Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Isbell had conducted “truth serum” experiments for the Office of Naval Research and was curious about LSD. In his small world, the CIA’s interest in LSD was an open secret. Early in 1953 he wrote to ask if the Agency could supply him with “a reasonably large quantity of the drug [for] a study of the mental and other pharmacological effects produced by the chronic administration of the diethyl-amide of lysergic acid.”

  That request caught Gottlieb’s attention. Isbell combined a fervent interest in psychoactive drugs with a ready supply of prisoners and a willingness to use them as research subjects. That made him an ideal MK-ULTRA contractor. On a July day in 1953, Gottlieb visited him in Lexington. They struck a deal. Gottlieb would provide LSD and whatever funds were necessary. Isbell would design and conduct experiments, provide subjects, and file reports.

  Carefully observing bureaucratic protocol, Gottlieb cleared this deal with Isbell’s superiors. He later wrote that he informed them, “in a secure manner, of our interest in and support of the research program of Dr. Harris Isbell … and of our financial support of it.” He gave them no details of the “research program.” They asked for none. As soon as Dr. William Sebrell, director of the National Institutes of Health, understood that this was a CIA project, Gottlieb wrote in his report, he “approved highly of our general aims and indicated that he would afford us full support and protection.”

  “The deal was pretty simple,” one investigator later wrote. “The CIA needed a place to test dangerous and possibly addictive drugs; Isbell had a large number of drug users in no position to complain. From the early 1950s onward, the Agency shipped LSD, with any number of other potentially dangerous narcotics, to Kentucky to be tested on human guinea pigs.”

  Isbell’s MK-ULTRA contracts included Subproject 73, to test whether LSD, mescaline, or other drugs could make users more susceptible to hypnosis; Subproject 91, to “perform pre-clinical pharmacology studies required to develop new psycho-chemicals”; and Subproject 147, to study psychotomimetic drugs, a class that produces delusions and delirium. He went on to write or co-author more than one hundred scientific articles, many of them reporting the results of drug experiments. In these articles he refers to his inmate subjects as volunteers. The degree of their informed consent, however, is highly debatable. They were not told what sort of drug they would be fed or what its effects might be. To attract them, Isbell offered rewards including doses of high-grade heroin to feed the habit he was supposedly helping them break. One of his articles refers to a volunteer who “felt that he would die or would become permanently insane” after being given 180 micrograms of LSD, asked not to be dosed again, and required “considerable persuasion” before agreeing to continue.

  “I feel sure you will be interested to learn that we were able to begin our experiments with LSD-25 during the month of July,” Isbell wrote to Gottlieb soon after they met. “We obtained five subjects who agreed to take the drug chronically. All of these were negro male patients.”

  A month later Isbell provided an update. He had steadily increased the dosage of LSD he administered to his subjects, up to 300 micrograms. “The mental effects of LSD-25 were very striking,” he told Gottlieb. “[They] included anxiety, a feeling of unreality … feelings of electric shocks on the skin, tingling sensations, choking … Marked changes in visual perception were reported. These included blurring of vision, abnormal coloration of familiar objects (hands turning purple, green etc.), flickering shadows, dancing dots of light, and spinning circles of color. Frequently, inanimate objects were distorted and changed in size.”

  This did not add much to what Gottlieb already knew, but he was pleased to have secured a supply of “expendables” for research inside the United States. He visited Lexington several times to observe Isbell’s experiments. Sometimes he brought Frank Olson or another of his colleagues. All recognized Isbell as a uniquely valuable collaborator.

  Later it turned out that one of Isbell’s victims was William Henry Wall, a physician and former state senator from Georgia who had become addicted to the painkiller Demerol after a dental procedure. In 1953 he was arrested on drug charges, convicted, and sentenced to a term at the Addiction Research Center. There he became a subject in Isbell’s LSD experiments. They left him mentally crippled. For the rest of his life he suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks, and suicidal impulses. A book that his son later wrote about the case is entitled From Healing to Hell.

  “What Harris Isbell did to my father was to assault him with a poison that permanently damaged his brain,” the book says. “The CIA’s ill-conceived covert Cold War scheme to find a mind-control drug for use on hostile leaders had caught my father in its hateful web.”

  One of Isbell’s experiments may have been the most extreme in the history of LSD research. Gottlieb wanted to test the effect of heavy doses over an extended period of time. Isbell selected seven prisoners, isolated them, and began the experiment. “I have 7 patients who have been taking the drug for 42 days,” he wrote in one progress report, adding that he was giving most of them “double, triple, and quadruple doses.” The experiment continued for seventy-seven days. What can happen to a man’s mind as he is locked in a cell and force-fed overdoses of LSD every day for so long? It is a gruesome question to ponder. Gottlieb, however, hoped that he might find a point at which massive LSD doses would finally dissolve the mind.

  “It was the worst shit I ever had,” recalled one subject in Isbell’s LSD experiments, a nineteen-year-old African American drug addict named Eddie Flowers. Flowers suffered through hours of overwhelming hallucinations because he wanted the dose of heroin that Isbell offered as payment: “If you wanted it in the vein, you got it in the vein.”

  Gottlieb appreciated prison doctors like Harris Isbell. They held almost life-or-death power over helpless men, and as government employees they were open to his overtures. He sent them LSD, which they fed to inmates who volunteered in exchange for favors like more comfortable cells, better prison jobs, or credit for “good time.” Afterward they wrote reports describing the inmates’ responses.

  The most enthusiastic of these doctors, Carl Pfeiffer, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University, ran four MK-ULTRA “subprojects.” All involved the administration of LSD and other drugs to induce psychotic states in what Gottlieb called “normal and schizophrenic human beings.” As subjects, Pfeiffer used inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey. Under Subprojects 9 and 26, he studied ways that “various depressant drugs” can shake a person’s psyche “by either altering his metabolism or producing sedation.” His assignment under Subproject 28 was to test “depressants which affect the central nervous system.” Most intriguingly, under Subproject 47, he would “screen and evaluate hallucinogenic materials of interest to Technical Services.” One of his reports describes “epileptic-type seizures produced by chemicals.” Another says that LSD “produced a model psychosis … Hallucinations last for three days and are characterized by repeated waves of depersonalization, visual hallucinations, and feelings of unreality.” Gottlieb later said Pfeiffer’s work had been in “an ultra-sensitive area” that lent itself to “easy misinterpretation and misunderstanding,” but was worthwhile in the end.

  “We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments,” Gottlieb concluded. “The Agency learned that a person’s psyche could be very disturbed by those means.”

  That conclusion is richly confirmed by the recollections of one of Pfeiffer’s subjects, James “Whitey” Bulger, a Boston gangster who was later sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes including eleven murders. Bulger was a street-level thug in his mid-twenties when he was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary after being convicted of armed robbery and truck hijacking. There he volunteered to participate in what he was told was a drug experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. What followed is almost unimaginable: along with nineteen other inmates, he was given LSD nearly every day for f
ifteen months, without being told what it was. In a notebook that he wrote after being released, he described “nightly nightmares” and “horrible LSD experiences followed by thoughts of suicide and deep depression [that] would push me over the edge.” He did not tell medical attendants about hearing voices or the “seeming movement of calendar in cell, etc.” for fear that if he did so, “I’d be committed for life and never see the outside again.” In one passage he describes Pfeiffer as “a modern day Dr. Mengele.” It is a trenchant comparison, since the experiments that Mengele and other Nazi doctors conducted at concentration camps were lineal ancestors of MK-ULTRA “subprojects” like the one into which Bulger was drawn.

  “I was in prison for committing a crime and feel they committed a worse crime on me,” Bulger wrote. His description of his experience is a rare report on an MK-ULTRA experiment from the subject’s perspective.

  In 1957, while a prisoner at the Atlanta penitentiary, I was recruited by Dr. Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University to join a medical project that was researching a cure for schizophrenia. For our participation we would receive three days of good time for each month on the project … We were injected with massive doses of LSD-25. In minutes the drug would take over, and about eight or nine men—Dr. Pfeiffer and several men in suits who were not doctors—would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.

  The men in suits would be in a room and hook me up to machines, asking questions like: Did you ever kill anyone? Would you kill someone? Two men went psychotic. They had all the symptoms of schizophrenia. They had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking and frothing at the mouth. They put them in a strip cell down the hall. I never saw or heard of them again … They told us we were helping find a cure for schizophrenia. When it was all over, everyone would feel suicidal and depressed, wrung out emotionally. Time would stand still. I tried to quit, but Dr. Pfeiffer would appeal to me: “Please, you’re my best subject, and we are close to finding the cure.”

  At the same time that Gottlieb was supporting Pfeiffer’s experiments, he found several other enthusiastic partners. One of the first was James Hamilton, a well-known Stanford University psychiatrist who had worked with George Hunter White on OSS “truth serum” research during World War II and later advised the Chemical Corps on bio-warfare projects. During the 1950s Hamilton signed three MK-ULTRA contracts. His first assignment, which Gottlieb called Subproject 2, was to study “possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness,” and also to survey “methods to enable the administration of drugs to patients without their knowledge.” In Subproject 124, he was to test whether inhaling carbon dioxide could lead people into a trance-like state. Subproject 140, conducted at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco under the cover of thyroid research, was to measure the possible psychoactive effects of thyroid-related hormones. By one account Hamilton was “one of the renaissance men of the program, working on everything from psycho-chemicals to kinky sex to carbon dioxide inhalation.”

  As Hamilton was beginning his work, Gottlieb hired another prominent psychiatrist, Robert Hyde, assistant superintendent of Boston Psychopathic Hospital—now the Massachusetts Mental Health Center—to begin a series of LSD experiments. Hyde had a unique credential: he was the first American to take LSD, having been introduced to it by an Austrian psychiatrist shortly after World War II. Colleagues considered him an “amazing and fearless researcher” who harbored a “pathological obsession with discovering more about medicine.” As soon as the CIA began funding LSD research, he applied. Soon, according to one study, “hundreds of students from Harvard, Emerson and MIT were unwittingly assisting the Agency’s research into the possibility of mind control.” Each was paid $15 to drink “a little vial of a clear, colorless and odorless liquid” that might produce an “altered state.” They were not told details about the drug they would be ingesting, and as one study later concluded, “none of those involved in the experiments had the proper training or understanding to guide participants.” Several had negative reactions. One hanged herself in a clinic bathroom.

  Hyde went on to become one of the most prolific early dispensers of LSD, under the umbrella of four MK-ULTRA “subprojects.” Gottlieb’s assignments to him were remarkably broad, reflecting their recognition of shared interests. Under Subproject 8, Hyde conducted a “study of the biochemical, neurophysiological, sociological, and clinical psychiatric aspects of LSD.” Under Subproject 10 he “tested and evaluated the effect of LSD and alcohol when administered to individuals falling under various personality categories.” Subproject 63 was to study “the use of alcohol as a social phenomenon, with particular emphasis on those variables that would prove predictive in the assessment and possible manipulation of human behavior.” The surviving description of Subproject 66 is most elastic: “Test a number of techniques for predicting a given individual’s reactions to LSD-25, other psycho-chemicals, and alcohol.”

  No connection that Gottlieb made during his first months running MK-ULTRA proved more important and fruitful than the one he sealed with Harold Abramson, the New York allergist who had shepherded him through his first “self-experimentation” with LSD. Abramson was an LSD pioneer. Using stock he ordered from Sandoz, and later the effectively unlimited supply that Gottlieb and Eli Lilly made available to him, he distributed samples to other doctors and gave it to guests during parties at his Long Island home. One of his friends called these parties “wild and crazy, along with all the sex and what have you.” Another reported that “you’d be very, very surprised at who attended some of these events.”

  In mid-1953 Gottlieb gave Abramson $85,000 in MK-ULTRA money for “the conduct of experiments with LSD and other hallucinogenics … along the following lines: (a) Disturbance of Memory; (b) Discrediting by Aberrant Behavior; (c) Alteration of Sex Patterns; (d) Eliciting of Information; (e) Suggestibility; (f) Creations of Dependence.” The variety of these assignments matched the breadth of Abramson’s interest in LSD. He fed it to Siamese fighting fish and described their reaction in a series of articles. More disturbing, he developed a special curiosity about the impact of mind-altering drugs on children. He closely monitored experiments, including one in which twelve “pre-puberty” boys were fed psilocybin, and another in which fourteen children between the ages of six and eleven, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.

  “It was done with great secrecy,” one doctor who worked with the CIA said years later. “We went through a great deal of hoop-de-do and signed secrecy agreements, which everyone took very seriously.”

  Gottlieb shaped MK-ULTRA almost entirely alone, and so it reflected his own instincts. His deepest conviction was that the key to mind control lay in drugs—specifically, as one study of the period explains, in LSD.

  Within the agency, Dr. Gottlieb … found time to lead the chemists of the Technical Services Staff on a series of increasingly daring experiments with LSD. They spiked each other’s coffee and liquor; they spread it on their food. They tripped out in their offices and in safe houses in Washington and beyond, in the Maryland countryside. They were stoned for days at a time.

  There were moments of black comedy: a hallucinating scientist suddenly decided he was Fred Astaire and grabbed the nearest secretary, convinced she was Ginger Rogers … Dr. Gottlieb regarded such incidents as the usual hiccups in searching for the magic technique he was convinced the Communists were using … His sixth sense—that deductive reasoning which made him such a respected figure among his peers—convinced Dr. Gottlieb that there might be no quick answers; the only certain way to arrive at the one which mattered, success, was to continue
experimenting. In that summer of 1953, he encouraged his staff to go in search of how to take possession of a man’s mind. He was no longer only the Beast to Richard Helms’s Beauty, but also became known as Merlin, the great wizard. Watching his colleagues expanding their conception of reality under the influence of LSD, he would sometimes dance a jig; those were among some of his happiest hours at the Agency, equaled only by rising at dawn to milk his goats.

  As best he could, Gottlieb integrated his home life with his professional quest. He and Margaret wondered what lies beyond the physical reality that human senses can perceive, and his “self-experimentation” with LSD coincided with their shared pursuit of inner wisdom. Years later Margaret described the heterodox spirituality they developed.

  I am impatient when I hear people equate being “good” or “religious” with being Christian. There are many “goods” and many religions, and a Muslim’s way to God is very similar to ours, and so is a Hindu’s or a Buddhist’s, and I can’t see that Christianity is more full of love or less full of fears and superstitions … Is there a God? There is certainly a Force or a Source that all mankind (and maybe animals too) feels. It amazes and delights me that peoples who have not known of each other’s existence on the earth have come to very similar questions and to similar answers down through the ages since our very beginnings. There is Something that we all sense and are familiar with. Please let us not say, “My way is the only way.”

  Gottlieb never confided his thoughts to paper as his wife did. His spiritual side, however, became part of his mystique. To reinforce that mystique, and to inspire himself, he hung what he said was a verse from the Koran on the wall above his desk: “When they come, it will be asked of them, Did you reject my words when you had no full knowledge of them? Or what was it that you did?”

  * * *