Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Kesey gave LSD a new role in American society. As the 1960s progressed, he was as responsible as anyone for turning it into a symbol of youth culture, free love, hippie rebellion, and opposition to the Vietnam War. His parties, and the troupe of LSD-fueled “merry pranksters” he led on a celebrated trek across the United States aboard a brightly painted bus, helped bring the drug to public consciousness.

  The music of the Grateful Dead would also play an essential role in the emerging LSD counterculture. Grateful Dead tours were traveling LSD circuses. Celebrants lost themselves in music and lyrics that sought to enhance their drug experiences. Many of the band’s most evocative songs were written by a poet, Robert Hunter, who, like Kesey, credited LSD for his insights—and who, also like Kesey, first tried LSD as a volunteer at a research project covertly financed by the CIA.

  Hunter was another of the psychedelic voyagers through whom LSD leaked from MK-ULTRA into the counterculture. “He’d been making some money by taking psychological tests at Stanford, and somehow that gave him the opportunity to earn $140 for four sessions, one per week, taking psychedelic drugs at the VA Hospital under auspices of what would prove to be the CIA,” according to one biographer. “He received LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly called acid) the first week, psilocybin the second, mescaline the third, and a mixture of all three on the fourth.” At each session, after the drug took effect, Hunter was brought to see a hypnotist. Later he said the experiments seemed aimed at determining whether these drugs “increased my ability to be hypnotized.”

  After taking LSD for the first time, Hunter described the experience in a six-page essay. “Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist,” he wrote. It was just a short step from that to “China Cat Sunflower,” said to be the first Grateful Dead song Hunter wrote while under the influence of LSD: “A leaf of all colors plays a golden string fiddle to a double-e waterfall over my back.”

  The radical poet Allen Ginsberg also discovered LSD through Gottlieb. “Psychiatrists who had worked for the US Navy and US intelligence gave Allen Ginsberg his first dose of LSD in 1959, as part of the CIA MK-ULTRA experiments,” according to one history of the CIA. According to another, “He volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University, where two psychologists who were secretly working for the CIA to develop mind-control drugs gave him LSD.” During his first sessions, Ginsberg listened through headphones to recordings of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and recitations by Gertrude Stein. He went on to become a powerful advocate for the “healthy personal adventure” of psychedelic drug use.

  Timothy Leary, the most famous preacher of LSD gospel, came to the drug through a different path, but also one that Gottlieb helped blaze. Leary first became interested in psychedelics when, as a young professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard, he read Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article about “magic mushrooms” in Life magazine. Three years later, while vacationing in Mexico, he managed to procure some. “It was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life,” he later recalled. Leary returned to his post at Harvard, began sponsoring drug experiments, was fired, and then set off on the journey that made him a high priest of LSD. Neither he nor anyone else knew it at the time, but Gottlieb had used MK-ULTRA funds, disguised as a foundation grant, to subsidize Wasson’s travel to the Mexican village where he found the mushrooms. Leary’s lifelong fascination with LSD, like those of Ken Kesey, Robert Hunter, and Allen Ginsberg, was part of Gottlieb’s legacy.

  The drug that Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues hoped would allow them to control humanity had the opposite effect. It fueled a generational revolt unlike any in American history. In 1966 LSD was banned in California. The federal government soon followed. President Richard Nixon called Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America.”

  Years later, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs commissioned a study of how LSD leaked out of government laboratories. It concluded that the drug’s “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of high status. Teachers have influenced students.”

  That was true as far as it went. John Marks, the researcher who first brought MK-ULTRA to public attention, filled in what was missing. “The authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country,” Marks wrote. “They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: that somebody had to influence the teachers, and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be seen the men of MK-ULTRA.”

  The subversives who first ripped LSD out of its research cocoon later saw the irony of what they had done. “The United States government was in a way responsible for creating the ‘acid tests’ and the Grateful Dead, and thereby the whole psychedelic counterculture,” Robert Hunter concluded. Allen Ginsberg came to wonder: “Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the CIA’s lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control? Had they, by conscious plan or inadvertent Pandora’s Box, let loose the whole LSD fad on the US and the world?”

  For years Ken Kesey rejected Ginsberg’s insistence that the CIA had been behind the drug research in which they both had participated. Once the existence of MK-ULTRA was revealed in the 1970s, he realized that Ginsberg was right—the research had been conducted for a hidden purpose. “It was being done to make people insane,” Kesey said, “to weaken people and try to put them under the control of interrogators.”

  Several counterculture heroes acknowledged their debt to MK-ULTRA. “The LSD movement was started by the CIA,” Timothy Leary asserted when he was at the peak of his fame. “I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.” John Lennon put the same thought more poetically: “We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out of the bottle, boy, and relax! They invented LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.”

  * * *

  UNDER A STAIRCASE in a faded Moscow apartment block, a CIA officer wearing a trench coat bent down into the semi-darkness and reached behind a radiator. He found what he was looking for: a matchbox hanging from a metal hook. Inside were miniature photos of top-secret documents taken by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer ever to become an American spy. Penkovsky had been betraying Soviet secrets for more than a year. Seconds after the officer bent to retrieve his “dead drop” on November 2, 1962, disaster struck. Soviet police agents jumped from the shadows and arrested him. Since he was officially employed by the State Department, he was protected by diplomatic immunity and punished only by expulsion from the Soviet Union. Penkovsky was tried, convicted of treason, and executed.

  Some CIA post-mortems on Penkovsky’s loss focused on the devices he had been given to use. His camera was a commercially available Minox III, small enough to fit into a fist and equipped to take sharp images but unsuited to covert use because it required two hands. The matchbox he used to “dead drop” his film was serviceable but primitive. His Panasonic radio allowed him only to receive messages, not send any, and the messages could be deciphered only with the help of a code pad. The Technical Services Division looked amateurish, stuck in the past, able to conduct audio surveillance and produce simple items like false documents but not actively looking for ways to use cutting-edge technology in covert operations.

  For the CIA, losing Penkovsky came after a series of other humiliations, most notably the U-2 fiasco, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and the failure to predict construction of the Berlin Wall. As if that were not enough, the Bay of Pigs failure had led President Kennedy to fire Allen Dulles, the only director of central intellige
nce many officers had ever known. The new director, John McCone, had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and was an outsider to CIA culture.

  McCone began by shaking up the team that had been responsible for the CIA’s recent failures. Early in 1962 he arranged early retirement for Richard Bissell, the deputy director for plans, who had presided over the Bay of Pigs debacle. To take his place, McCone elevated Richard Helms—Gottlieb’s steadfast patron and protector. A few months later, Helms reshuffled the Technical Services Division, and when the dust settled Gottlieb was its deputy chief. His assignment was to bring it into a new age.

  “TSD leadership had mountains to climb,” recalled one officer who served there in the 1950s. “One was technology, which was pretty bad.”

  When Gottlieb joined the CIA in 1951, Technical Services officers numbered in the dozens. By the time he became deputy chief eleven years later, there were several hundred. The division’s headquarters was not at the new CIA campus in Langley, Virginia, but in a wonderfully historic complex at 2430 E Street in Washington, near the Lincoln Memorial. It had been the original CIA headquarters, and before that had housed the Office of Strategic Services. The complex was spacious, giving Gottlieb room in the East Building for his Audio Operations staff, in the South Building for Secret Writing, and in the Central Building for Disguise Operations.

  Many other Technical Services officers were based at CIA stations overseas. Most often they were called upon to tap a phone line, bug an office, install a hidden camera, or turn a can or brick into a container for hiding microfilm. Gottlieb wanted to offer more. He recognized that technology was becoming steadily more important in covert operations, and he set out to hire engineers, chemists, artists, printers, and all manner of craftsmen. Rather than recruiting from Ivy League universities, he concentrated on technical schools and state colleges. He brought ambitious students to Washington for internships. When he bumped up against a hiring ceiling, he would offer “temporary” contracts that could be indefinitely extended.

  “Typically, these technical recruits had shown a childhood penchant for tinkering that eventually turned into engineering and hard-science degrees,” one Technical Services officer later wrote. “They were often the first or only member of their family to attend college and many came from rural communities in the Midwest and Southwest. They arrived at the CIA seeking technical opportunities and adventure. It did not take long before these newly minted engineers began delighting in calling operations officers ‘liberal arts majors.’ For engineers, this less than flattering term summed up both a case officer’s educational background and the imprecise, unscientific nature of agent recruiting and handling.”

  During Gottlieb’s years in the top echelon of Technical Services, its officers prided themselves on doing more than simply waiting for gadget orders. They tried to help operations officers imagine new ways to penetrate enemy defenses, uncover secrets, and protect agents. Are Soviet diplomats in a Latin American country discussing sensitive matters under a tree in their embassy compound? No problem: Technical Services developed a tiny microphone and transmitter, encased them inside a projectile, and designed a gun to fire the projectile into the accommodating tree. Does an agent find covert photography of documents too risky? Technical Services invented a “subminiature” camera with a four-millimeter lens that could take up to one hundred pictures despite being small enough to conceal in a pen, watch, or cigarette lighter. Does a spy say he will take risks only if he is given an “L-pill” so he can commit suicide if caught? Technical Services made a pair of eyeglasses with such a pill hidden in one of the temple tips, so that if the agent was trapped and brought in for interrogation, he could pretend to be chewing nervously on his glasses while he was actually biting on the “L-pill.”

  Whenever counterintelligence officers needed guidance on what drugs to use in an interrogation, Gottlieb was the obvious person to consult. When the Soviet intelligence officer Yuri Nosenko defected to the West in 1962, the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, suspected that he was a fake defector sent to disrupt the CIA. Nosenko was held captive at a safe house in Maryland for three years and subjected to almost every torture Gottlieb had ever devised in an effort to force him to confess. He endured seventeen rounds of intense questioning. Electrodes were strapped to his head. For much of his 1,277 days in captivity, he was locked into a small, windowless concrete cell. Later the CIA concluded that he had been a genuine defector and that the way he was treated “went beyond the bounds of propriety or good judgment.” At the time, though, Gottlieb and his team were thought to have proven their value once again.

  Among the many special interests that Gottlieb pursued at Technical Services was graphology, or handwriting analysis. Some Europeans took graphology seriously, but most Americans dismissed it as unreliable. Gottlieb was an exception. He was always looking for new or little-understood tools that might help him peer into the human mind. In 1958, while he was based in Germany but returning periodically to Washington, he commissioned “a special research study of handwriting analysis” that became MK-ULTRA Subproject 83.

  “Graphologists will categorize a number of handwriting samples according to the degree to which these specimens tend to reveal personality dimensions,” he wrote. “Other experts in handwriting analysis, including graphologists, handwriting identification experts and experimental psychologists, will examine the above groups of handwriting samples to determine any identifiable characteristics.”

  This “subproject” perfectly reflected the range of Gottlieb’s imagination. His life’s work had been the search for exotic knowledge that could be used in the service of covert action. While Subproject 83 was under-way, he wrote a memo that set goals for future research into graphology and secured it as part of the CIA tool kit.

  [Redacted] has conducted a detailed study of handwriting analysis … More important, however, he has assembled data making it possible to design relevant and meaningful research into the usefulness and applicability of handwriting analyses to intelligence activities … In addition, [redacted] will begin to develop technical surveys on other controversial and misunderstood areas. These will include, though not necessarily in the next year: (a) a revision and adaptation of material already developed on deception techniques (magic, sleight of hand, signals etc.); (b) psychic phenomena and extra-sensory perception; (c) subliminal perception; (d) hypnosis; (e) “truth serums”; (f) expressive movements (body type, which facial characteristics etc.).

  By the early 1960s, Gottlieb was doing far more than conceiving and overseeing extreme experiments in deep secrecy. He helped run a mini-empire with outposts around the world. That pulled him away from MK-ULTRA. So did his own rising doubts.

  Gottlieb conceived MK-ULTRA as a search for ways to control the human mind. For years he pursued that quest to the edge of science and beyond. His imagination was fed by regular LSD use—by his own estimate he dosed himself at least two hundred times—and he never hesitated to test anything he could imagine. Nonetheless he was in the end a scientist. Years of relentless MK-ULTRA experiments pushed him inexorably toward an unwelcome conclusion: there is no way to take control of another person’s mind.

  The first sign that Gottlieb was beginning to give up on MK-ULTRA, so far as is known, came in a memo entitled “Scientific and Technical Problems in Covert Action Operations,” which he wrote in 1960. It remains classified, but a later CIA report contains excerpts. One sentence leaps out: “As of 1960 no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodisiac, or recruitment pill was known to exist.” This admission—that years of MK-ULTRA experiments had failed to produce the breakthrough of Gottlieb’s dreams—marked the beginning of his acknowledgment that his search had been in vain.

  Other MK-ULTRA officers reached the same conclusion. “The possibility of creating a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ is a total psychological impossibility,” said David Rhodes, who spent several years distributing CIA grants as president of the Society for the Investigat
ion of Human Ecology. “But it is intriguing. It is a lot of fun.”

  Gottlieb continued to direct MK-ULTRA during his first years back from Germany, but it operated on a greatly reduced scale. Many of its “subprojects” ended. Experiments with LSD were curtailed. No more funds were spent for research into electroshock or sensory deprivation. With the use of enough powerful drugs and other extreme measures, Gottlieb had found, it is possible to destroy a human mind. He had discovered no way, however, to embed a new personality into the resulting void, or to open the wiped-away mind to control by an outsider.

  Even as MK-ULTRA wound down, it remained one of the CIA’s most closely guarded secrets. John McCone learned of it after becoming director in 1961. In an effort to curtail and professionalize it, he created a new directorate for science and technology, and ordered it to take over the “behavioral” work Technical Services had been doing. This prospect naturally disturbed Gottlieb and his patron Helms. They managed to persuade McCone that he should protect MK-ULTRA from prying eyes, even those with top-secret clearance. It was not moved into the new directorate. Instead it remained in the covert action directorate, under Helms’s friendly supervision.

  This bureaucratic victory ensured that the story of MK-ULTRA’s past would remain tightly held. The question of its future remained to be resolved. McCone did not share his predecessor’s fascination with the idea of mind control. If there were to be any further experiments in this area, he decreed, they should be conducted by the new Science and Technology Directorate, not by Gottlieb and his Technical Services Division.