrap of information related to the C.l.A's behavior modification programs. Our visits to the reading room became a weekly ritual, and soon we expanded our investigation to include army, navy, and air force documents as well. During the next six months we reviewed approximately twenty thousand pages of previously classified memoranda. We began to think of ourselves as archeologists rather than muck-rakers, trying to unearth remnants of a lost history buried underneath layers of secrecy. 

In the course of our inquiry we uncovered CIA documents describing experiments in sensory deprivation, sleep teaching, ESP, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and many other methods that might have applications for behavior modification. One project was designed to turn people into programmed assassins who would kill on automatic command. Another document mentioned "hypnotically induced anxieties" and "induced pain as a form of physical and psychological control." There were repeated references to exotic drugs and biological agents that caused "headache clusters," uncontrollable twitching or drooling, or a lobotomy-like stupor. Deadly chemicals were concocted for the sole purpose of inducing a heart attack or cancer without leaving a clue as to the actual source of the disease. CIA specialists also studied the effects of magnetic fields, ultrasonic vibrations, and other forms of radiant energy on the brain. As one CIA doctor put it, "We lived in a never- never land of 'eyes only' memos and unceasing experimentation." 

As it turns out, nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960's marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amayinitrate, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed, and many others had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by C.I.A and army scientists. But of all the techniques explored by the Agency in its multimillion-dollar twenty-five-year quest to conquer the human mind, none received as much attention or was embraced with such enthusiasm as LSD-25. For a time C.I.A personnel were completely infatuated with the hallucinogen. Those who first tested LSD in the early 1950's were convinced that it would revolutionize the cloak-and-dagger trade. 

As we studied the documents more closely, certain shapes and patterns came alive to us. We began to get a sense of the internal dynamics of the ClA's secret LSD program and how it evolved over the years. The story that emerged was far more complex and rich in detail than the disconnected smattering of information that had surfaced in various press reports and government probes. We were able to understand what the spies were looking for when they first got into LSD, what happened during the initial phase of experimentation, how their attitude changed as they tested the drug on themselves and their associates, and how it was ultimately used in covert operations.

The central irony of LSD is that it has been used both as a weapon and a sacrament, a mind control drug and a mind-expanding chemical. Each of these possibilities generated a unique history: a covert history, on the one hand, rooted in C.I.A and military experimentation with hallucinogens, and a grassroots history of the drug counterculture that exploded into prominence in the 1960s. At key points the two histories converge and overlap, forming an interface between the C.l.A's secret drug programs and the rise and fall of the psychedelic movement. 

The LSD story is inseparable from the cherished hopes and shattered illusions of the sixties generation. In many ways it provides a key for understanding what happened during that turbulent era, when political and cultural revolution erupted with full fury. And yet, as the decade drew to a close, the youth movement suddenly collapsed and bottomed out, leaving a trail of unanswered questions in its wake. Only by examining both sides of the psychedelic saga of the C.I.A's mind control program and the drug subculture can we grasp the true nature of LSD-25 and discern what effect this powerful chemical agent had on the social upheavals of the 1960's

Part One: 

The Roots of Psychedelia 

1 

In The Beginning There Was Madness  

The Truth Seekers

In the spring of 1942 General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S), the C.l.A's wartime predecessor, assembled a half-dozen prestigious American scientists and asked them to undertake a top-secret research program. Their mission, Donovan explained, was to develop a speech-inducing drug for use in intelligence interrogations. He insisted that the need for such a weapon was so acute as to warrant any and every attempt to find it. 

The use of drugs by secret agents had long been a part of cloak-and-dagger folklore, but this would be the first concerted attempt on the part of an American espionage organization to modify human behavior through chemical means. "We were not afraid to try things that had never been done before," asserted Donovan, who was known for his freewheeling and unconventional approach to the spy trade. The O.S.S chief pressed his associates to come up with a substance that could break down the psychological defenses of enemy spies and P.O.W's, thereby causing an uninhibited disclosure of classified information. Such a drug would also be useful for screening O.S.S personnel in order to identify German sympathizers, double agents, and potential misfits. 

Dr. Windfred Overhulser(L), superintendent of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, was appointed chairman of the research committee. Other members included Dr. Edward Strecker, then president of the American Psychiatric Association, and Harry J. Anslinger(R), head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The committee surveyed and rejected numerous drugs, including alcohol, barbiturates, and caffeine. Peyote and scopolamine were also tested, but the visions produced by these substances interfered with the interrogation process. Eventually marijuana was chosen as the most likely candidate for a speech-inducing agent. 

O.S.S scientists created a highly potent extract of cannabis, and through a process known as esterification a clear and viscous liquid was obtained. The final product had no color, odor, or taste. It would be nearly impossible to detect when administered surreptitiously, which is exactly what the spies intended to do. "There is no reason to believe that any other nation or group is familiar with the preparation of this particular drug," stated a once classified O.S.S document. Henceforth the O.S.S referred to the marijuana extract as "TD" a rather transparent cover for "Truth Drug." 

Various ways of administering TD were tried on witting and unwitting subjects. O.S.S operatives found that the medicated goo could "be injected into any type of food, such as mashed potatoes, butter, salad dressing, or in such things as candy." Another scheme relied on using facial tissues impregnated with the drug. But these methods had their drawbacks. What if someone had a particularly ravenous appetite? Too much TD could knock a subject out and render him useless for interrogation. The O.S.S eventually determined that the best approach involved the use of a hypodermic syringe to inject a diluted TD solution into a cigarette or cigar. After smoking such an item, the subject would get suitably stoned, at which point a skillful interrogator would move in and try to get him to spill the beans.

The effects of TD were described in an O.S.S report: "TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern an individual's discretion and caution. It accentuates the senses and makes manifest any strong characteristics of the individual. Sexual inhibitions are lowered, and the sense of humor is accentuated to the point where any statement or situation can become extremely funny to the subject. On the other hand, a person's unpleasant characteristics may also be heightened. It may be stated that, generally speaking, the reaction will be one of great loquacity and hilarity." * 

* This was a rather mild and playful assessment of the effects of marijuana compared to the public rantings of Harry Anslinger, the narcotics chief who orchestrated an unrelenting media campaign against "the killer weed.

After testing TD on themselves, their associates, and US military personnel, O.S.S agents utilized the drug operationally, although on a limited basis. The results were mixed. In certain instances TD subjects felt a driving necessity "to discuss psychologically charged topics. Whatever the individual is trying to withhold will be forced to the top of his subconscious mind." But there were also those who experienced "toxic reactions" better known in latter-day lingo as "bummers." One unwitting doper became irritable and threatening and complained of feeling like he was "two different people." The peculiar nature of his symptoms precluded any attempt to question him. 

That was how it went, from one extreme to the other. At times TD seemed to stimulate "a rush of talk"; on other occasions people got paranoid and didn't say a word. The lack of consistency proved to be a major stumbling block, and "Donovan's dreamers," as his enthusiastic O.S.S staffers have been called, reluctantly weaned themselves from their reefer madness. A handwritten comment in the margins of an O.S.S document summed up their stoned escapades: "The drug defies all but the most expert and searching analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." 

After the war, the CIA and the military picked up where the O.S.S had left off in the secret search for a truth serum. The navy took the lead when it initiated Project CHATTER in 1947, the same year the CIA was formed. Described as an "offensive" program, CHATTER was supposed to devise means of obtaining information from people independent of their volition but without physical duress. Toward this end Dr. Charles Savage conducted experiments with mescaline (a semi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus that produces hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD) at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But these studies, which involved animal as well as human subjects, did not yield an effective truth serum, and CHATTER was terminated in 1953. 

The navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation agent when American investigators learned of mind control experiments carried out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. After administering the hallucinogen to thirty prisoners, the Nazis concluded that it was "impossible to impose one's will on another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given." But the drug still afforded certain advantages to SS interrogators, who were consistently able to draw "even the most intimate secrets from the (subject] when questions were cleverly put." Not surprisingly, "sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case."

The mescaline experiments at Dachau were described in a lengthy report by the US Naval Technical Mission, which swept across Europe in search of every scrap of industrial material and scientific data that could be garnered from the fallen Reich. This mission set the stage for the wholesale importation of more than six hundred top Nazi scientists under the auspices of Project Paperclip, which the CIA supervised during the early years of the Cold War. Among those who emigrated to the US in such a fashion was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the German scientist whose chief subordinates (Dr. Sigmund Ruff and Dr. Sigmund Rascher) were directly involved in "aviation medicine" experiments at Dachau, which included the mescaline studies.* Despite recurring allegations that he sanctioned medical atrocities during the war, Strughold settled in Texas and became an important figure in America's space program. After Wernher von Braun, he was the top Nazi scientist employed by the American government, and he was subsequently hailed by NASA as the "father of space medicine."

* Strughold's subordinates injected Dachau inmates with gasoline, crushed them to death in high-altitude pressure chambers, shot them so that potential blood coagulants could be tested on their wounds, forced them to stand naked in subfreezing temperatures or immersed them in tubs of ice water to see how long it would take before they died. As Charles R. Allen, Jr., author of From Hitler to Uncle Sam: How American Intelligence Used Nazi War Criminals, stated in an article on Strughold, "There was a clear pattern to the various experiments with poison, gas, deliberate infestation of victims with malaria, typhus and other virulencies causing instant or prolonged anguishing to death. Whether the tests concerned high-altitude, freezing or the potability of sea water; or the shooting of 'volunteers' with gas bullets of the patent purpose of the entire body of tests conducted at Dachau was to enhance the effectiveness of Hitler's criminal warfare against humanity." 

After the war an Allied tribunal convened at Nuremberg sentenced a number of Nazi doctors to death for their role in medical atrocities at Dachau and other concentration camps. The judges at Nuremberg subsequently put forward a code of ethics for scientific research, which stipulated that full voluntary consent must be obtained from all research subjects and experiments should yield positive results for the benefit of society that could not be obtained in any other way. 

Although Dr. Strughold escaped prosecution, his name later appeared on a master list of "Reported Nazi War Criminals Residing in the United States" compiled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.

The CIA, meanwhile, had launched an intensive research effort geared toward developing "special" interrogation techniques. Two methods showed promise in the late 1940S. The first involved narcohypnosis, in which a CIA psychiatrist attempted to induce a trance state after administering a mild sedative. A second technique involved a combination of two different drugs with contradictory effects. A heavy dose of barbiturates was given to knock the subject out, and then he received an injection of a stimulant, usually some type of amphetamine. As he started to come out of a somnambulant state, he would reach a certain ineffable point prior to becoming fully conscious. Described in CIA documents as "the twilight zone," this groggy condition was considered optimal for interrogation. 

CIA doctors attempted to extend the stupor limbo as long as possible. In order to maintain the delicate balance between consciousness and unconsciousness, an intravenous hookup was inserted in both the subject's arms. One set of works contained a downer, the other an upper (the classic "goofball" effect); with a mere flick of the finger an interrogator could regulate the flow of chemicals. The idea was to produce a "push",a sudden outpouring of thoughts, emotions, confidences, and whatnot. Along this line various combinations were tested: Seconal and Dexedrine; Pentothal and Desoxyn; and depending on the whim of the spy in charge, some marijuana (the old O.S.S stand-by, which the CIA referred to as "sugar") might be thrown in for good measure.

The goofball approach was not a precision science. There were no strictly prescribed rules or operating procedures regarding what drugs should be employed in a given situation. The CIA interrogators were left to their own devices, and a certain degree of recklessness was perhaps inevitable. In one case, a group of CIA experts hastily drafted a memo after reviewing a report prepared by one of the Agency's special interrogation teams. The medical consultants pointed out that "the amounts of scopolamine administered were extremely heavy." They also noted that the best results were obtained when two or at most three different chemicals were used in a session. In this case, however, heavy dosages of scopolamine were administered along with thiamine, sodium luminal, atropine sulfate, sodium pentothal and caffeine sulfate. One of the ClA's professional consultants in "H" techniques also questioned why hypnosis was attempted "after a long and continuous use of chemicals, after the subject had vomited, and after apparently a maximum tolerance point had been reached with the chemicals." Everyone who read the interrogation report agreed that hypnosis was useless, if not impossible, under such conditions. Nevertheless, the memo concluded by reaffirming that "no criticism is intended whatsoever" and that "the choice of operating weapons" must be left to the agents in the field. 

Despite the potential hazards and tenuousness of the procedure as a whole, special interrogations were strongly endorsed by Agency officials. A CIA document dated November 26, 1951, announced, "We're now convinced that we can maintain a subject in a controlled state for a much longer period of time than we heretofore had believed possible. Furthermore, we feel that by use of certain chemicals or combinations, we can, in a very high percentage of cases, produce relevant information." Although these techniques were still considered experimental, the prevailing opinion among members of the special interrogation teams was that there had been enough experiments "to justify giving the green light to operational use of the techniques." "There will be many a failure," a CIA scientist acknowledged, but he was quick to stress that "every success with this method will be pure gravy." *

* Obtaining information was only one aspect of the interrogation process. Even when CIA officers were able to loosen a subject's tongue, other problems remained, such as how to insure that he would not remember the events that transpired during his stint in the twilight zone. "If by some means we could create a perfect and thoroughly controlled amnesia," a CIA agent declared, "the matter would be simplified, but amnesia is not certain and cannot be guaranteed." 

Certain drugs were known to produce amnesia for a matter of hours or days, but this was not sufficient. The CIA also had access to chemicals capable of causing permanent brain damage, but long-term amnesia drugs that would be completely reversible over a twelve-to-eighteen-month period were not available. 

This was quite an inconvenience as far as the national security experts were concerned. The question of what to do with subjects of special interrogation sessionsóthe "disposal problem"óprovoked a heated debate inside the Company. The immediate objective was to find a way of holding them "in maximum custody until either operations have progressed to the point where their knowledge is no longer highly sensitive, or the knowledge they possess in general will be of no use to the enemy." 

One possibility suggested in CIA documents was to render a person incoherent through psychological and/or pharmacological attack and then have him placed in a mental institution. An unspecified number of subjects were committed involuntarily to insane asylums, including some who were described in CIA memoranda as mentally sound. (This practice, which began in the early 1950S and continued at least until the mid-1960s, invites obvious comparisons to the incarceration of Russian dissidents in psychiatric hospitals because of their political views.) Another option involved "termination with extreme prejudice" (CIA lingo for assassination), but this was hardly an ideal solution in all situations.

In an effort to expand its research program the CIA contacted academics and other outside experts who specialized in areas of mutual interest. Liaison was established with the research sections of police departments and criminology laboratories; medical practitioners, professional hypnotists, and psychiatrists were brought on as paid consultants; and various branches of the military provided assistance. Oftentimes these arrangements involved a cover to conceal the ClA's interest in behavior modification. With the bureaucratic apparatus already in place, the ClA's mind control efforts were integrated into a single project under the code name BLUEBIRD. Due to the extreme sensitivity of the project, the usual channels of authorization were bypassed; instead of going through the Projects Review Committee, the proposal for BLUEBIRD was submitted directly to CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who authorized the use of unvouchered funds to finance the hush-hush undertaking.* With this seal of approval the ClA's first major drug testing program was officially hatched. BLUEBIRD was to remain a carefully guarded secret, for if word of the program leaked out it would have been a great embarrassment and a detriment to American intelligence. As one CIA document put it, BLUEBIRD material was "not fit for public consumption"

*In one CIA document the question of disposal was discussed under the heading "LOBOTOMY and Related Operations." A number of individuals who were fully cognizant of the disposal problem suggested that lobotomy "might be the answer or at least a partial solution." They argued that "lobotomy would create a person 'who no longer cared,' who had lost all initiative and drive, whose allegiance to ideal or motivating factors no longer existed, and who would probably have, if not complete amnesia, at least a fuzzy or spotty memory for recent and past events." They also pointed out "that certain lobotomy types of operations were simple, quickly performed and not too dangerous." 

Along this line a group of CIA scientists entertained the possibility of using an "icepick" lobotomy to render an individual harmless "from a security point of view." A memo dated February 7, 1952, notes that on numerous occasions after using electroshock to produce anesthesia, an unidentified surgeon in the Washington, DC, area performed an operation that involved destroying brain tissue by piercing the skull just above the eye with a fine surgical icepick. This type of psychosurgery had certain advantages, in that it resulted in "nervous confusional and amnesia effects" without leaving a "tell-tale scar." The CIA also experimented with brain surgery via UHF sound waves and at one point during the early 1950S attempted to create a microwave "amnesia beam" that would destroy memory neurons. 

Not all CIA officials, however, favored using lobotomy as a disposal technique. Potential drawbacks were cited: surgical risk was great, brain damage could be extensive, and such an operation, if faulty, could produce a "vegetable." Moreover, if the enemy discovered that the CIA was mutilating people's brains for the sake of national security, this information could be exploited as a propaganda weapon. Other CIA officials opposed lobotomy because it was blatantly inhumane and violated "all concepts of 'fair- play' and the American way of life and [thus] it could never be officially [emphasis added] sanctioned or supported." A CIA document dated March 3, 1952, states that while "the USSR and its satellites are capable of any conceivable atrocity against human beings to attain what they think are their ends, we should notówith our high regard for human lifeóuse these techniques unless by using them we save the lives of our own people and the situation is highly critical to the nation's safety." 

In the early 1950s, at least $100,000 was designated for a proposed research project geared toward developing "neuro-surgical techniques for Agency interest." It is not known whether this research was ever carried out.

From the outset the C.l.A's mind control program had an explicit domestic angle. A memo dated July 13, 1951, described the Agency's mind-bending efforts as "broad and comprehensive, involving both domestic and overseas activities, and taking into consideration the programs and objectives of other departments, principally the military services." BLUEBIRD activities were designed to create an "exploitable alteration of personality" in selected individuals; specific targets included "potential agents, defectors, refugees, POWs," and a vague category of "others." A number of units within the CIA participated in this endeavor, including the Inspection and Security Staff (the forerunner of the Office of Security), which assumed overall responsibility for running the program and dispatching the special interrogation teams. Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the chairman of the BLUEBIRD steering committee, consistently pushed for a more reliable speech-inducing substance. By the time BLUEBIRD evolved into Operation ARTICHOKE (the formal change in code names occurred in August 1951), Security officials were still searching for the magic technique the deus ex machina that would guarantee surefire results. 

The whole concept of a truth drug was a bit far fetched to begin with. It presupposed that there was a way to chemically bypass the mind's censor and turn the psyche inside out, unleashing a profusion of buried secrets, and that surely some approximation of "truth" would emerge amidst all the personal debris. In this respect the C.l.A's quest resembled a skewed version of a familiar mythological theme from which such images as the Philosopher's Stone and the Fountain of Youth derive that through touching or ingesting something one can acquire wisdom, immortality, or eternal peace. It is more than a bit ironic that the biblical inscription on the marble wall of the main lobby at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, reads, "And ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free." 

The freewheeling atmosphere that prevailed during the C.l.A's early years encouraged an "anything goes" attitude among researchers associated with the mind control program. This was before the Agency's bureaucratic arteries began to harden, and those who participated in Operation ARTICHOKE were intent on leaving no stone unturned in an effort to deliver the ultimate truth drug. A number of agents were sent on fact-finding missions to all comers of the globe to procure samples of rare herbs and botanicals. The results of one such trip were recorded in a heavily deleted document entitled "Exploration of Potential Plant Resources in the Caribbean Region." Among the numerous items mentioned in this report, a few were particularly intriguing. A plant called a "stupid bush," characterized by the CIA as a psychogenic agent and a pernicious weed, was said to proliferate in Puerto Rico and Saint Thomas. Its effects were shrouded in mystery. An "information bush" was also discovered. This shrub stumped CIA experts, who were at a loss to pin down its properties. The "information bush" was listed as a psychogenic agent followed by a lingering question mark. What type of information-prophetic or mundane might be evoked by this unusual herb was unclear. Nor was it known whether the "information bush" could be used as an antidote to the "stupid bush" or vice versa.

The CIA studied a veritable pharmacopoeia of drugs with the hope of achieving a breakthrough. At one point during the early 1950's Uncle Sam's secret agents viewed cocaine as a potential truth serum. "Cocaine's general effects have been somewhat neglected," noted an astute researcher. Whereupon tests were conducted that enabled the CIA to determine that the precious powder "will produce elation, talkativeness, etc." when administered by injection. "Larger doses," according to a previously classified document, "may cause fearfulness and alarming hallucinations." The document goes on to report that cocaine "counteracts the catatonia of catatonic schizophrenics" and concludes with the recommendation that the drug be studied further. 

A number of cocaine derivatives were also investigated from an interrogation standpoint. Procaine, a synthetic analogue, was tested on mental patients and the results were intriguing. When injected into the frontal lobes of the brain through trephine holes in the skull, the drug "produced free and spontaneous speech within two days in mute schizophrenics." This procedure was rejected as "too surgical for our use." Nevertheless, according to a CIA pharmacologist, "it is possible that such a drug could be gotten into the general circulation of subject without surgery, hypodermic or feeding." He suggested a method known as iontophoresis, which involves using an electric current to transfer the ions of a chosen medicament into the tissues of the body. 

The C.l.A's infatuation with cocaine was short-lived. It may have titillated the nostrils of more than a few spies and produced some heady speculation, but after the initial inspiration it was back to square one. Perhaps their expectations were too high for any drug to accommodate. Or maybe a new approach to the problem was required. 

The search for an effective interrogation technique eventually led to heroin. Not the heroin that ex-Nazi pilots under CIA contract smuggled out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia on CIA proprietary airlines during the late 1940's and early 1950's; nor the heroin that was pumped into America's black and brown ghettos after passing through contraband networks controlled by mobsters who moonlighted as CIA hitmen. The Agency's involvement in worldwide heroin traffic, which has been well documented in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy, went far beyond the scope of Operation ARTICHOKE, which was primarily concerned with eliciting information from recalcitrant subjects. However, ARTICHOKE scientists did see possible advantages in heroin as a mind control drug. According to a CIA document dated April 26, 1952, heroin was "frequently used by police and intelligence officers on a routine basis [emphasis added]." The cold turkey theory of interrogation: CIA operatives determined that heroin and other habit-forming substances "can be useful in reverse because of the stresses produced when they are withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use."

Enter LSD 

It was with the hope of finding the long-sought miracle drug that CIA investigators first began to dabble with LSD-25 in the early 1950's. At the time very little was known about the hallucinogen, even in scientific circles. Dr. Wemer Stoll, the son of Sandoz president Arthur Stoll and a colleague of Albert Hermann's, was the first person to investigate the psychological properties of LSD. The resuits of his study were presented in the Swiss Archives of Neurology in 1947. Stoll reported that LSD produced disturbances in perception, hallucinations, and acceleration in thinking; moreover, the drug was found to blunt the usual suspiciousness of schizophrenic patients. No unfavorable aftereffects were described. Two years later in the same journal Stoll contributed a second report entitled "A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts." 

The fact that LSD caused hallucinations should not have been a total surprise to the scientific community. Sandoz first became interested in ergot, the natural source of lysergic acid, because of numerous stories passed down through the ages. The rye fungus had a mysterious and contradictory reputation. In China and parts of the Mideast it was thought to possess medicinal qualities, and certain scholars believe that it may have been used in sacred rites in ancient Greece. In other parts of Europe, however, the same fungus was associated with the horrible malady known as St. Anthony's Fire, which struck periodically like the plague. Medieval chronicles tell of villages and towns where nearly everyone went mad for a few days after ergot-diseased rye was unknowingly milled into flour and baked as bread. Men were afflicted with gangrenous limbs that looked like blackened stumps, and pregnant women miscarried. Even in modem times there have been reports of ergot-related epidemics.* 

* In 1951 hundreds of respectable citizens in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small French village, went completely berserk one evening. Some of the town's leading citizens jumped from windows into the Rhone. Others ran through the streets screaming about being chased by lions, tigers, and "bandits with donkey ears." Many died, and those who survived suffered strange aftereffects for weeks. In his book The Day of St. Anthony's File, John C. Fuller attributes this bizarre outbreak to rye flour contaminated with ergot.

The CIA inherited this ambiguous legacy when it embraced LSD as a mind control drug. An ARTICHOKE document dated October 21, 1951, indicates that acid was tested initially as part of a pilot study of the effects of various chemicals "on the conscious suppression of experimental or non-threat secrets." In addition to lysergic acid this particular survey covered a wide range of substances, including morphine, ether, Benzedrine, ethyl alcohol, and mescaline. "There is no question," noted the author of this report, "that drugs are already on hand (and new ones are being produced) that can destroy integrity and make indiscreet the most dependable individual." The report concluded by recommending that LSD be critically tested "under threat conditions beyond the scope of civilian experimentation." POWs, federal prisoners, and Security officers were mentioned as possible candidates for these field experiments. 

In another study designed to ascertain optimal dosage levels for interrogation sessions, a CIA psychiatrist administered LSD to "at least twelve human subjects of not too high mentality." At the outset the subjects were "told only that a new drug was being tested and promised that nothing serious or dangerous would happen to them. During the intoxication they realized something was happening, but were never told exactly what." A dosage range of 100 to 150 micrograms was finally selected, and the Agency proceeded to test the drug in mock interrogation trials.

Initial reports seemed promising. In one instance LSD was given to an officer who had been instructed not to reveal "a significant military secret." When questioned, however, "he gave all the details of the secret  and after the effects of the LSD had worn off, the officer had no knowledge of revealing the information (complete amnesia)." Favorable reports kept coming in, and when this phase of experimentation was completed, the C.l.A's Office of Scientific Intelligence (O.S.I) prepared a lengthy memorandum entitled "Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare." LSD was said to be useful "for eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during interrogation." Moreover, the data on hand suggested that LSD might help in reviving memories of past experiences. 

It almost seemed too good to be true a drug that unearthed secrets buried deep in the unconscious mind but also caused amnesia during the effective period. The implications were downright astounding. Soon the entire CIA hierarchy was head over heels as news of what appeared to be a major breakthrough sent shock waves rippling through headquarters. (C. P. Snow once said, "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head.") For years they had searched, and now they were on the verge of finding the Holy Grail of the cloak-and-dagger trade. As one CIA officer recalled, "We had thought at first that this was the secret that was going to unlock the universe." 

But the sense of elation did not last long. As the secret research progressed, the CIA ran into problems. Eventually they came to recognize that LSD was not really a truth serum in the classical sense. Accurate information could not always be obtained from people under the influence of LSD because it induced a "marked anxiety and loss of reality contact." Those who received unwitting doses experienced an intense distortion of time, place, and body image, frequently culminating in full-blown paranoid reactions. The bizarre hallucinations caused by the drug often proved more of a hindrance than an aid to the interrogation process. There was always the risk, for example, that an enemy spy who started to trip out would realize he'd been drugged. This could make him overly suspicious and taciturn to the point of clamming up entirely. 

There were other pitfalls that made the situation even more precarious from an interrogation standpoint. While anxiety was the predominant characteristic displayed during LSD sessions, some people experienced delusions of grandeur and omnipotence. An entire operation might backfire if someone had an ecstatic or transcendental experience and became convinced that he could defy his interrogators indefinitely. And then there was the question of amnesia, which was not as cut-and-dried as first supposed. Everyone agreed that a person would probably have a difficult time recalling exactly what happened while he was high on LSD, but that didn't mean his mind would be completely blank. While the drug might distort memory to some degree, it did not destroy it. 

When CIA scientists tested a drug for speech-inducing purposes and found that it didn't work, they usually put it aside and tried something else. But such was not the case with LSD. Although early reports proved overoptimistic, the Agency was not about to discard such a powerful and unusual substance simply because it did not live up to its original expectations. They had to shift gears. A reassessment of the strategic implications of LSD was necessary. If, strictly speaking, LSD was not a reliable truth drug, then how else could it be used?

CIA researchers were intrigued by this new chemical, but they didn't quite know what to make of it. LSD was significantly different from anything else they knew about. "The most fascinating thing about it," a CIA psychologist recalled, "was that such minute quantities had such a terrific effect." Mere micrograms could create "serious mental confusion  and render the mind temporarily susceptible to suggestion." Moreover, the drug was colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and therefore easily concealed in food and beverage. But it was hard to predict the response to LSD. On certain occasions acid seemed to cause an uninhibited disclosure of information, but oftentimes the overwhelming anxiety experienced by the subject obstructed the interrogation process. And there were unexplainable mood swingsó from total panic to boundless bliss-out. How could one drug produce such extreme and contradictory reactions? It didn't make sense. 

As research continued, the situation became even more perplexing. At one point a group of Security officers did an about-face and suggested that acid might best be employed as an anti-interrogation substance: "Since information obtained from a person in a psychotic state would be unrealistic, bizarre, and extremely difficult to assess, the self-administration of LSD-25, which is effective in minute doses, might in special circumstances offer an operative temporary protection against interrogation [emphasis added]." 

This proposal was somewhat akin to a suicide pill scenario. Secret agents would be equipped with micro-pellets of LSD to take on dangerous assignments. If they fell into enemy hands and were about to be interrogated, they could pop a tab of acid as a preventive measure and babble gibberish. Obviously this idea was impractical, but it showed just how confused the ClA's top scientists were about LSD. First they thought it was a truth serum, then a lie serum, and for a while they didn't know what to think. 

To make matters worse, there was a great deal of concern within the Agency that the Soviets and the Red Chinese might also have designs on LSD as an espionage weapon. A survey conducted by the Office of Scientific Intelligence noted that ergot was a commercial product in numerous Eastern Bloc countries. The enigmatic fungus also flourished in the Soviet Union, but Russian ergot had not yet appeared in foreign markets. Could this mean the Soviets were hoarding their supplies? Since information on the chemical structure of LSD was available in scientific journals as early as 1947, the Russians might have been stockpiling raw ergot in order to convert it into a mind control weapon. "Although no Soviet data are available on LSD-25," the OSI study concluded, "it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and are capable of producing it at any time."

Were the Russians really into acid? "I'm sure they were," asserted John Gittlinger, one of the C.l.A's leading psychologists during the Cold War, "but if you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of it." * While hard evidence of a Soviet LSD connection was lacking, the CIA wasn't about to take any chances. What would happen, for example, if an American spy was caught and dosed by the Commies? The CIA realized that an adversary intelligence service could employ LSD "to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish druginduced psychosis from actual insanity." The only way to be sure that an operative would not freak out under such circumstances would be to give him a taste of LSD (a mind control vaccine?) before he was sent on a sensitive overseas mission. Such a person would know that the effects of the drug were transitory and would therefore be in a better position to handle the experience. CIA documents actually refer to agents who were familiar with LSD as "enlightened operatives." 

* Internal CIA memorandum dispute the oft-repeated allegation that the Soviet Union and her satellites, including Red China, were engaged in unorthodox methods of altering human behavior. According to a CIA document dated January 14, 1953, "Apparently their major emphasis is on the development of specially trained teams for obtaining information without the use of narcotics, hypnosis, or special mechanical devices [emphasis added]." A memo issued the next day by the Ad Hoc Medical Study Group admitted that "the present state of knowledge indicates little, if any, threat to National Security through 'special interrogation' techniques or agents." 

Along this line. Security officials proposed that LSD be administered to CIA trainee volunteers. Such a procedure would clearly demonstrate to select individuals the effects of hallucinogenic substances upon themselves and their associates. Furthermore, it would provide an opportunity to screen Agency personnel for "anxiety proneness"; those who couldn't pass the acid test would be excluded from certain critical assignments. This suggestion was well received by the ARTICHOKE steering committee, although the representative from the ClA's Medical Office felt that the test should not be "confined merely to male volunteer trainee personnel, but that it should be broadened to include all components of the Agency." According to a CIA document dated November 19, 1953, the Project Committee "verbally concurred in this recommendation." 

During the next few years numerous CIA agents tried LSD. Some used the drug on repeated occasions. How did their firsthand experience with acid affect their personalities? How did it affect their attitude toward their workóparticularly those who were directly involved in mind control research? What impact did it have on the program as a whole?+

+ At the very least, one suspects that a firsthand encounter with LSD would have made the clandestine mentality more receptive to the possibility of ESP, subliminal perception, and other phenomena associated with altered states. The CIA ís interest in parapsychology dates back to the late 1940's. A handwritten memo of the period suggests that "hypnotists and telepathists" be contacted as professional consultants on an exploratory basis, but this proposal was initially rejected. It was not until 1952, after the CIA got heavily involved with LSD, that the Agency began funding ESP research. 

While parapsychology has long been ridiculed by the scientific establishment, the CIA seriously entertained the notion that such phenomena might be highly significant for the spy trade. The Agency hypothesized that if a number of people in the US were found to have a high ESP capacity, their talent could be assigned to specific intelligence problems. In 1952 the CIA initiated an extensive program involving "the search for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP performance." The Office of Security, which ran the ARTICHOKE project, was urged to follow "all leads on individuals reported to have true clairvoyant powers" so as to be able to subject their claims to "rigorous scientific investigation." 

Along this line the CIA began infiltrating sÈances and occult gatherings. A memo dated April 9, 1953, refers to a domesticóand therefore illegalóoperation that required the "planting of a very specialized observer" at a sÈance in order to obtain "a broad surveillance of all individuals attending the meetings."

At the outset of the C.l.A's behavior control endeavors the main emphasis was on speech-inducing drugs. But when acid entered the scene, the entire program assumed a more aggressive posture. The ClA's turned-on strategists came to believe that mind control techniques could be applied to a wide range of operations above and beyond the strict category of "special interrogation." It was almost as if LSD blew the Agency's collective mind-set or was it mind-rut? With acid acting as a catalyst, the whole idea of what could be done with a drug or drugs in general, was suddenly transformed. Soon a perfect compound was envisioned for every conceivable circumstance: there would be smart shots, memory erasers, "anti vitamins," knock-out drops, "aphrodisiacs for operational use," drugs that caused "headache clusters" or uncontrollable twitching, drugs that could induce cancer, a stroke or a heart attack without leaving a trace as to the source of the ailment. There were chemicals to make a drunk man sober and a sober man as drunk as a fish. Even a "recruitment pill" was contemplated. What's more, according to a document dated May 5, 1955, the CIA placed a high priority on the development of a drug "which will produce 'pure euphoria' with no subsequent letdown." 

This is not to suggest that the CIA had given up on LSD. On the contrary, after grappling with the drug for a number of years, the Agency devised new methods of interrogation based on the "far-out" possibilities of this mind-altering substance. When employed as a third-degree tactic, acid enabled the CIA to approach a hostile subject with a great deal of leverage. CIA operatives realized that intense mental confusion could be produced by deliberately attacking a person along psychological lines. Of all the chemicals that caused mental derangement, none was as powerful as LSD. Acid not only made people extremely anxious, it also broke down the character defenses for handling anxiety. A skillful interrogator could exploit this vulnerability by threatening to keep an unwitting subject in a tripped-out state indefinitely unless he spilled the beans. This tactic often proved successful where others had failed. CIA documents indicate that LSD was employed as an aid to interrogation on an operational basis from the mid-1950's through the early 1960's.

The CIA also sought to develop techniques whereby the ESP powers of a group of psychics could be used "to produce factual information that could not be obtained in any other way." If it were possible "to identify the thought of another person several hundred miles away," a CIA scientist explained, "the adaptation to the practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not give serious difficulty." Moreover, "everything that adds anything to our understanding of what is taking place in ESP is likely to give us advantage in the problem of use and control." 

In a rather bizarre twist, during the late 1960s the CIA experimented with mediums in an effort to contact (and debrief?) dead agents. These attempts, according to Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official, were part of a larger effort to harness psychic powers for various intelligence-related missions that included utilizing clairvoyants to divine the intentions of the Kremlin leadership. Secret ESP research is still being conducted, although CIA spokesmen refuse to comment on the nature of these experiments.

Laboratories of the State 

When the CIA first became interested in LSD, only a handful of scientists in the United States were engaged in hallucinogenic drug research. At the time there was little private or public support for this relatively new field of experimental psychiatry, and no one had undertaken a systematic investigation of LSD. The C.l.A's mind control specialists sensed a golden opportunity in the making. With a sizable treasure chest at their disposal they were in a position to boost the careers of scientists whose skill and expertise would be of maximum benefit to the CIA. Almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence as money started pouring through ClA-linked conduits or "cutouts" such as the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. 

Among those who benefited from the CIA's largesse was Dr. Max Rinkel,(L) the first person to bring LSD to the United States. In 1949 Rinkel, a research psychiatrist, obtained a supply of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and gave the drug to his partner, Dr. Robert Hyde,(R) who took the first acid trip in the Western Hemisphere. Rinkel and Hyde went on to organize an LSD study at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a pioneering mental health clinic affiliated with Harvard University. They tested the drug on one hundred volunteers and reported the initial findings in May 1950 (nearly three years before the CIA began funding their work) at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Rinkel announced that LSD produced "a. transitory psychotic disturbance" in normal subjects. This was highly significant, for it raised the possibility that mental disorders could be studied objectively in a controlled experimental setting. 

Rinkel's hypothesis was supported and expanded upon during the same forum by Dr. Paul Hoch, a prominent psychiatrist who would also proffer his services to the CIA in the years ahead. Hoch reported that the symptoms produced by LSD, mescaline and related drugs were similar to those of schizophrenia: intensity of color perception, hallucinations, depersonalization, intense anxiety, paranoia, and in some cases catatonic manifestations. As Hoch put it, "LSD and Mescaline disorganize the psychic integration of the individual." He believed that the medical profession was fortunate to have access to these substances, for now it would be possible to reconstruct temporary or "model" psychoses in the laboratory. LSD was considered an exceptional research tool in that the subject could provide a detailed description of his experience while he was under the influence of the drug. It was hoped that careful analysis of these data would shed new light on schizophrenia and other enigmatic mental diseases. 

Hoch's landmark thesis that LSD was a "psychotomimetic" or "madness-mimicking" agent caused a sensation in scientific circles and led to several important and stimulating theories regarding the biochemical basis of schizophrenia. This in turn sparked an upsurge of interest in brain chemistry and opened new vistas in the field of experimental psychiatry. In light of the extremely high potency of LSD, it seemed completely plausible that infinitesimal traces of a psychoactive substance produced through metabolic dysfunction by the human organism might cause psychotic disturbances. Conversely, attempts to alleviate a "lysergic psychosis" might point the way toward curing schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness.*

* While the miracle cure never panned out, it is worth noting that Thorazine was found to mollify an LSD reaction and subsequently became a standard drug for controlling patients in mental asylums and prisons

As it turned out, the model psychosis concept dovetailed particularly well with the secret schemes of the CIA, which also viewed LSD in terms of its ability to blow minds and make people crazy. Thus it is not surprising that the CIA chose to invest in men like Rinkel and Hoch. Most scientists were flattered by the government's interest in their research, and they were eager to assist the CIA in its attempt to unravel the riddle of LSD. This was, after all, the Cold War, and one did not have to be a blue-ribbon hawk or a hard-liner to work in tandem with American intelligence. 

In the early 1950's the CIA approached Dr. Nick Bercel, a psychiatrist who maintained a private practice in Los Angeles. Bercel was one of the first people in the United States to work with LSD, and the CIA asked him to consider a haunting proposition. What would happen if the Russians put LSD in the water supply of a large American city? A skillful saboteur could carry enough acid in his coat pocket to turn an entire metropolis into a loony bin, assuming he found a way to distribute it equally. In light of this frightening prospect, would Bercel render a patriotic service by calculating exactly how much LSD would be required to contaminate the water supply of Los Angeles? Bercel consented, and that evening he dissolved a tiny amount of acid in a glass of tap water, only to discover that the chlorine neutralized the drug. "Don't worry," he told his CIA contact, "it won't work." 

The Agency took this as a mandate, and another version of LSD was eventually concocted to overcome this drawback. A CIA document states accordingly, "If the concept of contaminating a city's water supply seems, or in actual fact, is found to be far-fetched (this is by no means certain), there is still the possibility of contaminating, say, the water supply of a bomber base or, more easily still, that of a battleship . Our current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce hysteria (unaccountable laughing, anxiety, terror) . It requires little imagination to realize what the consequences might be if a battleship's crew were so affected." 

The CIA never got in touch with Bercel again, but they monitored his research reports in various medical journals. When Bercel gave LSD to spiders, they spun perfectly symmetrical webs. Animal studies also showed that cats cringed before untreated mice, and fish that normally swam close to the bottom of a water tank hovered near the top. In another experiment Dr. Louis Joylon ("Jolly") West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma, injected an elephant with a massive dose of 300,000 micrograms. Dr. West, a CIA contract employee and an avid believer in the notion that hallucinogens were psychotomimetic agents, was trying to duplicate the periodic "rut" madness that overtakes male elephants for about one week each year. But the animal did not experience a model elephant psychosis; it just keeled over and remained in a motionless stupor. In attempting to revive the elephant, West administered a combination of drugs that ended up killing the poor beast. 

Research on human subjects showed that LSD lodged primarily in the liver, spleen, and kidneys. Only a tiny amount (.01%) of the original dose entered the brain, and it only remained there for twenty minutes. This was a most curious finding, as the effect of LSD was not evident until the drug had disappeared entirely from the central nervous system. Some scientists thought LSD might act as a trigger mechanism, releasing or inhibiting a naturally occurring substance in the brain, but no one could figure out exactly why the drug had such a dramatic effect on the mind.

Many other questions were in need of clarification. Could the drug be fatal? What was the maximum dose? Were the effects constant, or were there variations according to different personality types? Could the reaction be accentuated by combining LSD with other chemicals? Was there an antidote? Some of these questions overlapped with legitimate medical concerns, and researchers on CIA stipends published unclassified versions of their work in prestigious scientific periodicals. But these accounts omitted secret data given to the CIA on how LSD affected "operationally pertinent categories" such as disturbance of memory, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting information, increasing suggestibility, and creating emotional dependence. 

The CIA was particularly interested in psychiatric reports suggesting that LSD could break down familiar behavior patterns, for this raised the possibility of reprogramming or brainwashing. If LSD temporarily altered a person's view of the world and suspended his belief system, CIA doctors surmised, then perhaps Russian spies could be cajoled into switching loyalties while they were tripping. The brainwashing strategy was relatively simple: find the subject's weakest point (his "squeaky board") and bear down on it. Use any combination or synthesis which might "open the mind to the power of suggestion to a degree never hitherto dreamed possible." LSD would be employed to provoke a reality shift, to break someone down and tame him, to find a locus of anonymity and leave a mark there forever. 

To explore the feasibility of this approach, the Agency turned to Dr. Ewen Cameron, a respected psychiatrist who served as president of the Canadian, the American, and the World Psychiatric Associations before his death in 1967. Cameron also directed the Allain Memorial Institute at Montreal's McGill University, where he developed a bizarre and unorthodox method for treating schizophrenia. With financial backing from the CIA he tested his method on fifty-three patients at Allain. The so-called treatment started with "sleep therapy," in which subjects were knocked out for months at a time. The next phase, "depatterning," entailed massive electroshock and frequent doses of LSD designed to wipe out past behavior patterns. Then Cameron tried to recondition the mind through a technique known as "psychic driving." The patients, once again heavily sedated, were confined to "sleep rooms" where tape recorded messages played over and over from speakers under their pillows. Some heard the same message a quarter of a million times. 

Cameron's methods were later discredited, and the CIA grudgingly gave up on the notion of LSD as a brainwashing technique. But that was little consolation to those who served as guinea pigs for the ClA's secret mind control projects. Nine of Cameron's former patients have sued the American government for $1,000,000 each, claiming that they are still suffering from the trauma they went through at Allain. These people never agreed to participate in a scientific experimentóa fact which reflects little credit on the CIA, even if Agency officials feared that the Soviets were spurting ahead in the mind control race. The CIA violated the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics by sponsoring experiments on unwitting subjects. Ironically, Dr. Cameron was a member of the Nuremberg tribunal that heard the case against Nazi war criminals who committed atrocities during World War II.

Like the Nazi doctors at Dachau, the CIA victimized certain groups of people who were unable to resist: prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, sexual deviants, ethnic minorities. One project took place at the Addiction Research Center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington was ostensibly a place where heroin addicts could go to shake a habit, and although it was officially a penitentiary, all the inmates were referred to as "patients." The patients had their own way of referring to the doctors"hacks" or "croakers" who patrolled the premises in military uniforms. 

The patients at Lexington had no way of knowing that it was one of fifteen penal and mental institutions utilized by the CIA in its super-secret drug development program. To conceal its role the Agency enlisted the aid of the navy and the National Institutes of Mental Health (N.I.M.H), which served as conduits for channeling money to Dr. Harris Isbell, a gung-ho research scientist who remained on the CIA payroll for over a decade. According to CIA documents the directors of NIMH and the National Institutes of Health were fully cognizant of the Agency's "interest" in Isbell's work and offered "full support and protection." 

When the CIA came across a new drug (usually supplied by American pharmaceutical firms) that needed testing, they frequently sent it over to their chief doctor at Lexington, where an ample supply of captive guinea pigs was readily available. Over eight hundred compounds were farmed out to Isbell, including LSD and a variety of hallucinogens. It became an open secret among street junkies that if the supply got tight, you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell's wacky drug experiments. (Small wonder that Lexington had a return rate of 90%.) Dr. Isbell, a longtime member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs, defended the volunteer system on the grounds that there was no precedent at the time for offering inmates cash for their services. 

CIA documents describe experiments conducted by Isbell in which certain patients nearly all black inmates were given LSD for more than seventy-five consecutive days. In order to overcome tolerance to the hallucinogen, Isbell administered "double, triple and quadruple doses." A report dated May 5, 1959, comments on an experiment involving psilocybin (a semi-synthetic version of the magic mushroom). Subjects who ingested the drug became extremely anxious, although sometimes there were periods of intense elation marked by "continuous gales of laughter." A few patients felt that they "had become very large, or had shrunk to the size of children. Their hands or feet did not seem to be their own and sometimes took on the appearance of animal paws . 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." 

Isbell concluded, "Despite these striking subjective experiences, the patients remained oriented in time, place and person. In most instances, the patients did not lose their insight but realized that the effects were due to the drug. Two of the nine patients, however, did lose insight and felt that their experiences were caused by the experimenters controlling their minds."

In addition to his role as a research scientist, Dr. Isbell served as a go-between for the CIA in its attempt to obtain drug samples from European pharmaceutical concerns which assumed they were providing "medicine" to a US Public Health official. The CIA in turn acted as a research coordinator, passing information, tips, and leads to Isbell and its other contract employees so that they could keep abreast of each other's progress; when a new discovery was made, the CIA would often ask another researcher to conduct a follow-up study for confirmation. One scientist whose work was coordinated with Isbell's in such a manner was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a noted pharmacologist from Princeton who tested LSD on inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey. 

Isbell, Pfeiffer, Cameron, West, and Hoch all were part of a network of doctors and scientists who gathered intelligence for the CIA. Through these scholar-informants the Agency stayed on top of the latest developments within the "above ground" LSD scene, which expanded rapidly during the Cold War. By the mid-1950's numerous independent investigators had undertaken hallucinogenic drug studies, and the CIA was determined not to let the slightest detail escape its grasp. In a communique dated May 26, 1954, the Agency ordered all domestic field offices in the United States to monitor scientists engaged in LSD research. People of interest, the memo explained, "will most probably be found in biochemistry departments of universities, mental hospitals, private psychiatric practice. We do ask that you remember their importance and report their work when it comes to your attention." 

The CIA also expended considerable effort to monitor the latest developments in LSD research on a worldwide scale. Drug specialists funded by the Agency made periodic trips to Europe to confer with scientists and representatives of various pharmaceutical concerns, including, of course, Sandoz Laboratories. Initially the Swiss firm provided LSD to investigators all over the world free of charge, in exchange for full access to their research data. (CIA researchers did not comply with this stipulation.) By 1953 Sandoz had decided to deal directly with the US Food and Drug Administration (PDA), which assumed a supervisory role in distributing LSD to American investigators from then on. It was a superb arrangement as far as the CIA was concerned, for the FDA went out of its way to assist the secret drug program. With the FDA as its junior partner, the CIA not only had ready access to supplies of LSD (which Sandoz marketed for a while under the brand name Delysid) but also was able to keep a close eye on independent researchers in the United States. 

The CIA would have been content to let the FDA act as an intermediary in its dealings with Sandoz, but business as usual was suspended when the Agency learned of an offer that could not be refused. Prompted by reports that large quantities of the drug were suddenly available, top-level CIA officials authorized the purchase of ten kilos of LSD from Sandoz at an estimated price of $240,000 enough for a staggering one hundred million doses. A document dated November 16, 1953, characterized the pending transaction as a "risky operation," but CIA officials felt it was necessary, if only to preclude any attempt the Communists might make to get their hands on the drug. What the CIA intended to do with such an incredible stash of acid was never made clear.

The CIA later found out that Sandoz had never produced LSD in quantities even remotely resembling ten kilograms. Apparently only ten milligrams were for sale, but a CIA contact in Switzerland mistook a kilogram, 1000 grams, for a milligram (.001 grams), which would explain the huge discrepancy. Nevertheless, Sandoz officials were pleased by the CIAís interest in their product, and the two organizations struck up a cooperative relationship. Arthur Stoll, president of Sandoz, agreed to keep the CIA posted whenever new LSD was produced or a shipment was delivered to a customer. Likewise, any information concerning LSD research behind the Iron Curtain would be passed along confidentially. 

But the CIA did not want to depend on a foreign company for supplies of a substance considered vital to American security interests. The Agency asked the Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis to try to synthesize a batch of all-American acid. By mid- 1954 Lilly had succeeded in breaking the secret formula held by Sandoz. "This is a closely guarded secret," a CIA document declared, "and should not be mentioned generally." Scientists at Lilly assured the CIA that "in a matter of months LSD would be available in tonnage quantities."

Midnight Climax 

In a speech before the National Alumni Conference at Princeton University on April 10, 1953, newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles lectured his audience on "how sinister the battle for men's minds had become in Soviet hands." The human mind, Dulles warned, was a "malleable tool," and the Red Menace had secretly developed "brain perversion techniques." Some of these methods were "so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them." Dulles continued, "The minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment  are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts. Parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat the thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside. In effect the brain becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control." 

Three days after delivering this address Dulles authorized Operation MK-ULTRA, the C.l.A's major drug and mind control program during the Cold War. MK-ULTRA was the brainchild of Richard Helms, a high-ranking member of the Clandestine Services (otherwise known as the "dirty tricks department") who championed such methods throughout his career as an intelligence officer. As Helms explained to Dulles when he first proposed the MK-ULTRA project, "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." 

The super secret MK-ULTRA program was run by a relatively small unit within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (T.S.S). Originally established as a supplementary funding mechanism to the ARTICHOKE project, MK-ULTRA quickly grew into a mammoth undertaking that outflanked earlier mind control initiatives. For a while both the TSS and the Office of Security (which directed the ARTICHOKE project) were engaged in parallel LSD tests, and a heated rivalry developed between the two groups. Security officials were miffed because they had gotten into acid first and then this new clique started cutting in on what the ARTICHOKE crowd considered their rightful turf.

The internecine conflict grew to the point where the Office of Security decided to have one of its people spy on the T.S.S. This set off a flurry of memos between the Security informant and his superiors, who were dismayed when they learned that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed the MK-ULTRA program, had approved a plan to give acid to unwitting American citizens. The Office of Security had never attempted such a reckless gesture although it had its own idiosyncrasies; ARTICHOKE operatives, for example, were attempting to have a hypnotized subject kill someone while in a trance. 

Whereas the Office of Security utilized LSD as an interrogation weapon, Dr. Gottlieb had other ideas about what to do with the drug. Because the effects of LSD were temporary (in contrast to the fatal nerve agents), Gottlieb saw important strategic advantages for its use in covert operations. For instance, a surreptitious dose of LSD might disrupt a person's thought process and cause him to act strangely or foolishly in public. A CIA document notes that administering LSD "to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc." But Gottlieb realized there was a considerable difference between testing LSD in a laboratory and using the drug in clandestine operations. In an effort to bridge the gap, he and his TSS colleagues initiated a series of in-house experiments designed to find out what would happen if LSD was given to someone in a "normal" life setting without advance warning. 

They approached the problem systematically, taking one step at a time, until they reached a point where outsiders were zapped with no explanation whatsoever. First everyone in Technical Services tried LSD. They tripped alone and in groups. A typical experiment involved two people pairing off in a closed room where they observed each other for hours at a time, took notes, and analyzed their experiences. As Gottlieb later explained, "There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a first hand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs (was] important to those of us who were involved in the program." 

When they finally learned the hallucinogenic ropes, so to speak, they agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a TSS colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparationsówhich usually meant taking the rest of the day off. Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to TSS members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Such tests were considered necessary because foreknowledge would prejudice the results of the experiment. 

Indeed, things were getting a bit raucous down at headquarters. When Security officials discovered what was going on, they began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of the TSS game plan. Moral reservations were not paramount; it was more a sense that the MK-ULTRA staff had become unhinged by the hallucinogen. The Office of Security felt that the TSS should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few TSS jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party. A Security memo dated December 15, 1954, noted that acid could "produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours and possibly for longer." The writer of this memo concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did "not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties."

The purpose of these early acid tests was not to explore mystical realms or higher states of consciousness. On the contrary, the TSS was trying to figure out how to employ LSD in espionage operations. Nevertheless, there were times when CIA agents found themselves propelled into a visionary world and they were deeply moved by the experience. One MK-ULTRA veteran wept in front of his colleagues at the end of his first trip. "I didn't want to leave it," he explained. "I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty." His colleagues assumed he was having a bad trip and wrote a report stating that the drug had made him psychotic. 

Adverse reactions often occurred when people were given LSD on an impromptu basis. On one occasion a CIA operative discovered he'd been dosed during his morning coffee break. "He sort of knew he had it," a fellow-agent recalled, "but he couldn't pull himself together. Somehow, when you know you've taken it, you start the process of maintaining your composure. But this grabbed him before he was aware, and it got away from him." Then he got away from them and fled across Washington stoned out of his mind while they searched frantically for their missing comrade. "He reported afterwards," the TSS man continued, "that every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. It was a real horror for him. I mean, it was hours of agony Ö like being in a dream that never stops with someone chasing you." 

Incidents such as these reaffirmed to the MK-ULTRA crew just how devastating a weapon LSD could be. But this only made them more enthusiastic about the drug. They kept springing it on people in a manner reminiscent of the ritual hazing of fraternity pledges. "It was just too damned informal," a TSS officer later said. "We didn't know much. We were playing around in ignorance  We were just naive about what we were doing." 

Such pranks claimed their first victim in November 1953, when a group of CIA and army technicians gathered for a three-day work retreat at a remote hunting lodge in the backwoods of Maryland. On the second day of the meeting Dr. Gottlieb spiked the after-dinner cocktails with LSD. As the drug began to take effect, Gottlieb told everyone that they had ingested a mind-altering chemical. By that time the group had become boisterous with laughter and unable to carry on a coherent conversation. 

One man was not amused by the unexpected turn of events. Dr. Frank Olson, an army scientist who specialized in biological warfare research, had never taken LSD before, and he slid into a deep depression. His mood did not lighten when the conference adjourned. Normally a gregarious family man, Olson returned home quiet and withdrawn. When he went to work after the weekend, he asked his boss to fire him because he had "messed up the experiment" during the retreat. Alarmed by his erratic behavior, Olson's superiors contacted the CIA, which sent him to New York to see Dr. Harold Abramson. A respected physician, Abramson taught at Columbia University and was chief of the allergy clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was also one of the CIAís principal LSD researchers and a part-time consultant to the Army Chemical Corps. While these were impressive credentials, Abramson was not a trained psychiatrist, and it was this kind of counseling his patient desperately needed.

For the next few weeks Olson confided his deepest fears to Abramson. He claimed the CIA was putting something in his coffee to make him stay awake at night. He said people were plotting against him and he heard voices at odd hours commanding him to throw away his wallet which he did, even though it contained several non cashed checks. Dr. Abramson concluded that Olson was mired in "a psychotic state with delusions of persecution" that had been "crystallized by the LSD experience." Arrangements were made to move him to Chestnut Lodge, a sanitorium in Rockville, Maryland, staffed by CLA-cleared psychiatrists. (Apparently other CIA personnel who suffered from psychiatric disorders were enrolled in this institution.) On his last evening in New York, Olson checked into a room at the Statler Hilton along with a CIA agent assigned to watch him. And then, in the wee hours of the morning, the troubled scientist plunged headlong through a closed window to his death ten floors below. 

The Olson suicide had immediate repercussions within the CIA. An elaborate cover- up erased clues to the actual circumstances leading up to his death. Olson's widow was eventually given a government pension, and the full truth of what happened would not be revealed for another twenty years. Meanwhile CIA director Allen Dulles suspended the in-house testing program for a brief period while an internal investigation was conducted. In the end, Gottlieb and his team received only a mildly worded reprimand for exercising "bad judgment," but no records of the incident were kept in their personnel files which would harm their future careers. The importance of LSD eclipsed all other considerations, and the secret acid tests resumed. 

Gottlieb was now ready to undertake the final and most daring phase of the MK- ULTRA program: LSD would be given to unwitting targets in real-life situations. But who would actually do the dirty work? While looking through some old OSS files, Gottlieb discovered that marijuana had been tested on unsuspecting subjects in an effort to develop a truth serum. These experiments had been organized by George Hunter White, a tough, old-fashioned narcotics officer who ran a training school for American spies during World War II. Perhaps White would be interested in testing drugs for the CIA. As a matter of protocol Gottlieb first approached Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. Anslinger was favorably disposed and agreed to "lend" one of his top men to the CIA on a part-time basis. 

Right from the start White had plenty of leeway in running his operations. He rented an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village, and with funds supplied by the CIA he transformed it into a safe house complete with two-way mirrors, surveillance equipment, and the like. Posing as an artist and a seaman. White lured people back to his pad and slipped them drugs. A clue as to how his subjects fared can be found in White's personal diary, which contains passing references to surprise LSD experiments: "Gloria gets horrors  Janet sky high." The frequency of bad reactions prompted White to coin his own code word for the drug: "Stormy," which was how he referred to LSD throughout his fourteen-year stint as a CIA operative.

In 1955 White was transferred to San Francisco, where two more safe houses were established. During this period he initiated Operation Midnight Climax, in which drug- addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment. As payment for their services the hookers received $100 a night, plus a guarantee from White that he'd intercede on their behalf should they be arrested while plying their trade. In addition to providing data about LSD, Midnight Climax enabled the CIA to learn about the sexual proclivities of those who passed through the safe-houses. White's harem of prostitutes became the focal point of an extensive CIA study of how to exploit the art of lovemaking for espionage purposes. 

When he wasn't operating a national security whorehouse, White would cruise the streets of San Francisco tracking down drug pushers for the Narcotics Bureau. Sometimes after a tough day on the beat he invited his narc buddies up to one of the safehouses for a little "R & R." Occasionally they unzipped their inhibitions and partied on the premisesómuch to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns in shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD. "So far as I'm concerned," White later told an associate, " 'clear thinking' was non-existent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times like I was having a 'mind-expanding experience' but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session." 

White had quite a scene going for a while. By day he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night he dispensed them to strangers. Not everyone was cut out for this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, and White often relied on the bottle to reconcile the two extremes. But there were still moments when his Jekyll-and-Hyde routine got the best of him. One night a friend who had helped install bugging equipment for the CIA stopped by the safehouse only to find the roly-poly narcotics officer slumped in front of a full-length mirror. White had just finished polishing off a half gallon of Gibson's. There he sat, with gun in hand, shooting wax slugs at his own reflection. 

The safe house experiments continued without interruption until 1963, when CIA inspector general John Earman accidentally stumbled across the clandestine testing program during a routine inspection of TSS operations. Only a handful of CIA agents outside Technical Services knew about the testing of LSD on unwitting subjects, and Earman took Richard Helms, the prime instigator of MK-ULTRA, to task for not fully briefing the new CIA director, John J. McCone. Although McCone had been handpicked by President Kennedy to replace Allen Dulles as the dean of American intelligence, Helms apparently had his own ideas about who was running the CIA.

Earman had grave misgivings about MK-ULTRA and he prepared a twenty-four-page report that included a comprehensive overview of the drug and mind control projects. In a cover letter to McCone he noted that the "concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." But the harshest criticism was reserved for the safe house experiments, which, in his words, placed "the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy." Earman stated that LSD had been tested on "individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Numerous subjects had become ill, and some required hospitalization for days or weeks at a time. Moreover, the sophomoric procedures employed during the safe house sessions raised serious questions about the validity of the data provided by White, who was hardly a qualified scientist. As Earman pointed out, the CIA had no way of knowing whether White was fudging the results to suit his own ends. 

Earman recommended a freeze on unwitting drug tests until the matter was fully considered at the highest level of the CIA. But Helms, then deputy director for covert operations (the number two position within the Agency), defended the program. In a memo dated November 9, 1964, he warned that the C.l.A's "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing," and he called for a resumption of the safe house experiments. While admitting that he had "no answer to the moral issue," Helms argued that such tests were necessary "to keep up with Soviet advances in this field." 

This Cold War refrain had a familiar ring. Yet only a few months earlier Helms had sung a different tune when J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, asked him to report on Soviet mind control initiatives. Helms stated his views in a document dated June 26, 1964: "Soviet research in the pharmacological agents producing behavioral effects has consistently lagged five years behind Western research [emphasis added]." Furthermore, he confidently asserted that the Russians did not have "any singular, new potent drugs  to force a course of action on an individual." 

The bureaucratic wrangling at CIA headquarters didn't seem to bother George Hunter White, who kept on sending vouchers for "unorthodox expenses" to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. No definitive record exists as to when the unwitting acid tests were terminated, but it appears that White and the CIA parted ways when he retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1966. Afterwards White reflected upon his service for the Agency in a letter to Gottlieb: "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" 

By this time the CIA had developed a "stable of drugs," including LSD, that were used in covert operations. The decision to employ LSD on an operational basis was handled through a special committee that reported directly to Richard Helms, who characterized the drug as "dynamite" and asked to be "advised at all times when it was intended for use." A favorite plan involved slipping "P-1" (the code name for LSD when used operationally) to socialist or left-leaning politicians in foreign countries so that they would babble incoherently and discredit themselves in public.

Fidel Castro was among the Third World leaders targeted for surprise acid attacks. When this method proved unworkable, CIA strategists thought of other ways to embarrass the Cuban premier. One scheme involved dusting Castro's shoes with thalium salts to make his beard fall out. Apparently they thought that Castro would lose his charisma along with his hair. Eventually the Agency shifted its focus from bad trips and close shaves to eliminating Castro altogether. Gottlieb and his TSS cohorts were asked to prepare an array of bizarre gadgets and biochemical poisons for a series of murder conspiracies allying the CIA with anti-Castro mercenaries and the Mob. 

Egyptian president Gamal Abdal Nasser also figured high on the ClA's hallucinogenic hit list. While he managed to avoid such a fate, others presumably were less fortunate. CIA documents cited in a documentary by ABC News confirm that Gottlieb carried a stash of acid overseas on a number of occasions during the Cold War with the intention of dosing foreign diplomats and statesmen. But the effects of LSD were difficult to predict when employed in such a haphazard manner, and the CIA used LSD only sparingly in operations of this sort.

The Hallucination Battlefield 

While the CIA was interested in LSD primarily as an instrument of clandestine warfare, the United States Army pursued a more grandiose scheme. During the Cold War top-level military brass waxed enthusiastic over the prospect of a new kind of chemical weapon that would revolutionize combat. They imagined aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of "madness gas" that would disorient people and dissolve their will to resist. This scenario appealed to those in the Pentagon who felt hamstrung by the possibility of a nuclear shoot-out with the Ruskies. They realized that new methods of waging limited warfare would have to be developed, and psycho-chemical weapons seemed to offer an attractive alternative. 

According to Major General William Creasy, chemical incapacitate went hand in glove with the strategic requirements of the Cold War. As chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps, Creasy promoted the psycho-chemical cause with eccentric and visionary zeal. He maintained that this type of warfare was not only feasible but tactically advantageous in certain situations. Consider, for example, the difficult task of dislodging enemy soldiers from a city inhabited by an otherwise friendly population an industrial center perhaps, bustling with activity. Assume that the city housed numerous museums and cultural landmarks. Why blow to smithereens the best and worst alike with an old-fashioned artillery barrage? The prospect of obliterating the whole kit and caboodle seemed downright foolish to Creasy if you could get away with less. 

Suppose instead you found a way to spike the city's water supply or to release a hallucinogen in aerosol form. For twelve to twenty-four hours all the people in the vicinity would be hopelessly giddy, vertiginous, spaced-out. Those under the spell of madness gas would be incapable of raising a whimper of protest while American troops established themselves on what was once forbidden turf. Victory would be a foregone conclusion, as smooth and effortless as the French army in The King of Hearts strolling into a town inhabited solely by asylum inmates.

Yes, wouldn't it be nice to take the teeth out of war and at the same time make its result so final? Just blow their minds, move in, and take over; it was that simple or so Creasy claimed. As soon as the citizenry recovered from their relatively brief stint in the ozone, everyone would return to a nine-to-five schedule. There'd be no fatalities and, except for a few borderline psychotics pushed over the edge by the drug, no sick or wounded needing medical care. Most important, the local economy would have suffered no significant setback. 

Psycho-chemical weapons, Creasy argued, offered the most humane way of conducting the dirty business of warfare. He preached a new military gospel: war without death. An era of bloodless combat was just around the proverbial comer. There was only one problem. The sadly misinformed lay public and their elected officials harbored a knee-jerk aversion to chemical weapons. 

In May 1959 Creasy took his case directly to the people by granting interviews to reporters and stumping for psycho-chemicals on a cross-country lecture tour. "I do not contend that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect," he told This Week magazine. "But warfare is never pleasant. And to those who feel that any kind of chemical weapon is more horrible than conventional weapons, I put this question: Would you rather be temporarily deranged, blinded, or paralyzed by a chemical agent, or burned alive by a conventional fire bomb?" 

Creasy testified a short time later to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. He explained to the bewildered congressmen how a psycho-chemical "attacks the sensory, perception, and nerve centers of the body  discombobulating them . Your hearing might be affected, your sight might be affected, your physical balance might be affected." Moreover, these drugs worked so swiftly that people wouldn't even know they'd been hit. 

Representative James Fulton (R-Pa.) was disturbed by Creasy's remarks. He wondered if some foreign power might already be subjecting people in the United States to such agents. "How can we determine it?" Fulton asked. "What is the test to see whether we are already being subjected to them? Are we under it now?  Are we the rabbits and the guinea pigs?  How are we to know?" 

Simple, said Creasy. If LSD or a related drug was administered to members of Congress, "we could possibly have you dancing on the desks, or shouting Communist speeches." 

Fulton gasped. "Have you ever tried them on Congress?" 

"I can assure you of one thing," said Creasy. "The Chemical Corps of the Army has not found it necessary to do it up until now." 

Creasy's five-star performance succeeded in winning the hearts, minds, and appropriations of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A sizable budget increase was awarded to the Chemical Corps for the express purpose of developing a nonlethal incapacitate that could subdue a foe without inflicting permanent injury. Apparently Creasy neglected to inform the congressmen of the death of Harold Blauer in 1953. Blauer, a tennis professional, was the subject of a drug study conducted by a group of doctors working under army contract at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He died a few hours after receiving an injection of MDA (methyl di-amphetamine, known in latter-day street parlance as the "love drug") supplied by Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the Army Chemical Corps. "We didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him," an army researcher later admitted.

The scientist who directly oversaw this research project was Dr. Paul Hoch, an early advocate of the theory that LSD and other hallucinogens were essentially psychosis- producing drugs. In succeeding years Hoch performed a number of bizarre experiments for the army while also serving as a CIA consultant. Intraspinal injections of mescaline and LSD were administered to psychiatric patients, causing an "immediate, massive, and almost shocklike picture with higher doses." Aftereffects ("generalized discomfort," "withdrawal," "oddness," and "unreality feelings") lingered for two to three days following the injections. Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psychosurgery. ("It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value," Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex. 

Another scientist who rented his services to the CIA as well as the military was Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University. Heath and his colleagues administered LSD to people and then subjected them to electronic brain stimulation via electrode implant. One test subject became hysterical, lapsed into a trancelike state, and later claimed that the doctors were trying to manipulate her body. She was "obviously having paranoid ideas," commented an army employee. 

In addition to sponsoring research at various universities and civilian hospitals, the army conducted extensive in-house studies with LSD. During the late 1950's a series of tests was initiated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Their purpose was to determine how well soldiers would fare in the execution of war games while high on acid. Small military units were given EA-I729, the army's secret code number for LSD, and asked to perform various operational exercises, including command-post maneuvers, squad drills, tank driving, radarscope reading, antiaircraft tracking, meteorological and engineering surveys, and so on. The results showed performance ranging "from total incapacity to marked decrease in proficiency." Unbeknownst to the stoned servicemen, some of these exercises were filmed by the army and were later shown to members of Congress to demonstrate the disruptive influence of psycho-chemicals. 

Concerned that LSD might one day be used covertly against an American military unit, certain officials suggested that every Chemical Corps officer should be familiar with the effects of the drug, if only as a precautionary measure. Accordingly nearly two hundred officers assigned to the Chemical Corps school at Fort McClellan, Alabama, were given acid as a supplement to their regular training program. Some staff members even tried to teach classes while tripping. 

Additional tests were carried out at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Dug-way Proving Ground, Utah; and in various European and Pacific stations. Soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were given LSD and confined to sensory deprivation chambers; then they were subjected to hostile questioning by intelligence officers. An army report concludes that an "interrogator of limited experience could compel a subject to compromise himself and to sign documents which could place him in jeopardy." With a stronger dose "a state of fear and anxiety could be induced where the subject could be compelled to trade his cooperation for a guarantee of return to normalcy."

Shortly thereafter the military began using LSD as an interrogation weapon on an operational basis, just as the CIA had been doing for years. An army memo dated September 6, 1961, discussed the interrogation procedure: "Stressing techniques employed included silent treatment before or after EA 1729 administration, sustained conventional interrogation prior to EA 1729 interrogation, deprivation of food, drink, sleep or bodily evacuation, sustained isolation prior to EA 1729 administration, hot- cold switches in approach, duress 'pitches,' verbal degradation and bodily discomfort, or dramatized threats to subject's life or mental health." 

Documents pertaining to Operation DERBY HAT indicate that an army Special Purpose Team trained in LSD interrogations initiated a series of field tests in the Far East beginning in August 1962. Seven individuals were questioned; all were foreign nationals who had been implicated in drug smuggling or espionage activities, and in each case the EA-I729 technique produced information that had not been obtained through other means. One subject vomited three times and stated that he "wanted to die" after the Special Purpose Team gave him LSD; his reaction was characterized as "moderate." Another went into shock and remained semiconscious for nearly an hour after receiving triple the dosage normally used in these sessions. When he came to, the Special Purpose Team propped him up in a chair and tried to question him, but the subject kept collapsing and hitting his head on the table, oblivious to the pain. A few hours later he started to talk. "The subject often voiced an anti- communist line," an army report noted, "and begged to be spared the torture he was receiving. In this confused state he even asked to be killed in order to alleviate his suffering." * 
* Upon completion of their mission in November 1962, the Special Purpose Team was told to remain in Japan and wait for further instructions. Arrangements were made to extend their stay in the Pacific Theater for an additional sixty days so that they could travel to Saigon. According to the army inspector general, a letter hand-delivered to the team "allegedly announced the Secretary of Defense's decision to use LSD on Viet Cong POW's."
By the mid-1960's nearly fifteen hundred military personnel had served as guinea pigs in LSD experiments conducted by the US Army Chemical Corps. Some later claimed they were coerced into "volunteering" for these experiments by their superior officers. A number of GI veterans complained they suffered from severe depression and emotional disturbances after the LSD trials. Ironically, there were also reports that soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were stealing LSD from the laboratories and using it for recreational purposes. Some of these men had taken their first "trip" (the word originally coined by army scientists to describe an LSD session) when acid was given to unsuspecting GI's at mess parties. 

Army policy restricted LSD tests to individual volunteers or small groups of military personnel. That was not enough for the leaders of the Chemical Corps. Major General Creasy bemoaned the fact that large-scale testing of psycho-chemical weapons in the United States was prohibited. "I was attempting to put on, with a good cover story," he grumbled, "to test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud was laid down on a city. It was denied on reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me."

As it happened, however, LSD was much more effective by ingestion than by inhalation, and the Chemical Corps was unable to figure out an appropriate means for delivering the drug. This precluded any possibility of using LSD as a large-scale battle weapon. Undaunted, the military surrealists and their industrial counterparts forged ahead in search of a drug and a delivery system that could do the job. During the early 1960's Edgewood Arsenal received an average of four hundred chemical "rejects" every month from the major American pharmaceutical firms. Rejects were drugs found to be commercially useless because of their undesirable side effects. Of course, undesirable side effects were precisely what the army was looking for. 

It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual patterns. The effects generally last about three days, although symptoms of headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior have been known to persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an army doctor, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." 

Dr. Van Sim, who served as chief of the Clinical Research Division at Edgewood, made it a practice to try all new chemicals himself before testing them on volunteers. Sim said he sampled LSD "on several occasions." Did he enjoy getting high, or were his acid trips simply a patriotic duty? "It's not a matter of compulsiveness or wanting to be the first to try a material," Sim stated. "With my experience I am often able to change the design of future experiments . This allows more comprehensive tests to be conducted later, with maximum effective usefulness of inexperienced volunteers. I'm trying to defeat the compound, and if I can, we don't have to drag out the tests at the expense of a lot of time and money." 

With BZ Dr. Sim seems to have met his match. "It zonked me for three days. I kept falling down and the people at the lab assigned someone to follow me around with a mattress. I woke up from it after three days without a bruise." For his efforts Sim received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service and was cited for exposing himself to dangerous drugs "at the risk of grave personal injury." 

According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ." Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975. During this period an estimated twenty-eight hundred soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ. Robert Bowen, a former air force enlisted man, felt disoriented for several weeks after his exposure. Bowen said the drug produced a temporary feeling of insanity but that he reacted less severely than other test subjects. One paratrooper lost all muscle control for a time and later seemed totally divorced from reality. "The last time I saw him," said Bowen, "he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar." *
* Pentagon spokespeople insist that the potential hazards of such experimentation were "supposed" to be fully explained to all volunteers. But as Dr. Snyder noted, nobody "can tell you for sure BZ won't have a long-lasting effect. With an initial effect of eighty hours compared to eight for LSD you would have to worry more about its long-lasting or recurrent effects."

After extensive clinical testing at Edgewood Arsenal, the army concluded that BZ was better suited than LSD as a chemical warfare agent for a number of reasons. While acid could knock a person "off his rocker," to use Chemical Corps jargon, BZ would also put him "on the floor" (render him physically immobile). This unique combinationóboth "off the rocker" and "on the floor"ówas exactly what the army sought from an incapacitant. Moreover, BZ was cheaper to produce, more reliable, and packed a stronger punch than LSD. Most important, BZ could be dispersed as an aerosol mist that would float with the wind across city or battlefield. Some advantage was also found in the fact that test subjects lapsed into a state of "semi-quiet delirium" and had no memory of their BZ experience. 

This was not to belittle lysergic acid. Although LSD never found a place in the army's arsenal, the drug undoubtedly left its mark on the military mind. Once again LSD seems to have acted primarily as a catalyst. Before acid touched the fancy of army strategists, Creasy's vision of a new kind of warfare was merely a pipe dream. With LSD it suddenly became a real possibility. 

During the early 1960's the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army's standard incapacitating agent. By this time the superhallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large- scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was reportedly employed by American troops as a counterinsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, "We will use these things as we very well see fit, when we think it is in the best interest of the US and their allies."

to be continued
2 Psychedelic Pioneers

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