by Paul Wolfe
I glanced at a paragraph in the middle. That’s how I read. I never seem to begin at the beginning. I scribbled down what I read on a yellow pad beside the couch.
“Every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace should begin by looking inward, by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward freedom and peace at home, toward the Soviet Union.”
“This is wonderful,” I said. “They’re going to kill you.” I laughed. Jack hadn’t shown the speech to anybody. He had not cleared it with the war machine for approval, he had not shared it with Central Intelligence, he had not conferred with the Joint Chiefs. “All I need is that son of a bitch LeMay eyeballing this and throwing up all over it. I’m just going to deliver it. Read what Ted wrote at the end.”
I read the end over several times, and Jack let me scribble it down. “Now don’t show it to anybody, Mary. The future of peace in this world just landed on your shoulders. Don’t fuck it up!”
This is what I wrote down, what I still have on my desk on a scrap of lined yellow paper:
We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I have to find the right time and place to deliver the speech.”
“Why not deliver it at a college commencement? You’re allowed to be visionary when you’re talking to students. You can be inspirational. You’re allowed to dream, and you don’t have to clear it with anybody.”
I knew I had touched a nerve. I quoted the phrase back to him: “Jack, we’re all mortal.”
JUNE 11
Jack gave the speech yesterday. He delivered the commencement address at American University, pronouncing the words exactly as I had read them in the White House. Wearing a graduation gown and looking so happy in the sunshine of a Washington spring, Jack announced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I realized I had only seen him in daylight once before. At my urging, he has struck a blow against the cold men that they will not soon forget. He has threatened their livelihood, more precisely their deathlihood. He has departed from the script, and intelligence professionals are men who read scripts, written for the most part in blood.
He reframed the argument with words that will halt, if but for a moment, the suicidal hatred of Russians we have all been programmed to bear. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” The words of Ted Sorensen, the devout Unitarian, the megaphone of Jack’s mind, a poet of politics.
There was no approval for the speech from the Pentagon, no input from the Joint Chiefs, no cooperation from the CIA. Jack stood there on his own, his own man, and delivered the address, leaving the cold men out in the cold. I quietly slipped in and out of the university to watch history, in which I had played my part, though as with so many women in history, anonymously.
Afterward I walked back along Massachusetts Avenue, back toward the cozy streets of Georgetown, thinking the world was now a different place by the sheer act of declaring it so. How lucky I was to be present as the world tilted ever so slightly on its axis toward peace. How lucky I felt to be wearing new tennis sneakers and walking in glittering Washington sunshine past mansions so breathtaking they now belonged to countries instead of people.
And then I noticed three men walking behind me. I felt them suddenly and whirled around. They were not close enough to intrude, but not too far to distinguish their features. Why did I think they were the three who’d huddled with Kirkland Jennings at the Wisners’ party? A deep cold slowly climbed my legs. I’ve lost a son! I felt like shouting at them, screaming at them. You can leave me alone!
I walked faster. I crossed the street. I wondered how fiercely the men in National Security would react to a president urging us to reexamine our natures rather than build more weapons. And what indeed would they say if they knew that shaping the speech at American University, the call for a nuclear test ban treaty, was their own psychedelic drug of choice, LSD?
JUNE 14
Revelation is the natural tendency of information. When a critical mass of secrecy is reached, it seems, secrecy itself begins to unravel and disclosure erupts on a massive scale. This is my only explanation for a note left in my mailbox this morning, signed “V.”
Too many lives have been destroyed.
Meet me at the Key Bridge on the towpath 2 PM Saturday.
Two possible lives diverged from the vortex of that note: the threatened life and the humdrum life. The threatened life, so much more real and vivid a sort of life than the routine one most of us choose. The threatened life, so addicting in its bodily charge, has claimed cloak-and-dagger men like Cord and James, has claimed rebels of spirit like Tim Leary; something in him too must set itself on fire rather than succumb to the deadliness of routine.
I did not choose the threatened life. I simply have a big mouth. And now I must accept threat as an air that I breathe. Now, the nauseating scent of peril mixes with the hydrangeas in the summer air of Georgetown. I read and reread the note, first in disbelief, then with the realization that it is a telegram from the next level of danger. The kind of note they find crumpled up on floors next to bodies.
JUNE 17
I met the young man called V under the Key Bridge by the canal on Saturday, beneath the hum of traffic to Virginia. I will say little about him. He told me he worked in the CIA in the Directorate of Plans, Cord’s department, the department responsible for covert action. I thought the bizarrely banal and bureaucratic name “Directorate of Plans” itself was a form of covert action.
“Why me?” I asked him.
“Many in the Agency feel it has all gone too far. And there are rumors of plans that will go even further. Much further than you can imagine.”
“Why me?” I asked him again.
“We know about you. Everyone knows about you, and we know that you know people. In fact, you know everybody, and we believe you are the only person in such a position of influence who is sympathetic to our thinking.”
“So I’m the designated loudmouth?”
“You can do what you will with the information. My job is to share it. It has never been divulged before.”
What V told me, I accepted. I will bear the truth.
What V told me, I write down from memory, feverishly.
What he told me is the secret history of LSD.
JUNE 18
Allen Dulles unleashed LSD on the world to reengineer the human mind. That was how V began his story. He said Allen Dulles considered the war against Communism a battle for men’s minds, hence mind control the logical mission of the CIA. LSD was the tool of choice for the mission, a mission he code-named MKUltra. “MK” indicates that the operation emerged from the technical services division; “Ultra,” that it carried the highest classification of secrecy.
As the truth of MKUltra spilled out along the towpath, I wondered if rather than being liberated by our acid trips, Timothy Leary and I had simply been dupes in some vast truth serum experiment engineered by Satan himself, Allen Dulles.
For a moment, I felt I could bear no more secrets. I wished to place my forty-two-year-old woman’s body, the body of the mother of two remaining sons, not one inch farther into the realm of danger. The breeze blew gently through my hair and past all the souls of Georgetown, the trees swayed extraordinarily green and silent, the water of the canal flowed along its liquid way. The world was really quite beautiful, and I could simply choose to enjoy it. Real human beings perished in the wake of Joe Alsop’s wine, James Angleton’s cigarettes, my ex-husband’s glass eye. I was qualified to swirl color on canvas and knit winter scarves for my sons in boarding school, but not to bring down Central Intelligence. Not to end the Cold War.
But I am a Pinchot. So I listened to V.
Here is the story he related:
LSD was an accident of
chemistry. In a laboratory in Switzerland in 1943, experimenting with a derivative of the ergot fungus known as lysergic acid, Dr. Albert Hofmann accidentally underwent the world’s first acid trip. When he swallowed his concoction, the boundaries between his mind and the universe dissolved. He had pierced the mystery at the heart of existence, the state of final truth that visionary seekers have pursued since the dawn of time. Dazzled by the discovery, he came to call lysergic acid diethylamide “medicine for the soul.” He happened to pass the formula on to Dr. Harris Isbell, who happened to work with Allen Dulles, at which point the notion of “soul” was dropped from the equation.
Project MKUltra was launched in Lexington, Kentucky, under the guise of the first government drug treatment hospital. Famous black heroin addicts sent there to dry out now became human guinea pigs in a mind-control experiment. Sammy Davis Jr., Sonny Rollins, Elvin Jones, Ray Charles, white bohemian artists such as William Burroughs and trumpeter Chet Baker—they were all heroin addicts, they were all sent to Lexington to dry out, they were all unaware that their minds had become property of the CIA.
Dr. Harris Isbell became a psychedelic Dr. Mengele. He once took seven inmates and gave them four times the normal dose of LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. He strapped nine black men to tables and injected them with psilocybin, inserting rectal thermometers in them, flashing lights in their eyes to measure pupil dilation, having their joints whacked to test neural reactions. Lexington, Kentucky, was the first chapter of Project MKUltra, as related by V.
JUNE 22
Color fields. I have been working at the Jefferson Place Gallery because life goes on, because I am waiting for further revelations from V, because when I am immersed in art I am not immersed in fear. I am a hostess of art now, and Jefferson Place is the epicenter of a new movement, a movement of color fields, and I feel myself at the forefront. We are living color, breathing color, soaking and staining our canvases (I worship you, Helen Frankenthaler!).
I am mounting Kenneth Noland’s exhibition, and the gallery is ablaze with chevrons, circles, bull’s-eyes, triangles, and odd-shaped canvases. I am liberated from the rectangular world, Cord’s world, so black and white and gray and dead. I could feel Kenneth’s eyes on me as I stood on a stepladder hanging his paintings, and I did not mind.
JUNE 26
Kenneth Noland’s show was a triumph. Every painting was sold. The gallery will stay open, and Kenneth will join the pantheon of artists overthrowing art as we know it. He is simplifying abstraction so that the design is not privileged over the pure existence of color. He is eliminating brushwork in favor of staining, thus removing the artist from the art. This is how he explains it.
I have become the Evangeline Bruce of color fields. No aficionado of chitchat, cheese, and wine, I do speak fervently the language of color and shape to the wealthy collectors of Washington.
I seem to be finding myself in revolutions all over the place. Maybe existence itself is revolution, and some of us simply stop at points along the way, and where we end up, we call “life.”
JUNE 28
Roxanne Arcturis says that in the Aquarian Age the role of women will change: “We will activate and harmonize Venusian energies within our aggregate of bodies.” Apparently the spirits channeling the Akashic records for Roxanne neglected to explain to her why we have an aggregate of bodies. One is almost too much for me.
JULY 1
V and I walked up Wisconsin Avenue toward the cathedral, the revelations of MKUltra continuing. Information may be the underlying thread connecting all phenomena, as stated in a Scientific American article I read, and information may be the basic building block of reality. But I have become a repository for information I never wanted to know.
I told V that they broke into my house, that they moved things. I asked if I was at risk, and he didn’t answer. He simply looked at me and asked if he should continue. Yes. I saw that I was still on my own, so I nodded for him to proceed, and he spoke of Operation Midnight Climax. It was the creation of federal narcotics agent and CIA operative George Hunter White, and what he did, I did not want to hear. White created CIA-financed bordellos and sent drug-addicted prostitutes to pick up men, bring them back to the safe house, and ply them with drinks laced with LSD. Psychological research, CIA-style. Poising himself behind a one-way mirror, guzzling martinis from a pitcher and surrounded by photos of manacled women being tortured and whipped, White watched the hallucinating men perform sex with prostitutes, in a bizarre attempt to measure the impact of psychedelic drugs on the human nervous system. George Hunter White was famous for writing: “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” George Hunter White was the man who trained Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleton. Double-hoodwinked, I said, these poor men, seeking nothing more than relief from the unrelievable urge nature has given the male body. Fooled first by prostitutes, then by our government, winding up in an unconsenting state of schizophrenia in a CIA whorehouse.
V told me something else he thought I might find interesting. During the span of MKUltra, as the CIA unleashed LSD on the world, they administered a routine standardized test to prospective employees to gauge their fitness for the CIA. The test had been written by a clinical psychologist named Dr. Timothy Leary.
JULY 12
V left another message in my mailbox. There was a story untold that deserved disclosure before taking its place in the oblivion of a CIA file cabinet. He said it would be the final message left in the mailbox. Any future messages would be left behind the shutter nearest my front door. So once again we walked the towpath from Key Bridge toward Fletcher’s Cove.
The canal flowed on, a wet, silent servant of American history, and V began his story. It concerned a bacteriologist named Frank Olson who helped the CIA conduct experiments in chemical warfare. In one such experiment, it seems, they dosed an unsuspecting town in the south of France with LSD, transforming the unconsenting village of Pont-Saint-Esprit into a tiny, picturesque insane asylum. Suicides, people hurling themselves from rooftops, ripping off clothes and thrashing wildly, people screaming with hallucinations as flowers and snakes arose from their bodies.
To head off an investigation into the bizarre occurrences at Pont-Saint-Esprit, Allen Dulles launched a campaign of disinformation. The sudden outbreak of insanity, according to the explanation, was merely the result of fungus in the bread.
But Frank Olson suffered an affliction unforgivable to Allen Dulles: remorse. Possessing no such faculty himself, Dulles virulently suppressed it in the soldiers of his secret army. So to stop a whistle-blower from raising an explosive whistle to his lips, they plied Frank Olson with LSD for days of reprogramming at a secret CIA facility in the woods. But the acid failed to reinvigorate his Company spirit. In fact, it accelerated his confusion. A week later he mysteriously fell from the twelfth-floor window of a hotel onto the sidewalks of New York.
The official story was that Olson was simply another suicide. Who can fathom the demons that lurk within a human mind? This is the question upon which the CIA has built its citadel. Frank Olson was another perfectly executed CIA suicide.
I looked at V. “Do you think I might end up a suicide? Do you think I may succumb to a massive heart attack one sunny morning in Georgetown? Or accidentally fall from a train in Niagara Falls? There’s no one else I can ask.”
“I can’t worry about you,” V said abruptly. “I’m sorry. I can only tell the tale.”
I am once again unprotected. With a suitcase of secrets to carry, and no one to help me with the luggage.
JULY 17
It’s amazing how much we rely on the people we once enslaved to free us. Kenneth took me to Bohemian Caverns to hear a black saxophone player who had inspired his painting.
I was thrilled to find myself in the Negro precincts of Washington again, feeling more at home here than under the chandeliers of Georgetown. When I was a young journalist in New Y
ork, I went to Minton’s and the Cotton Club in Harlem, and friends were always shocked when they heard it, but I knew I had nothing to fear.
It was midnight when we arrived, and all you could make out in the violet haze of cigarette smoke was silhouettes. A black man wearing an impeccably tight purple suit and pink tie led us to a table near the stage. A musician named John Coltrane was wailing on the saxophone—that is the only word I can find for it, wailing; it was not a sound I had heard before. It was a primal sound, a prehistoric beast screaming in a primeval landscape of earth rather than what we have come to call music. I realized that jazz is abstract art applied to air.
A pianist, a drummer, and a bass player accompanied John Coltrane, but each appeared to be in his own musical world, each emitting sounds through his instrument that seemed random and unstructured, not pertaining to what anyone else was playing, sound with no obvious rhythm to tap your foot to nor melody to hum on your way home. Yet it all seemed to jell. Like Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, it forced you to listen to what was there in the moment rather than rely on recognition of sounds familiar from the past.
I let the sounds wash over me. At times the saxophone sounded melodic, with a jaunty rhythm; then it would lose its footing and approach cacophony, as if it had jumped the tracks of music, and some human voice was screaming at you through the brass tube. Toward the end, the drummer began a stately rolling of drums, like the rolling cadence of timpani in a symphony orchestra, and for a moment the saxophone became melodic, almost biblical. It had a kind of sad, religious feeling to it, and John Coltrane gave me the impression that he wasn’t trying to play, he was just playing, that there was no longer a separation between him and the saxophone, and that is how I would like to paint. The audience seemed transfixed, nodding their heads, and clapped loudly when John Coltrane left the stage. The man in the purple suit jumped to the microphone and in almost a whisper, said: “Ladies and gentlemen. ‘A Love Supreme.’”
