Alec Hustad

ENG 1A
Ramos
6/3/14
Caught In the Act
From the early 1940s to the early 1960s, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted countless covert behavior-altering operations on unwitting
American and non-American citizens at the expense of their sanity and health. Aside from the agents
and military personnel that agreed to be experimental subjects, the victims of these atrocious
experiments were ignorant to the fact that they were bring experimented on by the U.S. Government,
and were often patients in mental institutions unable to defend themselves. The main objective of these
experiments evolved from developing a truth drug to splitting personalities in order to create sleeper
spies, and almost always involved dosing the subject with an experimental drug. The operations and
experiments were conducted by American agents, CIA contracted companies and employees, and a
group of Nazi scientists they smuggled from the fallen Reich into America under the umbrella of Project
Paperclip. The majority of the CIA documents were destroyed in the mid 1970s when George H.W. Bush
was appointed to director of the CIA, and there is no way to tell when the CIAs mind control operations
were terminated.
In 1942, during World War II, President Roosevelt created the OSS in order to conduct espionage
activities in foreign countries as well as other secretive missions. According to Alex Kershaw, In 1942,
Roosevelt tapped Donovan to head the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a new organization set up to
aid resistance in Europe and carry out espionage (Kershaw 68). William Wild Bill Donovan was a
highly decorated World War I veteran, and would later become known as the father of American
intelligence. After World War II, the American navy scoured Europe for any artifacts left over from the

German military. This is when the U.S. intelligence community became aware of the mind control
experiments being conducted on prisoners at concentration camps, mainly Dachau and Auschwitz. John
Marks states, According to research member Walter Neff, the goal of the Dachau experiments was to
eliminate the will of the person being examined (Marks 5). The Nazi scientist at Dachau concentration
camp had prisoners sit in bathtubs full of ice to see how long it would take for them to freeze to death,
put them in high-altitude pressure chambers and crushed them to death to see how high into the
atmosphere a human can travel, and shot them with guns to test different experimental blood
coagulants. Perhaps the most terrible experimentation that went on was the mescaline trials. The
scientists at the concentration camps were slipping mescaline, the active chemical in the peyote cactus,
into the prisoners drinks without them knowing. Many prisoners must have had no idea what was
causing their extremely accelerated sensory input, and many of them must have figured they went mad
absent of any chemical catalyst. After discovering this bit of intelligence, Donovan rounded up a small
group of prestigious American scientists, and asked them to conduct the first ever behavior modification
project carried out by an American espionage organization. The mission was to develop a drug, a truth
drug, which would aid in the interrogation of unwilling subjects. This was the primordial ooze that
would one day evolve into one of the darkest and most brow-raising moments of military history in
America during the 1900s. OSS scientists concocted a drug using marijuana as the primary active
ingredient during the quest for the truth drug. The drug was first tested on fellow OSS agents and other
military personnel, followed by its temporary use in covert intelligence gathering operations. One of the
few of men that were tasked with using the truth drug operationally was a man named George Hunter
White. According to Troy Hooper, In a quest for truth serums, White and other OSS agents slipped
concentrated tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA) into the food and cigarettes of suspected
communists, conscientious objectors, and mobsters in the 1940s (Hooper 2). The reactions were
unpredictable and unrepeatable forcing scientist to drop THCA and return to the drawing board.

The OSS was dissolved in 1945, but was born again in the form of the CIA in 1947. The Columbia
Encyclopedia defines the CIA as: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), independent executive bureau of the
U.S. government established by National Security Act of 1947, replacing the wartime Office of Strategic
Services (1942-45), the first U.S. espionage and covert operations agency (The Columbian
Encyclopedia). The CIA picked up right where the OSS left off in the development of a truth drug to use
in interrogation and in covert operations. The navy actually took the lead in 1947, initiating project
CHATTER, whose main objective was to obtain information from unwilling people without physical
coercion. They were testing mescaline at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland
until they realized it didnt accomplish the objective of the project; CHATTER was terminated in 1953.
The CIAs first director was Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and is the man responsible for bringing the collective
behavior-altering operation BLUEBIRD into existence. All of the CIAs mind control projects were brought
together under code name BLUEBIRD. Marks states that On April 20, 1950, CIA Director Roscoe
Hillenkoetter approved BLUEBIRD and authorized the use of unvouchered funds to pay for its most
sensitive areas. The CIAs behavior-control program now had a bureaucratic structure (Marks 24). It
was official, the CIAs first drug testing program was underway, and instead of this project going through
the proper channels of authorization, the Projects Review Committee, it was sent directly to
Hillenkoetter for approval. How suiting that the CIAs first mind control operation was brought into
creation illegitimately. What helped keep everything under-wraps was the fact that The CIA was given
(1949) special powers under the Central Intelligence Act: The CIA director may spend agency funds
without accounting for them (The Columbian Encyclopedia). The main goals of BLUEBIRD were to
create an alteration in a persons personality to later be exploited, obtain accurate information from
unwilling people, and to condition personnel from the agency or of interest to the agency to prevent
enemies from acquiring information from them. As for Wild Bill Donovan, *T+he organization he had
created quickly sprang back to life in 1947, in the form of the CIA, but without him at the helm, which

left him very bitter towards the agency (Kershaw 68).

The code name for BLUEBIRD was changed to ARTICHOKE in August of 1951. Discovering a truth
drug was still the main focus of the project, and CIA personnel were sent all over the globe in search of
rare plants and herbs that had psychological effects on the human brain. Cocaine and its synthetic
analog procaine were tested, but did not perform the role of a truth serum. The agency then moved to
heroin, which was viewed as a potential interrogation agent because of its habit forming qualities.
Because of the stresses produced by heroin withdrawal, an individual experiencing those withdrawals
might spill the beans for a hit of H, but this proved to be unsuitable. In the early 1950s, the CIA was
turned-on to LSD-25, which would change the game forever. According to Martin A. Lee and Bruce
Shlain, Dr Hofmann 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 (Lee and Shlain xvii). Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD-25 in 1938, but
didnt become aware of its properties until he accidently absorbed some through his fingers about 5
years later. When the CIA became aware of LSD-25, they immediately began testing it on humans. The
subjects were told that a new drug was being tested, and promised that nothing bad would happen to
them, which is obviously an empty promise. At first, the data seemed to support the idea that LSD-25
was the miracle drug the agency had been waiting for, but the more testing that was done, the more
they realized how difficult it was to obtain legitimate truth from people under the influence. Usually
when a substance didnt deliver a desired result, the CIA would just toss it aside, but LSD-25 was
different. The CIA realized that LSD created a state of mind that was easily impressionable, and the fact
that it was tasteless, odorless, and colorless meant it could be easily concealed in a vector. The agency
considered using LSD-25 as an anti-interrogation method, where if a U.S. agent was caught and
interrogated by an opposing force, the agent could pop a pill full of LSD-25 and become unfit for
interrogation, similar to a suicide pill scenario. The CIA was also worried that the Soviet Union had

already been testing LSD-25 on the human mind, despite the fact that there was zero evidence to
support the theory. CIA personnel started taking LSD before overseas missions in the form of a mind
control vaccine, figuring that if an agent was already familiar with the effects, they were better suited to
know if they had been secretly dosed with LSD during their mission, and that it was not authentic
madness. One researcher took another view on these in-house experiments: It started out basically
with the CIA doing experimentations on their own men to discover if they could get rid of agents who
were going to quit the department, and still had classified information (The Film Archives).
After realizing the search for a speech-inducing drug was coming to an end, the CIA took on a
more aggressive stance when they came to the conclusion that LSD-25 could be used in a multitude of
brain washing techniques, which could be valuable to many different CIA operations. Many grants in LSD
research materialized almost overnight, and money started running into the agency through the
Geschicketer Fund for Medical Research, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, and the Josiah
Macy, JR Foundation, which are all CIA fronts. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain state that *t+he 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 (Lee and Shlain 23). The
agency found and contracted Dr. Ewen Cameron, director of the Allain Memorial Institute at Montreals
McGrill University and president of the Canadian, American, and World Psychiatric Associations.
Cameron developed a very brutal and unorthodox way to treat schizophrenia. The treatment started
with something he called sleep therapy, where he would keep the patient asleep for long periods of
time, usually measured in months. The second phase was called depatterning, where Cameron would
frequently dose the patient with LSD while delivering massive electroshock. The objective of this step
was to dissolve preexisting behavior patterns. The final technique was called psychic driving, where the
patients were heavily sedated and confined to what Cameron called sleep rooms. Under the pillows in
these rooms were speakers that played pre-recorded messages that played continuously over and over.

Some of these patients heard the same short message over a quarter of a million times. Heres the ironic
part, Dr. Ewen Cameron was part of the Nuremberg tribunal that heard the case against the Nazi war
criminals, who like Cameron, prayed on certain groups of people that were unable to defend
themselves. Not one of these patients agreed to this treatment, and some are still trying to sue the
government for the trauma they went through and are still going through.
In 1953, Allen Dulles became the director of the CIA, and authorized Operation MK-ULTRA. The
authorization was given three days after Dulles gave a speech to the National Alumni Conference at
Princeton University about how the communists had be secretly developing brainwashing techniques,
which had no data to back it. This operation was evolving for a long time: Operation Paperclip evolved
into Project Bluebird (1949), project Naomi (1950, and project artichoke (1951), and then Mk-Ultra
(1953) (Jewell). MK-ULTRA was steered by a small group within the CIA called the Technical Services
Staff (TSS), and consisted of many small operations. One researcher stated, Then we came across the
overall project called MK-ULTRA, its earlier code name was ARTICHOKE, and that included 149
subprojects (The Film Archive). At the beginning, Willis Gibbons was the captain of the MK-ULTRA ship,
but a mad scientist would quickly replace him. Eric Jewell notes that Gottlieb was for a while the
superior of Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz. After being recruited to the United States, Gottlieb replaced
Willis Gibbons to oversee MK-ULTRA (Jewell). Sydney Gottlieb is the man responsible for the countless
times unsuspecting American citizens were dosed with LSD. He also thought about covertly dosing high
officials with LSD while giving an important speech or during an important meeting causing the victim to
act strangely and lose credibility. The members of the TSS, commanded by Gottlieb, were ordered to
take LSD alone, and then in groups. Things escalated quickly, and the TSS members started slipping each
other LSD without any warning. After that got boring, they started dosing other people in the agency
outside of the TSS, which they covered up as trying to figure out how use LSD in an espionage operation.
This reckless behavior claimed its first casualty in 1953. Dr. Frank Olson, a biological warfare researcher,

was on a work retreat with Gottlieb and some of the other TSS members. On one of the nights, Gottlieb
laced the night-time cocktails with LSD. Olson had never experienced LSD before and didnt handle it as
well as the others. He fell into a deep depression after the trip, and committed suicide later that year.
One of the many MK-ULTRA subprojects was called Operation Midnight Climax. Gottlieb
contacted Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, asking if he could use George Hunter
White for carrying out Midnight Climax. Anslinger complied, and White was once again in the business
of secretly slipping chemicals into the bodies of unknowing recipients. The first CIA safe house that
White established was in Greenwich Village, which was an apartment he equipped with surveillance
equipment and two-way mirrors. White was relocated to San Francisco in 1955 where Operation
Midnight Climax was fully launched. According to Hooper, There were at least three CIA safe houses in
the Bay Area where experiments went on. Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which
operated from 1955 to 1965 (Hooper 1). Prostitutes, most of whom were heroin addicts, were hired by
White to bring their clients back to the CIA funded safe houses. In the safe house, the alcoholic
beverages were laced with LSD, and the prostitutes job was to get the men to drink them so that White
could observe their behavior behind the two-way mirror while sipping a LSD-virgin martini. The
prostitutes were paid $100 a night for their work, along with a promise of immunity by White if they
were arrested while conducting their business. When White wasnt at the CIA-financed whorehouse, he
would roam around San Francisco busting drug dealers for the Federal Narcotics Bureau, and would
often party in the safe houses with his narc friends. He busted people for drugs by day, and dosed
people with them by night. The whole objective of Operation Midnight Climax was to observe how an
individual handles the effects of LSD in a social environment. An unintended bonus was the ability to
observe how to exploit sex for espionage purposes. Operation Midnight Climax was terminated when
CIA inspector general John Earman unintentionally came into contact with the operations documents
during a routine inspection of the TSS. White retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1966 and fell out of

contact with the CIA.

Another one of the subprojects of MK-ULTRA was conducted at a rehab center in Lexington,
Kentucky. The Addiction Research Center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington was the
nations first drug treatment center, and despite the fact that it was technically a penitentiary, all of the
inmates were referred to as patients. This hospital was only one of fifteen used by the CIA to conduct
their classified drug experiments. The man who headed the experiments at Lexington was Dr. Harris
Isbell, a CIA contract employee who gave heroin and morphine to patients as payment for volunteering
for his crazy experiments. Jon Rappoport explains that During the 1940s and 50s, it was common
knowledge that musicians who were busted for drugs were shipped, or volunteered to go, to Lexington,
Kentucky (Rappoport). Not only would people voluntarily go to Lexington if they got caught with drugs,
they would commit themselves if the supply got scarce on the street. Dr. Isbells experiments were
anything but orthodox: It is reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77
consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. This is a chemical hammer of incredible proportions
(Rappoport). There is a report from Lexington, dated May 5, 1959, that describes an experiment where
Dr. Isbell strapped down individuals and injected them with psilocybin, the active chemical in
psychoactive mushrooms from the psilocybe genus. The patients then had rectal thermometers inserted
into their anuses and lights flashed into their eyes, which is a classic mind control technique. Dr. Isbell
also served the CIA as a drug conduit. European pharmaceutical companies would provide Dr. Isbell with
whatever drugs he needed since they were simply supplying medicine to a US Public Health official.
From the smuggling of 600 Nazi scientists in the 40s under Project Paperclip to the habitual
dosing of unsuspecting people in the 50s and 60s under MK-ULTRA, the CIA has conducted itself very
incompetently. These operations were kept classified not for the reason of securing the nation, but
rather securing themselves. CIA agents often say these operations arent fit for human consumption,
and hopefully it is clear why they express that concern. This information was gathered from the small

amount of declassified documents that still exist; imagine all of the information in the documents that
were destroyed, not to mention all the documents that are still classified. It is impossible to tell when
this snowballing of mind control operations stopped, so whos to say it stopped at all?