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The Search for the Manchurian CandidateJohn Marks6. Them Unwitting: The SafehousesFrank Olson's death could have been a major setback for the Agency's LSD testing, but the program, like Sid Gottlieb's career, emerged essentially unscathed. High CIA officials did call a temporary halt to all experiments while they investigated the Olson case and re-examined the general policy. They cabled the two field stations that had supplies of the drug (Manila and Atsugi, Japan) not to use it for the time being, and they even took away Sid Gottlieb's own private supply and had it locked up in his boss' safe, to which no one else had the combination. In the end, however, Allen Dulles accepted the view Richard Helms put forth that the only "operationally realistic" way to test drugs was to try them on unwitting people. Helms noted that experiments which gave advance warning would be "pro forma at best and result in a false sense of accomplishment and readiness." For Allen Dulles and his top aides, the possible importance of LSD clearly outweighed the risks and ethical problem of slipping the drug to involuntary subjects. They gave Gottlieb back his LSD. Once the CIA's top echelon had made its decision to continue unwitting testing, there remained, in Richard Helms' words, "only then the question of how best to do it." The Agency's role in the Olson affair had come too perilously close to leaking out for the comfort of the security-minded, so TSS officials simply had to work out a testing system with better cover. That meant finding subjects who could not be so easily traced back to the Agency. Well before Olson's death, Gottlieb and the MKULTRA crew had started pondering how best to do unwitting testing. They considered using an American police force to test drugs on prisoners, informants, and suspects, but they knew that some local politicians would inevitably find out. In the Agency view, such people could not be trusted to keep sensitive secrets. TSS officials thought about trying Federal prisons or hospitals, but, when sounded out, the Bureau of Prisons refused to go along with true unwitting testing (as opposed to the voluntary, if coercive, form practiced on drug addicts in Kentucky). They contemplated moving the program overseas, where they and the ARTICHOKE teams were already performing operational experiments, but they decided if they tested on the scale they thought was necessary, so many foreigners would have to know that it would pose an unacceptable security risk. Sid Gottlieb is remembered as the brainstorming genius of the MKULTRA group—and the one with a real talent for showing others, without hurting their feelings, why their schemes would not work. States an ex-colleague who admires him greatly, "In the final analysis, Sid was like a good soldier—if the job had to be done, he did it. Once the decision was made, he found the most effective way." In this case, Gottlieb came up with the solution after reading through old OSS files on Stanley Lovell's search for a truth drug. Gottlieb noted that Lovell had used George White, a prewar employee of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to test concentrated marijuana. Besides trying the drug out on Manhattan Project volunteers and unknowing suspected Communists, White had slipped some to August Del Gracio, the Lucky Luciano lieutenant. White had called the experiment a great success. If it had not been—if Del Gracio had somehow caught on to the drugging—Gottlieb realized that the gangster would never have gone to the police or the press. His survival as a criminal required he remain quiet about even the worst indignities heaped upon him by government agents. To Gottlieb, underworld types looked like ideal test subjects. Nevertheless, according to one TSS source, "We were not about to fool around with the Mafia." Instead, this source says they chose "the borderline underworld"—prostitutes, drug addicts, and other small-timers who would be powerless to seek any sort of revenge if they ever found out what the CIA had done to them. In addition to their being unlikely whistle-blowers, such people lived in a world where an unwitting dose of some drug—usually knockout drops—was an occupational hazard anyway. They would therefore be better equipped to deal with—and recover from—a surprise LSD trip than the population as a whole. Or so TSS officials rationalized. "They could at least say to themselves, 'Here I go again. I've been slipped a mickey,"' says a TSS veteran. Furthermore, this veteran remembers, his former colleagues reasoned that if they had to violate the civil rights of anyone, they might as well choose a group of marginal people. George White himself had left OSS after the war and returned to the Narcotics Bureau. In 1952 he was working in the New York office. As a high-ranking narcotics agent, White had a perfect excuse to be around drugs and people who used them. He had proved during the war that he had a talent for clandestine work, and he certainly had no qualms when it came to unwitting testing. With his job, he had access to all the possible subjects the Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any other drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the better. From a security viewpoint, CIA officials could easily deny any connection to anything White did, and he clearly was not the crybaby type. For Sid Gottlieb, George White was clearly the one. The MKULTRA chief decided to contact White directly to see if he might be interested in picking up with the CIA where he had left off with OSS. Always careful to observe bureaucratic protocol, Gottlieb first approached Harry Anslinger, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and got permission to use White on a part-time basis. Then Gottlieb traveled to New York and made his pitch to the narcotics agent, who stood 5'7", weighed over 200 pounds, shaved his head, and looked something like an extremely menacing bowling ball. After an early-morning meeting, White scrawled in his sweat-stained, leather-bound diary for that day, June 9, 1952: "Gottlieb proposed I be a CIA consultant—I agree." By writing down such a thing and using Gottlieb's true name,[1] White had broken CIA security regulations even before he started work. But then, White was never known as a man who followed rules. Despite the high priority that TSS put on drug testing, White's security approval did not come through until almost a year later. "It was only last month that I got cleared," the outspoken narcotics agent wrote to a friend in 1953. "I then learned that a couple of crew-cut, pipe-smoking punks had either known me—or heard of me—during OSS days and had decided I was 'too rough' for their league and promptly blackballed me. It was only when my sponsors discovered the root of the trouble they were able to bypass the blockade. After all, fellas, I didn't go to Princeton." People either loved or hated George White, and he had made some powerful enemies, including New York Governor Thomas Dewey and J. Edgar Hoover. Dewey would later help block White from becoming the head of the Narcotics Bureau in New York City, a job White sorely wanted. For some forgotten reason, Hoover had managed to stop White from being hired by the CIA in the Agency's early days, at a time when he would have preferred to leave narcotics work altogether. These were two of the biggest disappointments of his life. White's previous exclusion from the CIA may explain why he jumped so eagerly at Gottlieb's offer and why at the same time he privately heaped contempt on those who worked for the Agency. A remarkably heavy drinker, who would sometimes finish off a bottle of gin in one sitting, White often mocked the CIA crowd over cocktails. "He thought they were a joke," recalls one longtime crony. "They were too complicated, and they had other people do their heavy stuff." Unlike his CIA counterparts, White loved the glare of publicity. A man who gloried in talking about himself and cultivating a hard-nosed image, White knew how to milk a drug bust for all it was worth—a skill that grew out of early years spent as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In search of a more financially secure profession, he had joined the Narcotics Bureau in 1934, but he continued to pal around with journalists, particularly those who wrote favorably about him. Not only did he come across in the press as a cop hero, but he helped to shape the picture of future Kojaks by serving as a consultant to one of the early-television detective series. To start a raid, he would dramatically tip his hat to signal his agents—and to let the photographers know that the time had come to snap his picture. "He was sort of vainglorious," says another good friend, "the kind of guy who if he did something, didn't mind having the world know about it."[2] The scientists from TSS, with their Ph.D.s and lack of street experience, could not help admiring White for his swashbuckling image. Unlike the men from MKULTRA, who, for all their pretensions, had never worked as real-live spies, White had put his life on the line for OSS overseas and had supposedly killed a Japanese agent with his bare hands. The face of one ex-TSS man lit up, like a little boy's on Christmas morning, as he told of racing around New York in George White's car and parking illegally with no fear of the law. "We were Ivy League, white, middle-class," notes another former TSSer. "We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs. He'd purportedly been in a number of shootouts where he'd captured millions of dollars worth of heroin.... He was a pretty wild man. I know I was afraid of him. You couldn't control this guy . . . I had a little trouble telling who was controlling who in those days." White lived with extreme personal contradictions. As could be expected of a narcotics agent, he violently opposed drugs. Yet he died largely because his beloved alcohol had destroyed his liver. He had tried everything else, from marijuana to LSD, and wrote an acquaintance, "I did feel at times I was having a 'mind-expanding' experience but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session." He was a law-enforcement official who regularly violated the law. Indeed, the CIA turned to him because of his willingness to use the power of his office to ride roughshod over the rights of others—in the name of "national security," when he tested LSD for the Agency, in the name of stamping out drug abuse, for the Narcotics Bureau. As yet another close associate summed up White's attitude toward his job, "He really believed the ends justified the means."
George White's "pragmatic" approach meshed perfectly
with Sid Gottlieb's needs for drug testing. In May 1953 the two
men, who wound up going folk dancing together several times, formally
joined forces. In CIA jargon, White became MKULTRA subproject
#3. Under this arrangement, White rented two adjacent Greenwich
Village apartments, posing as the sometime artist and seaman "Morgan
Hall." White agreed to lure guinea pigs to the "safehouse"—as
the Agency men called the apartments—slip them drugs, and report
the results to Gottlieb and the others in TSS. For its part, the
CIA let the Narcotics Bureau use the place for undercover activities
(and often for personal pleasure) whenever no Agency work was
scheduled, and the CIA paid all the bills, including the cost
of keeping a well-stocked liquor cabinet—a substantial bonus
for White. Gottlieb personally handed over the first $4,000 in
cash, to cover the initial costs of furnishing the safehouse in
the lavish style that White felt befitted him.
Most men who go to prostitutes are prepared for the fact that [after the act] she's beginning to work to get herself out of there, so she can get back on the street to make some more money. . . . To find a prostitute who is willing to stay is a hell of a shock to anyone used to prostitutes. It has a tremendous effect on the guy. It's a boost to his ego if she's telling him he was really neat, and she wants to stay for a few more hours.... Most of the time, he gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell's he going to talk about? Not the sex, so he starts talking about his business. It's at this time she can lead him gently. But you have to train prostitutes to do that. Their natural inclination is to do exactly the opposite. The men from MKULTRA learned a great deal about varying sexual preferences. One of them says: We didn't know in those days about hidden sadism and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn't just what we had thought of—you know, the missionary position.... We started to pick up knowledge that could be used in operations, but with a lot of it we never figured out any way to use it operationally. We just learned.... All these ideas did not come to us at once. But evolving over three or four years in which these studies were going on, things emerged which we tried. Our knowledge of prostitutes' behavior became pretty damn good. . . . This comes across now that somehow we were just playing around and we just found all these exotic ways to waste the taxpayers' money on satisfying our hidden urges. I'm not saying that watching prostitutes was not exciting or something like that. But what I am saying was there was a purpose to the whole business.[5] In the best tradition of Mata Hari, the CIA did use sex as a clandestine weapon, although apparently not so frequently as the Russians. While many in the Agency believed that it simply did not work very well, others like CIA operators in Berlin during the mid-1960s felt prostitutes could be a prime source of intelligence. Agency men in that city used a network of hookers to good advantage—or so they told visitors from headquarters. Yet, with its high proportion of Catholics and Mormons—not to mention the Protestant ethic of many of its top leaders—the Agency definitely had limits beyond which prudery took over. For instance, a TSS veteran says that a good number of case officers wanted no part of homosexual entrapment operations. And to go a step further, he recalls one senior KGB man who told too many sexual jokes about young boys. "It didn't take too long to recognize that he was more than a little fascinated by youths," says the source. "I took the trouble to point out he was probably too good, too well-trained, to be either entrapped or to give away secrets. But he would have been tempted toward a compromising position by a preteen. I mentioned this, and they said, 'As a psychological observer, you're probably quite right. But what the hell are we going to do about it? Where are we going to get a twelve-year-old boy?' " The source believes that if the Russian had had a taste for older men, U.S. intelligence might have mounted an operation, "but the idea of a twelve-year-old boy was just more than anybody could stomach."
As the TSS men learned more about the San Francisco hustlers,
they ventured outside the safehouse to try out various clandestine-delivery
gimmicks in public places like restaurants, bars, and beaches.
They practiced ways to slip LSD to citizens of the demimonde while
buying them a drink or lighting up a cigarette, and they then
tried to observe the effects when the drug took hold. Because
the MKULTRA scientists did not move smoothly among the very kinds
of people they were testing, they occasionally lost an unwitting
victim in a crowd—thereby sending a stranger off alone with
a head full of LSD.
If TSS officials had been willing to stick with their original
target group of marginal underworld types, they would have had
little to fear from the police. After all, George White was the
police. But increasingly they used the safehouse to test drugs,
in the Inspector General's words, "on individuals of all
social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."
After all, they were looking for an operational payoff, and they
knew people reacted differently to LSD according to everything
from health and mood to personality structure. If TSS officials
wanted to slip LSD to foreign leaders, as they contemplated doing
to Fidel Castro, they would try to spring an unwitting dose on
somebody as similar as possible. They used the safehouse for "dry
runs" in the intermediate stage between the laboratory and
actual operations.
The MKULTRA crew continued unwitting testing until the summer
of 1963 when the Agency's Inspector General stumbled across the
safehouses during a regular inspection of TSS activities. This
happened not long after Director John McCone had appointed John
Earman to the Inspector General position.[8]
Much to the displeasure of Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms, Earman
questioned the propriety of the safehouses, and he insisted that
Director McCone be given a full briefing. Although President Kennedy
had put McCone in charge of the Agency the year before, Helms—the
professional's professional—had not bothered to tell his outsider
boss about some of the CIA's most sensitive activities, including
the safehouses and the CIA-Mafia assassination plots.[9]
Faced with Earman's demands, Helms—surely one of history's most
clever bureaucrats—volunteered to tell McCone himself about
the safehouses (rather than have Earman present a negative view
of the program). Sure enough, Helms told Earman afterward, McCone
raised no objections to unwitting testing (as Helms described
it). A determined man and a rather brave one, Earman countered
with a full written report to McCone recommending that the safehouses
be closed. The Inspector General cited the risks of exposure and
pointed out that many people both inside and outside the Agency
found "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior
. . . to be distasteful and unethical." McCone reacted by
putting off a final decision but suspending unwitting testing
in the meantime. Over the next year, Helms, who then headed the
Clandestine Services, wrote at least three memos urging resumption.
He cited "indications . . . of an apparent Soviet aggressiveness
in the field of covertly administered chemicals which are, to
say the least, inexplicable and disturbing," and he claimed
the CIA's "positive operational capacity to use drugs is
diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing."[10]
To Richard Helms, the importance of the program exceeded the risks
and the ethical questions, although he did admit, "We have
no answer to the moral issue." McCone simply did nothing
for two years. The director's indecision had the effect of killing
the program, nevertheless. TSS officials closed the San Francisco
safehouse in 1965 and the New York one in 1966.
After 10 years of unwitting testing, the men from MKULTRA apparently
scored no major breakthroughs with LSD or other drugs. They found
no effective truth drug, recruitment pill, or aphrodisiac. LSD
had not opened up the mind to CIA control. "We had thought
at first that this was the secret that was going to unlock the
universe," says a TSS veteran. "We found that human
beings had resources far greater than imagined."
NotesThe CIA's reaction to Frank Olson's death is described in numerous memos released by the Agency to the Olson family, which can be found at pp.1005-1132 of the Kennedy Subcommittee 1975 hearings on Biomedical and Behavioral Research. See particularly at p. 1077, 18 December 1953, Subject: The Suicide of Frank Olson and at p. 1027, 1 December 1953, Subject: Use of LSD.Richard Helms' views on unwitting testing are found in Document #448, 17 December 1963, Subject: Testing of Psychochemicals and Related Materials and in a memorandum to the CIA Director, June 9, 1964, quoted from on page 402 of the Church Committee Report, Book I. George White's diary and letters were donated by his widow to Foothills Junior College, Los Altos, California and are the source of a treasure chest of material on him, including his letter to a friend explaining his almost being "blackballed" from the CIA, the various diary entries cited, including references to folk-dancing with Gottlieb, the interview with Hal Lipset where he explains his philosophy on chasing criminals, and his letter to Sid Gottlieb dated November 21, (probably) 1972. The New York and San Francisco safehouses run by George White are the subjects of MKULTRA subprojects 3,14,16,42, and 149. White's tips to the landlord are described in 42-156, his liquor bills in 42-157, "dry-runs" in 42-91. The New York safehouse run by Charles Siragusa is subproject 132. The "intermediate" tests are described in document 132-59. Paul Avery, a San Francisco freelance writer associated with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland, California interviewed William Hawkins and provided assistance on the details of the San Francisco safehouse and George White's background. Additional information on White came from interviews with his widow, several former colleagues in the Narcotics Bureau, and other knowledgeable sources in various San Francisco law-enforcement agencies. An ex-Narcotics Bureau official told of Dr. James Hamilton's study of unusual sexual practices and the description of his unwitting drug testing comes from MKULTRA subproject 2, which is his subproject. Ray Treichler discussed some of his work with harassment substances in testimony before the Kennedy subcommittee on September 20, 1977, pp. 105-8. He delivered his testimony under the pseudonym "Philip Goldman." "The Gang that Couldn't Spray Straight" article appeared in the September 20, 1977 Washington Post. Richard Helms' decision not to tell John McCone about the CIA's connection to the Mafia in assassination attempts against Castro is described in the Church Committee's Assassination report, pp. 102-3. The 1957 Inspector General's Report on TSS, Document #417 and the 1963 inspection of MKULTRA, 14 August 1963, Document #59 provided considerable detail throughout the entire chapter. The Church Committee Report on MKULTRA in Book I, pp. 385-422 also provided considerable information. Sid Gottlieb's job as Assistant to the Clandestine Services chief for Scientific Matters is described in Document #74 (operational series) 20 October 1959, Subject: Application of Imaginative Research on the Behavioral and Physical Sciences to [deleted] Problems" and in the 1963 Inspector General's report. Interviews with ex-CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, another former Inspector General's staff employee, and several ex-TSS staffers contributed significantly to this chapter. Helms' letter to the Warren Commission on "Soviet Brainwashing Techniques," dated 19 June 1964, was obtained from the National Archives. The material on the CIA's operational use of LSD came from the Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 399-403 and from an affidavit filed in the Federal Court case of John D. Marks v. Central Intelligence Agency, et. al., Civil Action No. 76-2073 by Eloise R. Page, Chief, Policy and Coordination Staff of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. In listing all the reasons why the Agency should not provide the operational documents, Ms. Page gave some information on what was in the documents. The passages on TSS's and the Medical Office's positions on the use of LSD came from a memo written by James Angleton, Chief, Counterintelligence Staff on December 12, 1957 quoted in part at p. 401 of the Church Committee Report, Book I.
Footnotes1. CIA operators and agents all had cover names by which they were supposed to be called—even in classified documents. Gottlieb was "Sherman R. Grifford." George White became "Morgan Hall." (back)2. One case which put White in every newspaper in the country was his 1949 arrest of blues singer Billie Holliday on an opium charge. To prove she had been set up and was not then using drugs, the singer checked into a California sanitarium that had been recommended by a friend of a friend, Dr. James Hamilton. The jury then acquitted her. Hamilton's involvement is bizarre because he had worked with George White testing truth drugs for OSS, and the two men were good friends. White may have put his own role in perspective when he told a 1970 interviewer he "enjoyed" chasing criminals. "It was a game for me," he said. "I felt quite a bit of compassion for a number of the people that I found it necessary to put in jail, particularly when you'd see the things that would happen to their families. I'd give them a chance to stay out of jail and take care of their families by giving me information, perhaps, and they would stubbornly refuse to do so. They wouldn't be a rat, as they would put it." (back) 3. Despite this indication from White's diary that Lashbrook came to the New York safehouse for an "LSD surprise" and despite his signature on papers authorizing the subproject, Lashbrook flatly denied all firsthand knowledge of George White's testing in 1977 Senate testimony. Subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy did not press Lashbrook, nor did he refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible perjury charges. (back) 4. This was just one of many expenditures that would drive CIA auditors wild while going over George White's accounts. Others included $44.04 for a telescope, liquor bills over $1,000 "with no record as to the necessity of its use," and $31.75 to make an on-the-spot payment to a neighborhood lady whose car he hit. The reason stated for using government funds for the last expense: "It was important to maintain security and forestall an insurance investigation." (back) 5. In 1984, George Orwell wrote about government-encouraged prostitution: "Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class." (back) 6. In 1961 MKULTRA officials started a third safehouse in New York, also under the Narcotics Bureau's supervision. This one was handled by Charles Siragusa who, like White, was a senior agent and OSS veteran. (back) 7. Rhodes' testimony about this incident, which had been set up in advance with Senator Edward Kennedy's staff, brought on the inevitable "Gang That Couldn't Spray Straight" headline in the Washington Post. This approach turned the public perception of a deadly serious program into a kind of practical joke carried out badly by a bunch of bumblers. (back) 8. Lyman Kirkpatrick, the longtime Inspector General who had then recently left the job to take a higher Agency post, had personally known of the safehouse operation since right after Olson's death and had never raised any noticeable objection. He now states he was "shocked" by the unwitting testing, but that he "didn't have the authority to follow up . . . I was trying to determine what the tolerable limits were of what I could do and still keep my job." (back) 9. Trying to explain why he had specifically decided not to inform the CIA Director about the Agency's relationship with the mob, Helms stated to the Church committee, "Mr. McCone was relatively new to this organization, and I guess I must have thought to myself, well this is going to look peculiar to him . . . This was, you know not a very savory effort." Presumably, Helms had similar reasons for not telling McCone about the unwitting drug-testing in the safehouses. (back) 10. Helms was a master of telling different people different stories to suit his purposes. At the precise time he was raising the Soviet menace to push McCone into letting the unwitting testing continue, he wrote the Warren Commission that not only did Soviet behavioral research lag five years behind the West's but that "there is no present evidence that the Soviets have any singular, new potent, drugs . . . to force a course of action on an individual." (back) 11. TSS officials led by Sid Gottlieb, who were responsible for the operational use of LSD abroad, took the position that there was "no danger medically" in unwitting doses and that neither giving a medical exam or having a doctor present was necessary. The Agency's Medical Office disagreed, saying the drug was "medically dangerous." In 1957 Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick noted it would be "unrealistic" to give the Medical Office what amounted to veto power over covert operations by letting Agency doctors rule on the health hazard to subjects in the field. (back) 12. While I was doing the research for this book, many people approached me claiming to be victims of CIA drugging plots. Although I listened carefully to all and realized that some might be authentic victims, I had no way of distinguishing between someone acting strangely and someone made to act strangely. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this whole technique is that anyone blaming his aberrant behavior on a drug or on the CIA gets labeled a hopeless paranoid and his case is thrown into the crank file. There is no better cover than operating on the edge of madness. One leftist professor in a Latin American university who had opposed the CIA says that he was working alone in his office one day in 1974 when a strange woman entered and jabbed his wrist with a pin stuck in a small round object. Almost immediately, he become irrational, broke glasses, and threw water in colleagues' faces. He says his students spotted an ambulance waiting for him out front. They spirited him out the back door and took him home, where he tripped (or had psychotic episodes) for more than a week. He calls the experience a mix of "heaven and hell," and he shudders at the thought that he might have spent the time in a hospital "with nurses and straitjackets." Although he eventually returned to his post at the university, he states that it took him several years to recover the credibility he lost the day he "went crazy at the office." If the CIA was involved, it had neutralized a foe. (back) Chapter 7Send e-mail to The Psychedelic Library: psd_library@druglibrary.orgContents | Feedback | Search | DRCNet Library | Schaffer Library The Psychedelic Library | Book Menu |