Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Neither Mansfield nor anyone else, however, had any idea that the Agency was running a program potentially more explosive than any related to covert action abroad. MK-ULTRA was top secret even within the CIA. Only two officers—Gottlieb and Lashbrook—knew precisely what it was doing. A handful of others had a clear idea. All considered it essential that no one else learn what they knew. The public, they realized, was not ready to grasp the necessity of research into mind control that required the establishment of secret prisons and the infliction of great suffering on many people. The headline over one Washington Star article—CIA LEADERS ARE COOL TO WATCHDOG PROPOSAL—was an understatement. Dulles knew that he and the CIA could be seriously damaged if the Agency’s deep secrets became known. So did Eisenhower. He told aides that Mansfield’s bill would be passed “over my dead body.”

  In public Eisenhower insisted that he, too, wanted tighter oversight of the CIA. He named an eight-member committee, the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, that he said would monitor the CIA and let him know if anything was amiss. Then one of the Agency’s most powerful supporters in Congress, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, announced that his Armed Services Committee, which was charged with reviewing the CIA budget, would establish a new subcommittee to review the Agency’s activities. In a letter to one of his colleagues, he made clear that he did not intend this review to be any more intrusive than what his committee was already doing.

  “If there is one agency of the government in which we must take some matters on faith,” Russell wrote, “I believe this agency is the CIA.”

  Another of the CIA’s friends, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, made the same point in a speech opposing Mansfield’s proposal. “As a member of the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, I consider I have been informed of the activities of the CIA to the extent that I believe it was wise for me to be informed,” he said. “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of the CIA officials to speak to us. Instead, it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.”

  Three days of debate in the Senate did not shake support for Mansfield’s proposal, but pressure from the White House and the CIA did. Twelve of the thirty-seven co-sponsors removed their names from the proposal and opposed it. Eisenhower pressed Senate leaders to do whatever necessary to ensure that it did not pass. Senator Russell asserted in a speech that it would be better to abolish the CIA than to subject it to possibly unfriendly oversight.

  “I am beginning to feel like David facing Goliath,” Mansfield said on the third day of debate, “although I fear the results will not be the same.”

  He was right. Persuaded that the CIA needed absolute secrecy in order to defend the United States, the Senate rejected Mansfield’s proposal by a powerful margin, 59–27. The CIA was safe. So was MK-ULTRA.

  * * *

  ON AN AUTUMN evening in Rome two thousand years ago, Emperor Claudius ate a large meal that included a plate of his favorite mushrooms. Several hours later he fell violently ill. He trembled, vomited, gasped for breath, and died before morning. Twentieth-century scientists confirmed what some Romans suspected: Claudius’s wife, Agrippina, who wanted to place her son in power, had mixed poisonous mushrooms with the ones her husband liked to eat. The story of her success tantalized the first crop of CIA officers.

  “Let’s get into the technology of assassinations,” one urged in a memo. “Figure out most effective ways to kill—like Empress Agrippina.”

  Certain mushrooms have long been known to be poisonous, so it was reasonable to imagine that they or their chemical extracts could be used to kill. Once Gottlieb launched his mind control project, though, mushrooms became even more tantalizing. Ancient tradition held that some varieties can produce hallucinations and distortions of perception. Spanish friars who came to Mexico in the sixteenth century reported that natives used mushrooms in religious rituals. These reports fascinated CIA officers who were looking for paths into the human psyche.

  At the end of 1952 Morse Allen learned of a Mexican plant whose seeds, called piule, had a hypnotic effect. He dispatched a CIA officer to collect samples of piule and any other seed, plant, herb, or fungus that had “high narcotic and toxic value.” The officer, who passed himself off as a researcher looking for organic anesthetics, spent several weeks in Mexico. He returned with bags full of samples—and with something else. Several people he met had told him tales of a “magic mushroom.” Native shamans and priestesses, they said, used it as a pathway to the divine. They called it “God’s flesh.”

  “Very early accounts of the ceremonies of some tribes of Mexican Indians show that mushrooms are used to produce hallucinations and to create intoxication,” Allen wrote after hearing his officer’s report. “In addition, this literature shows that witch doctors or ‘divinators’ used some types of mushrooms to produce confessions or to locate stolen objects or to predict the future … [It is] essential that the peculiar qualities of the mushroom be explored.”

  Gottlieb had the Mexican plant samples analyzed and was told that several did indeed contain possibly psychoactive substances. That led him to look for a chemist he could send to Mexico to find organic toxins—and, if possible, the “magic mushroom.” He approached the Detroit-based pharmaceutical firm Parke, Davis and asked if it could recommend a suitable candidate. His offer was tempting: this chemist would remain at Parke, Davis but work for the CIA, which would pay his salary. The company suggested a serious-minded young researcher named James Moore, who as a graduate student had worked on the Manhattan Project. Moore was offered the job and accepted.

  “If I had thought I was participating in a scheme run by a small band of mad individuals,” Moore said years later, “I would have demurred.”

  Moore soon realized that he was not the only non-Mexican searching for “God’s flesh.” A remarkable married couple, Gordon and Valentina Wasson, had preceded him. Gordon Wasson was a successful New York banker who had married a Russian-born pediatrician who was obsessed with mushrooms. On their honeymoon, Valentina shocked him by racing toward patches of mushrooms, kneeling before them in “poses of adoration” and insisting that they were “things of grace infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind.” She harvested a basket of them and, to her new husband’s horror, ate them for dinner. He told her that he feared being a widower by morning, but she survived without ill effect. That converted him. Together they set out on a lifelong journey into the mushroom world.

  In the early 1950s, the Wassons made several trips to southern Mexico in search of the “magic mushroom.” Their first two trips were fruitless. Gordon Wasson made a third trip, this time accompanied by a photographer, and in a Oaxacan village they found a young Indian who led them to the home of a Mazatec woman named María Sabina. She was known as a guardian of ancient wisdom who used mushrooms to commune with the infinite. On the night of June 29, 1955, sitting before a rustic altar, she conducted her ritual. She distributed mushrooms to about twenty Indians—and, for the first time in recorded history, to outsiders.

  “I am the woman who shepherds the immense,” María Sabina chanted as her guests slipped into a different form of consciousness. “Everything has its origin, and I come, going from place to place from the origin.”

  For the next several hours, as the chants continued, Wasson and his photographer careened into a new world. “We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were open or closed,” he wrote afterward. “The effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.”

  Wasson could have had no idea that news of his discovery would electrify mind control experimenters in Washington whose ambitions were vastly
different from his own.

  James Moore heard reports of Wasson’s trip and wrote him a letter. He gave no hint that he was working for the CIA. Instead he told a partial truth: he was interested in researching the chemical properties of the “magic mushroom.” He correctly guessed that Wasson would be returning to the Mexican town where he had found it, Huautla de Jiménez, and asked to accompany him. To strengthen his case, he mentioned that he knew of a foundation that would help pay for the expedition. A deal was struck. The CIA sent Wasson $2,000, disguised as a grant from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. In exchange Wasson agreed to take Moore with him to Mexico. This was MK-ULTRA Subproject 58, aimed at unraveling the secrets of mushrooms.

  Wasson, Moore, and two French mycologists made their way to Huautla de Jiménez and found María Sabina. She agreed to repeat the ceremony. Wasson again found it transcendent. The mushrooms, he wrote afterward, gave him “a feeling of ecstasy” and raised him “to a height where you have not been in everyday life, not ever.” Moore had the opposite reaction. He did not like the dirt floor, was cold and hungry, had diarrhea, and “itched all over.” The ceremony, he wrote in his report, “was all this chanting in the dialect … I did feel the hallucinogenic effect, although ‘disorientation’ would be a better word to describe my reaction.”

  “He had no empathy for what was going on,” Wasson later said. “He was like a landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all … Our relationship deteriorated during the course of the trip.”

  Despite Moore’s discomfort, Gottlieb and his MK-ULTRA comrades considered his trip a great success because he returned with the samples of psychoactive mushrooms they had ordered. CIA officers had already visited a mushroom-producing region of Pennsylvania and told a couple of growers that they might be asking for help producing a rare fungus. Gottlieb cautioned, however, that research into the psychoactive properties of mushrooms must “remain an Agency secret.”

  Inevitably, word of Wasson’s adventure spread beyond his own circle and the circle of MK-ULTRA scientists. Life magazine asked him to write about it. The result was a seventeen-page spread, lavishly illustrated, in which Wasson described his experiences. He reported that his “spirit had flown forth and I was suspended in mid-air … The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries?” This article propelled a small horde of curious Americans toward Huautla de Jiménez. María Sabina came to wish she had never shared her people’s secret. Wasson regretted that he had pressed her to do so.

  Indigenous people in Mesoamerica had for centuries used the “magic mushroom” to bring them closer to invisible spirits. Wasson saw it as an aid to self-discovery, a way to open what the poet William Blake called “the doors of perception.” Gottlieb’s interest was entirely different. His lifelong search for inner tranquility had led him to believe that the universe embraces forces beyond known science. At the CIA he devoted himself to discovering and harnessing those forces—not as a way to ease pain or expand consciousness, but to serve the interests of one country pursuing one set of political goals at one historical moment. The image of CIA men traipsing through Mexican villages in search of a fungus that would help them defeat Communism seems outlandish in retrospect. Gottlieb, however, saw the “magic mushroom” the same way he saw LSD and every other substance he was investigating. All were potential weapons of covert war.

  * * *

  AS GOTTLIEB CONSOLIDATED control over his hidden realm, he solidified his position as one of the most powerful unknown Americans. Within the CIA, however, he remained an outsider. One reason was his background. Most officers who led the early CIA were comfortable with the alcoholism and old-boy camaraderie that defined their inbred world. Gottlieb could not penetrate that world and had no wish to do so. When he spoke to officers outside MK-ULTRA, it was often to preach the benefits of goat milk. Instead of joining them after hours, he retreated to his wife, children, and cabin in the Virginia woods.

  “Throughout the 1950s and for some time beyond, the Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities,” he recalled years later. “Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed.”

  The other reason Gottlieb stood apart from the legendary CIA officers of that era—world-shakers like Dulles, Helms, Wisner, and Angleton—was the nature of his work. They did the conventional job of covert action: spying on enemies and trying to weaken or destroy them. Gottlieb worked on a higher plane. If he could discover a way to control the human mind, all other CIA operations, including prized successes like toppling governments in Iran and Guatemala, would fade into insignificance.

  By 1957, Gottlieb had spent four intense years directing MK-ULTRA. From the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to the “safe houses” in New York and San Francisco to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, his “subprojects” were in full swing. His moment as a pioneer, though, had passed. He was approaching his fortieth birthday. A report on his MK-ULTRA work by the CIA inspector general found that “some of the activities are considered professionally unethical and in some cases border on the illegal.” Restless as ever, he made an unexpected career choice.

  During his years of travel, Gottlieb had met many CIA officers posted at foreign stations. In early 1957 he decided to become one of them. He left his post as chief of the Chemical Division at Technical Services, which he had run since it was created, and began several months of training as a field officer. After completing his course, he moved to Munich, accompanied by his wife and four children. He spoke German, knew the country from visits connected to MK-ULTRA interrogations, and had friends in the CIA network there.

  “Gottlieb had wanted to apply his black arts to field work, so he had requested an overseas post as a case officer,” according to one history of the CIA. “After being turned down by dozens of base chiefs who wanted no part of him, Munich Base Chief William Hood permitted him to come for a tour. ‘He was out in Munich, God bless him, to learn the trade. He came as a case officer, a GS-16 case officer,’ [CIA officer John] Sherwood said. Sherwood and Gottlieb became friends, and their families spent a great deal of time together in Munich. Looking back on it, Sherwood said he should have realized that Gottlieb was using innocent human beings in CIA experiments, but ‘I thought the guy was a real family man. Hell, we used to go mountain climbing together.’”

  The CIA station in Munich was a Cold War command post. From there, officers sent hundreds of partisan fighters on doomed commando missions behind the Iron Curtain and ran a host of other operations against the Soviet Union. Munich was also the base for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, CIA-connected broadcast services that beamed news and anti-Soviet propaganda into Communist countries. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, headed by the former Nazi officer Reinhard Gehlen, had its headquarters in the outlying district of Pullach. This concentration of covert resources attracted anti-Soviet exiles. Communist agents stalked them.

  On the evening of October 12, 1957, just a few weeks after Gottlieb arrived in Munich, a Ukrainian exile leader, Lev Rebet, collapsed and died on a dark street. Doctors concluded that he had suffered a heart attack. Later a Soviet agent confessed to killing him with a specially designed spray gun that fired poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule. It was precisely the sort of weapon Gottlieb might have designed.

  “When it came to spying, Munich like Hamburg was one of the unsung capitals of Europe,” the novelist John le Carré wrote in The Secret Pilgrim. “Even Berlin ran a poor second when it came to the size and visibility of Munich’s invisible community … Now and then frightful scandals broke, usually when one or other of this company of clowns literally forgot which side he was working for, or made a tearful confession in his cups, or shot his mistress or his boyfriend or himself, or popped up drunk on the other side of the Curtain to declare his loyalty to whomever he had not been loyal so far. I never in my
life knew such an intelligence bordello.”

  The CIA has not declassified files that would provide details of Gottlieb’s work in Munich. Half a century later, however, the German magazine Der Spiegel discovered and published a document showing that in 1958—while Gottlieb was stationed in Munich—German counterintelligence agents informed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that CIA officers were arresting people in Germany “without the knowledge of German authorities, imprisoning them at times for months, and subjecting them to forms of interrogation forbidden by German law.” Adenauer, who closely cooperated with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, chose to let the matter pass.

  “For two years he worked under cover, running foreign agents,” according to one survey of Gottlieb’s career. “One CIA officer recalls his help in the case of a chemist who had escaped from East Germany. For months the CIA had debriefed the chemist in a safe house. He claimed that he had provided technical support to Communist intelligence services, but CIA headquarters was not convinced that he was who he said he was. So Gottlieb was asked to interrogate him. Within a single session … Gottlieb established that the chemist was telling the truth, and in so doing exposed a system of secret writing that was in use by the other side.”

  During 1958 Gottlieb made two foreign trips from his base in Munich. One was for pleasure: he took his wife to Paris. He also flew back to Washington for an interval at CIA headquarters. While he was there, he was asked—as experienced officers often were—to address the incoming class of recruits. “He wasn’t a very dramatic speaker,” one of them recalled years later. “He did not impress me at all.”