Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed the pack.... We sat down with a particular soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something like "This is better than being overseas and getting shot at," and we would try to break them. We started asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the folder on them... We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass. The stuff actually worked.... Everyone but one—and he didn't smoke—gave us more information than we had before.
Since World War II, the United States government, led by the
Central Intelligence Agency, has searched secretly for ways to control human
behavior. This book is about that search, which had its origins in World War II.
The CIA programs were not only an extension of the OSS quest for a truth drug,
but they also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and Albert
Hofmann's discovery of LSD.
By probing the inner reaches of consciousness, Hofmann's
research took him to the very frontiers of knowledge. As never before in
history, the warring powers sought ideas from scientists capable of reaching
those frontiers—ideas that could make the difference between victory and
defeat. While Hofmann himself remained aloof, in the Swiss tradition, other
scientists, like Albert Einstein, helped turned the abstractions of the
laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons. Jules Verne's notions of
spaceships touching the moon stopped being absurd when Wernher von Braun's
rockets started pounding London. With their creations, the scientists reached
beyond the speculations of science fiction. Never before had their discoveries
been so breathtaking and so frightening. Albert Hofmann's work touched upon the
fantasies of the mind—accessible, in ancient legends, to witches and wizards
who used spells and potions to bring people under their sway. In the early
scientific age, the dream of controlling the brain took on a modern form in Mary
Shelley's creation, Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The dream would be updated again
during the Cold War era to become the Manchurian Candidate, the assassin whose
mind was controlled by a hostile government.[4]
Who could say for certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality
like Verne's rocket stories or Einstein's calculations? And who should be
surprised to learn that government agencies—specifically the CIA—would swoop
down on Albert Hofmann's lab in an effort to harness the power over the mind
that LSD seemed to hold?
From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty that man was
capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of advancing science and helping
his country gain advantage in war. To say that the Dachau experiments are object
lessons of how far people can stretch ends to justify means is to belittle by
cliché what occurred in the concentration camps. Nothing the CIA ever did in
its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to the callous killing
of the Nazi "aviation research." Nevertheless, in their attempts to
find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents crossed many
of the same ethical barriers. They experimented with dangerous and unknown
techniques on people who had no idea what was happening. They systematically
violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the
Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they
considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own.
Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for subjects
their own equivalents of the Nazis' Jews and gypsies: mental patients,
prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic
groups.
In the postwar era, American officials straddled the ethical
and the cutthroat approaches to scientific research. After an Allied tribunal
had convicted the first echelon of surviving Nazi war criminals—the Görings
and Speers—American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with "crimes
against humanity" at a second Nuremberg trial. None of the German
scientists expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else had carried out the
vilest experiments. All said that issues of moral and personal responsibility
are moot in state-sponsored research. What is critical, testified Dr. Karl
Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, is "whether the experiment is
important or unimportant." Asked his attitude toward killing human beings
in the course of medical research, Brandt replied, "Do you think that one
can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of
lives?" The judges at Nuremberg rejected such defenses and put forth what
came to be known as the Nuremberg Code on scientific research.[5]
Its main points were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from
all subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of society
that can be obtained in no other way; researchers should not conduct tests where
death or serious injury might occur, "except, perhaps" when the
supervising doctors also serve as subjects. The judges—all Americans—
sentenced seven of the Germans, including Dr. Brandt, to death by hanging. Nine
others received long prison sentences. Thus, the U.S. government put its full
moral force behind the idea that there were limits on what scientists could do
to human subjects, even when a country's security was thought to hang in the
balance.
The Nuremberg Code has remained official American policy ever
since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in, special U.S. investigating
teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of
military value. The report of one such team found that while part of the data
was "inaccurate," some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be
"an important complement to existing knowledge." Military authorities
sent the records, including a description of the mescaline and hypnosis
experiments, back to the United States. None of the German mind-control research
was ever made public.
Immediately after the war, large political currents began to
shift in the world, as they always do. Allies became enemies and enemies became
allies. Other changes were fresh and yet old. In the United States, the new Cold
War against communism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping
sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were concerned. Out of
these feelings and out of that overriding American faith in advancing technology
came the CIA's attempts to tame hostile minds and make spy fantasies real.
Experiments went forward and the CIA's scientists—bitten, sometimes
obsessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjustment. Some
theories were crushed, while others emerged in unexpected ways that would have a
greater impact outside the CIA than in the world of covert operations. Only one
aspect remained constant during the quarter-century of active research: The
CIA's interest in controlling the human mind had to remain absolutely secret.
World War II provided more than the grand themes of the CIA's
behavioral programs. It also became the formative life experience of the
principal CIA officials, and, indeed, of the CIA itself as an institution. The
secret derring-do of the OSS was new to the United States, and the ways of the
OSS would grow into the ways of the CIA. OSS leaders would have their
counterparts later in the Agency. CIA officials tended to have known the OSS
men, to think like them, to copy their methods, and even, in some cases, to be
the same people. When Agency officials wanted to launch their massive effort for
mind control, for instance, they got out the old OSS documents and went about
their goal in many of the same ways the OSS had. OSS leaders enlisted outside
scientists; Agency officials also went to the most prestigious ones in academia
and industry, soliciting aid for the good of the country. They even approached
the same George White who had shot his initials in the hotel ceiling while on
OSS assignment.
Years later, White's escapades with OSS and CIA would carry
with them a humor clearly unintended at the time. To those directly involved,
influencing human behavior was a deadly serious business, but qualities like
bumbling and pure craziness shine through in hindsight. In the CIA's campaign,
some of America's most distinguished behavioral scientists would stick all kinds
of drugs and wires into their experimental subjects—often dismissing the
obviously harmful effects with theories reminiscent of the learned
nineteenth-century physicians who bled their patients with leeches and belittled
the ignorance of anyone who questioned the technique. If the schemes of these
scientists to control the mind had met with more success, they would be much
less amusing. But so far, at least, the human spirit has apparently kept
winning. That—if anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign.
World War II signaled the end of American isolation and
innocence, and the United States found it had a huge gap to close, with its
enemies and allies alike, in applying underhanded tactics to war. Unlike
Britain, which for hundreds of years had used covert operations to hold her
empire together, the United States had no tradition of using subversion as a
secret instrument of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Russians,
and nearly everyone else had long been involved in this game, although no one
seemed as good at it as the British.
Clandestine lobbying by British agents in the United States
led directly to President Franklin Roosevelt's creation of the organization that
became OSS in 1942. This was the first American agency set up to wage secret,
unlimited war. Roosevelt placed it under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and
World War I military hero, General William "Wild Bill" Donovan. A
burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great intellectual curiosity,
Donovan started as White House intelligence adviser even before Pearl Harbor,
and he had direct access to the President.
Learning at the feet of the British who made available their
expertise, if not all their secrets, Donovan put together an organization where
nothing had existed before. A Columbia College and Columbia Law graduate
himself, he tended to turn to the gentlemanly preserves of the Eastern
establishment for recruits. (The initials OSS were said to stand for "Oh So
Social.") Friends—or friends of friends—could be trusted. "Old
boys" were the stalwarts of the British secret service, and, as with most
other aspects of OSS, the Americans followed suit.
One of Donovan's new recruits was Richard Helms, a young
newspaper executive then best known for having gained an interview with Adolf
Hitler in 1936 while working for United Press. Having gone to Le Rosey, the same
Swiss prep school as the Shah of Iran, and then on to clubby Williams College
Helms moved easily among the young OSS men. He was already more taciturn than
the jovial Donovan, but he was equally ambitious and skilled as a judge of
character. For Helms, OSS spywork began a lifelong career. He would become the
most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA, nurturing and
promoting it throughout his steady climb to the top position in the Agency.
Like every major wartime official from President Roosevelt
down, General Donovan believed that World War II was in large measure a battle
of science and organization. The idea was to mobilize science for defense, and
the Roosevelt administration set up a costly, intertwining network of research
programs to deal with everything from splitting the atom to preventing mental
breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston industrialist Stanley Lovell to head
OSS Research and Development and to be the secret agency's liaison with the
government scientific community.
A Cornell graduate and a self-described "saucepan
chemist," Lovell was a confident energetic man with a particular knack for
coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others Like most of his
generation, he was an outspoken patriot. He wrote in his diary shortly after
Pearl Harbor: "As James Hilton said, 'Once at war, to reason is treason.'
My job is clear—to do all that is in me to help America."
General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he
expected of Lovell: "I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick
to use against the Germans and Japanese—by our own people—but especially by
the underground resistance programs in all the occupied countries. You'll have
to invent them all, Lovell, because you're going to be my man." Thus Lovell
recalled his marching orders from Donovan, which he instantly received on being
introduced to the blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met anyone
with Donovan's personal magnetism.
Lovell quickly turned to some of the leading lights in the
academic and private sectors. A special group—called Division 19—within
James Conant's National Defense Research Committee was set up to produce
"miscellaneous weapons" for OSS and British intelligence. Lovell's
strategy, he later wrote, was "to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the
surface of every American scientist and to say to him, 'Throw all your normal
law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell.'"
Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who worked on
explosives research during the war (and who became science adviser to Presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy) remembers Stanley Lovell well: "Stan came to us and
asked us to develop ways for camouflaging explosives which could be smuggled
into enemy countries." Kistiakowsky and an associate came up with a
substance which was dubbed "Aunt Jemima" because it looked and tasted
like pancake mix. Says Kistiakowsky: "You could bake bread or other things
out of it. I personally took it to a high-level meeting at the War Department
and ate cookies in front of all those characters to show them what a wonderful
invention it was. All you had to do was attach a powerful detonator, and it
exploded with the force of dynamite." Thus disguised, "Aunt
Jemima" could be slipped into occupied lands. It was credited with blowing
up at least one major bridge in China.
Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find something
that would offend Japanese cultural sensibilities. His staff anthropologists
reported back that nothing was so shameful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel
movements. Lovell then had the chemists work up a skatole compound which
duplicated the odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible tubes, flown to
China, and distributed to children in enemy-occupied cities. When a Japanese
officer appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind
him and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the product
"Who? Me?" and he credited it with costing the Japanese
"face."
Unlike most weapons, "Who? Me?" was not designed to
kill or maim. It was a "harassment substance" designed to lower the
morale of individual Japanese. The inspiration came from academicians who tried
to make a science of human behavior. During World War II, the behavioral
sciences were still very much in their infancy, but OSS—well before most of
the outside world—recognized their potential in warfare. Psychology and
psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology all seemed to offer insights that could
be exploited to manipulate the enemy.
General Donovan himself believed that the techniques of
psychoanalysis might be turned on Adolf Hitler to get a better idea of "the
things that made him tick," as Donovan put it. Donovan gave the job of
being the Fuhrer's analyst to Walter Langer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts
psychoanalyst whose older brother William had taken leave from a chair of
history at Harvard to head OSS Research and Analysis.[6]
Langer protested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be highly
uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic methods could not
be used without direct access to the patient. Donovan was not the sort to be
deterred by such details. He told Langer to go ahead anyway.
With the help of a small research staff, Langer looked
through everything he could find on Hitler and interviewed a number of people
who had know the German leader. Aware of the severe limitations on his
information, but left no choice by General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and
wrote up a final study. It pegged Hitler as a "neurotic psychopath"
and proceeded to pick apart the Führer's psyche. Langer, since retired to
Florida, believes he came "pretty close" to describing the real Adolf
Hitler. He is particularly proud of his predictions that the Nazi leader would
become increasingly disturbed as Germany suffered more and more defeats and that
he would commit suicide rather than face capture.
One reason for psychoanalyzing Hitler was to uncover
vulnerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell seized upon one
of Langer's ideas—that Hitler might have feminine tendencies—and got
permission from the OSS hierarchy to see if he could push the Führer over the
gender line.[7]
"The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become
soprano," Lovell wrote. Lovell used OSS's agent network to try to slip
female sex hormones into Hitler's food, but nothing apparently came of it. Nor
was there ever any payoff to other Lovell schemes to blind Hitler permanently
with mustard gas or to use a drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main
problem in these operations—all of which were tried—was to get Hitler to
take the medicine. Failure of the delivery schemes also kept Hitler alive—OSS
was simultaneously trying to poison him.[8]
Without question, murdering a man was a decisive way to
influence his behavior, and OSS scientists developed an arsenal of chemical and
biological poisons that included the incredibly potent botulinus toxin, whose
delivery system was a gelatin capsule smaller than the head of a pin. Lovell and
his associates also realized there were less drastic ways to manipulate an
enemy's behavior, and they came up with a line of products to cause sickness,
itching, baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor thereof. They had less success
finding a drug to compel truthtelling, but it was not for lack of trying.
Chemical and biological substances had been used in wartime
long before OSS came on the scene. Both sides had used poison gas in World War
I; during the early part of World War II, the Japanese had dropped deadly germs
on China and caused epidemics; and throughout the war, the Allies and Axis
powers alike had built up chemical and biological warfare (CBW) stockpiles,
whose main function turned out, in the end, to be deterring the other side.
Military men tended to look on CBW as a way of destroying whole armies and even
populations. Like the world's other secret services, OSS individualized CBW and
made it into a way of selectively but secretly embarrassing, disorienting,
incapacitating, injuring, or killing an enemy.
As diversified as were Lovell's scientific duties for OSS,
they were narrow in comparison with those of his main counterpart in the CIA's
postwar mind-control program, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb would preside over
investigations that ranged from advanced research in amnesia by electroshock to
dragnet searches through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves and
barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler moustacheless, Gottlieb's office
would devise a scheme to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out; like Lovell,
Gottlieb would personally provide operators with deadly poisons to assassinate
foreign leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and he would be equally at
ease discussing possible applications of new research in neurology. On a much
greater scale than Lovell's, Gottlieb would track down every conceivable gimmick
that might give one person leverage over another's mind. Gottlieb would preside
over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to stress creation, and he would
rise through the Agency along with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.
Early in the war, General Donovan got another idea from the
British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had devised a testing program to
predict the performance of military officers. Donovan thought such a program
might help OSS sort through the masses of recruits who were being rushed through
training. To create an assessment system for Americans, Donovan called in
Harvard psychology professor Henry "Harry" Murray. In 1938 Murray had
written Explorations of Personality, a notable book which laid out a
whole battery of tests that could be used to size up the personalities of
individuals. "Spying is attractive to loonies," states Murray.
"Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel
in the field." The program's prime objective, according to Murray, was
keeping out the crazies, as well as the "sloths, irritants, bad actors, and
free talkers."
Always in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray and a distinguished
group of colleagues only 15 days until the first candidates arrived to be
assessed. In the interim, they took over a spacious estate outside Washington as
their headquarters. In a series of hurried meetings, they put together an
assessment system that combined German and British methods with Murray's earlier
research. It tested a recruit's ability to stand up under pressure, to be a
leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person's character by
the nature of his clothing.
More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in
his claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an aid in weeding
out the "horrors" among OSS candidates. Nevertheless, the secret
agency's leaders believed in its results, and Murray's system became a fixture
in OSS, testing Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray's young
behavioral scientists, like John Gardner,[9]
would go on to become prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the
OSS assessment program would be recognized as a milestone in American
psychology. It was the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual's
personality in order to predict his future behavior. After the war, personality
assessment would become a new field in itself, and some of Murray's assistants
would go on to establish OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with
AT&T. They also would set up study programs at universities, beginning with
the University of California at Berkeley.[10]
As would happen repeatedly with the CIA's mind-control research, OSS was years
ahead of public developments in behavioral theory and application.
In the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young
Oklahoma psychologist John Gittinger, who would rise in the CIA on the strength
of his ideas about how to make a hard science out of personality assessment and
how to use it to manipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within CIA
that refined both Murray's assessment function and Walter Langer's indirect
analysis of foreign leaders. Gittinger's methods would become an integral part
of everyday Agency operations, and he would become Sid Gottlieb's protégé.
Stanley Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler—and
the OSS man was always looking for ideas—would be to hypnotically control a
German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the Nazi regime and then to give the
subject a hypnotic suggestion to assassinate the Führer. The OSS candidate
would be let loose in Germany where he would take the desired action,
"being under a compulsion that might not be denied," as Lovell wrote.
Lovell sought advice on whether this scheme would work from
New York psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie and from the famed Menninger brothers, Karl
and William. The Menningers reported that the weight of the evidence showed
hypnotism to be incapable of making people do anything that they would not
otherwise do. Equally negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a German prisoner had a
logical reason to kill Hitler or anyone else, he would not need hypnotism to
motivate him.
Lovell and his coworkers apparently accepted this skeptical
view of hypnosis, as did the overwhelming majority of psychologists and
psychiatrists in the country. At the time, hypnosis was considered a fringe
activity, and there was little recognition of either its validity or its
usefulness for any purpose—let alone covert operations. Yet there were a
handful of serious experimenters in the field who believed in its military
potential. The most vocal partisan of this view was the head of the Psychology
Department at Colgate University, George "Esty" Estabrooks. Since the
early 1930s, Estabrooks had periodically ventured out from his sleepy upstate
campus to advise the military on applications of hypnotism.
Estabrooks acknowledged that hypnosis did not work on
everyone and that only one person in five made a good enough subject to be
placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism. He believed that only these
subjects could be induced to such things against their apparent will as reveal
secrets or commit crimes. He had watched respected members of the community make
fools of themselves in the hands of stage hypnotists, and he had compelled his
own students to reveal fraternity secrets and the details of private love
affairs—all of which the subjects presumably did not want to do.
Still his experience was limited. Estabrooks realized that
the only certain way to know whether a person would commit a crime like murder
under hypnosis was to have the person kill someone. Unwilling to settle the
issue on his own by trying the experiment, he felt that government sanction of
the process would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. "Any
'accidents' that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to
profit and loss," he wrote, "a very trifling portion of that enormous
wastage in human life which is part and parcel of war."
After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to OSS, but
they were not accepted by anyone in government willing to carry them to their
logical conclusion. He was reduced to writing books about the potential use of
hypnotism in warfare. Cassandra-like, he tried to warn America of the perils
posed by hypnotic control. His 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, concerned a
series of seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied personnel: an American
submarine captain torpedoes one of our own battleships, and the beautiful
heroine starts acting in an irrational way which serves the enemy. After a
perilous investigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans have
been hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them to obey Nazi commands.
Evans and his cohorts, shaken by the many ways hypnotism can be used against
them, set up elaborate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the
offensive. Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this time has been
brutally and rather graphically tortured. She complains that "doing things
to people's minds" is "a loathsome way to fight." Her qualms are
brushed aside by Johnny Evans, her lover and boss. He sets off after the
Germans—"to tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work
for us."
In the aftermath of the war, as the U.S. national security
apparatus was being constructed, the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency
would adopt Johnny Evans' mission—almost in those very words. Richard Helms,
Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and many others would undertake a
far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. In hypnosis and many other
fields, scientists even more eager than George Estabrooks would seek CIA
approval for the kinds of experiments they would not dare perform on their own.
Sometimes the Agency men concurred; on other occasions, they reserved such
experiments for themselves. They would tamper with many minds and inevitably
cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds,
and they would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own minds.