The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Charles Manson and Timothy Leary arrived in San Francisco at roughly the same time. Both had a keen interest in mind control. In the labyrinth of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi observes: “Somewhere along the line—I wasn’t sure how or where or when—Manson developed a control over his followers so all-encompassing that he would ask them to violate the ultimate taboo—say ‘kill’ and they would do it.”

  In 1993, a book appeared in Germany offering up a partial solution to the Manson mind control mystery, an intimate glimpse of the CIA’s activities in the Haight district: Murder’s Test-Tube: The Box of Charles Manson, by Carol Greene. A French review found the book’s other characters “far more frightening than Manson himself.” There was Dr. Wayne O. Evans, director of the Military Stress Laboratory of the US Army Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts in the 1960s. Evans took part in the Study Group for the Effects of Psychotropic Drugs on Normal Humans, a conference held in Puerto Rico in 1967, and issued a report, Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000:

  In considering the present volume, it is our hope that the reader will not believe this to be an exercise in science fiction. It is well known that the world of 15 years hence presently exists in the research laboratory of today.

  When we consider the effects of these advances in pharmacology we must ask:

  A. TO WHOM DO THE YOUTH LISTEN?

  B. WHAT ARE THEIR SOCIAL AND PERSONAL WORTH?

  Evans glimpsed shimmering vistas of mass mind control on the horizon. The average citizen might consider military psychopharmacology a morbid subject: “If we accept the position that human mood, motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state that we wish. The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can rationally consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to provide for people.” The unstated provider of said “neurochemical states” would, of course, be agents of the federal government.

  Consider Charles Manson’s contacts in Haight-Ashbury:

  Dr. David E. Smith [currently an associate clinical professor of occupational medicine and toxicology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a visiting associate professor of behavioral pharmacology in the department of psychiatry, University of Nevada Medical School] and his colleague Roger Smith (no relation), both of whom were associated with the famous Haight-Ashbury Clinic in San Francisco. They shared an interest in the concept of “behavioral sinks”; believed that rats, in response to overcrowding, were naturally inclined to violence, criminality, and mass murder; and believed that the percentage of rats who would engage in such behavior could be increased by the influence of drugs. Dr. David Smith . . . added a new dimension by injecting the rats with amphetamines. Author Greene presents and defends the thesis that for both Smiths, Haight-Ashbury represented an opportunity to test these theories [on humans]. David Smith referred to Haight-Ashbury as the national center for habitual drug abuse, and the first slum for teenagers in America. Both Smiths were personally acquainted with Manson, and Roger Smith was Manson’s parole officer when Manson first came to Haight-Ashbury, direct from prison.9

  “No doubt about it,” Lee and Shlain conclude, “LSD was a devastating weapon.”10

  And that’s exactly how officials of the CIA saw it. Allen Dulles wrote in a memo to the Secretary of Defense in 1955 that Langley took an interest in hallucinogens in the first place due to “the enthusiasm and foresight” of Dr. L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the chemical and radiological labs at the Army Chemical Center. Greene was the author of a 1949 paper, Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War, a bit of Orwellian inspiration for CIA and Army officials who have cited the report as their inspiration in the study of drugs as military ordnance.

  Dulles reported in his memo that the Agency was testing hallucinogens on “groups of people” or “individuals engaged in group activities.”11

  The list of groups susceptible to drugging did not exclude the Nixon administration. UCLA’s Sidney Gottlieb testified in September, 1977 that once, when Nixon visited a foreign country, his traveling party was secretly drugged by the CIA.12 ABC News later reported that the incident took place during Nixon’s sojourn to the Soviet Union in May, 1972.13

  At the dawn of the counter culture, CIA personnel mingled with drug dealers in San Francisco’s swelling hippie district. Scientists with Agency credentials moved to the Haight and set up “monitoring” stations, among them Louis J. West of UCLA, formerly Jack Ruby’s psychiatrist. (Dr. West testified that Ruby had an epileptic fit and accidentally shot Lee Harvey Oswald as a result of his involuntary twitchings.) West also went on to the chair of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute and oversaw the illicit mind control experiments of Drs. José Delgado, author of Physical Control of the Mind (1969), and Ross Adey, a veteran of Operation Paperclip. Dr. Margaret Singer, currently an advisory board member of the CIA-anchored “False Memory Syndrome Foundation,” also participated in the study of LSD as a politically-destabilizing weapon.

  Pete Townshend, guitar thrasher for The Who, was one of the few popular musicians who shunned the drug, found it politically and spiritually useless. He let that particular bandwagon roll by. “When you trip, you love yourself. You don’t realize you were better off as you were,” he said. “The trips are just a side street, and before you know it you’re back where you were. Each trip is more disturbing than the one that follows until eventually the side street becomes a dead end. Not only spiritually, which is the most important, but it can actually stop you thinking.” Townsend tried a hit of LSD given to him by Berkeley chemist Owsley Stanley III at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, 1967. It would be 18 years before he gave the drug another try. “It was incredibly powerful,” Townshend recalled. “Owsley must have had the most extraordinary liver.”14 By the time he got to Woodstock, Townshend was completely put off by the CIA’s mind control drug. As a “cynical” English culturatum, he “walked through it all and felt like spitting at the lot of them and shaking them, trying to make them realize nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.” The alternative society that blossomed in the mid-1960s was already rapidly disintegrating. Townshend blamed Woodstock, “a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then fuck the lot of them.”15

  Rock historian Charles Kaiser also considers LSD a weapon, and not a tool of spiritual revelation as the guinea pigs were led to believe: “One CIA memo called the drug a ‘potential new agent for unconventional warfare.’” Potential? “That was certainly what many people hoped it would be for the swarms of hippies who descended on the Haight in the summer of 1967. Vastly more powerful than marijuana or hash, LSD was the drug that took you, instead of the other way around. In 1966 Leary had founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, explaining, ‘Like every great religion of the past, we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and worship of God’. . . . But to the disappointment of the left, there never was any direct correlation between drug use (or promiscuity) and politics. This was one aspect of the deeper dichotomy between recreations of the sixties and their political content. Worshiping under the banner of sex, drug, and rock ‘n’ roll, millions of young Americans smoked marijuana, tripped on acid, sped through the decade on superfluous amphetamines, dressed wildly, danced violently, and seduced one another assiduously. Then in roughly the same proportion as their parents, they continued to vote Republican.”16

  “Dropping out,” ditching the corporate warfare state, was postulated by the emerging leadership of the anti-war subculture. And the philosophical direction of the swelling drop-out class was influenced by metaphysical, counter-cultural spokesmen with CIA support, each talking a blue streak about self, transcendence, consciousness expansion and equally high-minded, apolitical flights of mental expatriation.

&n
bsp; On the East Coast, Ira Einhorn, an eclectic new-age quack, and his friend Andrija Puharich, inventor of the tooth implant and a CIA-Army mind control researcher, lectured the counter-culture on drug reveling and “alien” visitations. Among the business sponsors of Ira Einhorn (currently a fugitive living in France, wanted for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Holly Maddox): the Bronfman family of Seagram’s fame; Russell Byers, a HUD director; John Haas, president of Rohm and Haas chemical conglomerate; Bill Cashel, Jr., a former Marine and president of Bell Pennsylvania. Einhorn wrote a chapter for a book edited by Humphrey Osmond, the infamous LSD chemist, Tim Leary and Alan Watts. His attorney was Arlen “Magic Bullet” Spector.17

  Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand was the prototypical drop-out . . . or was he? Brand was born in 1938, a native of Rockford, Illinois. He attended elite Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford University in 1960. Between 1960 and 1962, Brand was assigned to active duty as a US Army officer. He qualified for Airborne, taught basic infantry and worked as a Pentagon photojournalist. In 1968 he founded the original Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools for alternative living.

  “Brand organized one of the key events of the LSD era,” writes Benjamin Woolley in Virtual Worlds (1992)—the 1966 ‘Trips Festival’ in San Francisco: It was to be the grand finalé of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, a blissful “state of collective psychic intimacy that caused individual minds to melt into one single, seamless consciousness.” Stewart Brand saw in the Acid Test a glitzy public gathering to rival a rock concert for spectacle: “Hard though it may now be to believe, [he] set about attracting business sponsors. Brand’s commercial pragmatism and boy scout enthusiasm resulted in a sort of huge village fête, one that attracted an estimated 10,000 people and perhaps, though this goes unrecorded, a profit. It was so successful that a New York promoter reportedly wanted to book the acid test for Madison Square Garden.”

  In September 1967, precisely as CHAOS was launched by the CIA and the White House, Dr. Timothy Leary, tossed out of the Army for erratic behavior, abandoned experimenting with LSD on prisoners for the CIA in upstate New York, dropped a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and donned the robes of designated LSD media prelate.

  “In addition to this long mainstream tradition of far-out Sufi gnostic experimentation,” Leary told religious historian Rick Fields in 1983, “there was another branch of drug research.”18 While still at Harvard, Leary was approached by Henry Murray, chief of psychological operations for William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services during WWII (and after the war a mind control researcher at Harvard who enlisted as a subject of experimentation one Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber19). At the 1950 spy trial of Alger Hiss, Murray openly testified: “The whole nature of the functions of OSS were particularly inviting to psychopathic characters; it involved sensation, intrigue, the idea of being a mysterious man with secret knowledge.”20 And so Leary was fascinated with psychedelic compounds, “like most intelligence men,” he added, and volunteered early on for the psilocybin trials, surreptitiously sponsored by the Company.

  Kesey and Allen Ginsburg, among many others, first tasted LSD by signing onto Agency-funded research programs.

  “Hundreds of Harvard students had been tripped out by answering ads in the Crimson,” Leary explained to Smith. “So when I got here, I must tell you, I was the square on the block. We shared these drugs as novices, as amateurs, hesitantly moving into a field that had no signposts or guidelines. There was simply no language in western psychology to describe altered states of consciousness or ecstasies or visions or terrors. The psychiatrists said these were ‘psychomimetic’ experiences.”

  Dr. Leary’s CIA resumé has roots in 1954, with his promotion to director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. At Kaiser, Dr. Leary developed a personality test, “The Leary”—administered to Leary himself in 1970, in prison21—adopted by the Agency to test applicants.

  Dr. Leary was the bosom ally of Frank Barron, a former grad school classmate and CIA acid head.22 Barron was employed by the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research—Leary later admitted that the Institute was “staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists.” In 1966, Barron founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Mark Riebling, a Leary biographer, writes: “Leary follows Barron to Harvard and becomes a lecturer in psychology. After Barron administers to him some CIA psilocybin and LSD, Leary begins tripping regularly. He also studies the effects of psychedelics on others in controlled experiments. He later admits to knowing, at the time, that ‘some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.’ In addition to Barron, Leary’s associates and assistants during this period include former OSS chief psychologist Murray, who had monitored military experiments on truth-drug brainwashing and interrogation, and Dr. Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA.”23 (Orne, with the late Dr. West and Dr. Singer, was a guiding light of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization that specializes in discrediting ritually-abused, mind-controlled children and their therapists.)

  Leary swapped hallucinatory epiphanies with Aldous Huxley, a visiting professor at Harvard University. Huxley convinced Leary to form a “secret society,’’ writes Riebling, “to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for the purposes of human betterment. ‘That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.’” Huxley suggested that he initiated “artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they’ll educate the intelligent rich.”

  In 1962, Mary Pinchot Meyer (gunned down on a Potomac towpath, October 12, 1964), divorced from Cord Meyer, her CIA official husband visited Leary at Harvard: “Leary will later recall her as ‘amused, arrogant, aristocratic.’” Meyer informs Leary that the government is “studying ways to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing.” She asks that he “teach us how to run [LSD] sessions, use drugs to do good. Leary agrees. He provides her with drug samples and ‘session’ reports, and is in touch with her every few weeks, advising her on how to be a ‘brainwasher.’ She swears him to secrecy.” One day after the assassination of John Kennedy, she phoned him, Leary recalled, and she was overcome with fear and grief. “They couldn’t control [Kennedy] anymore,” she told Leary. “He was learning too much. . . . They’ll cover everything up.”24

  Leary was a magnet for espionage agents. He was constantly surrounded by operatives of the intelligence agencies. In the end, he paired up with G. Gordon Liddy in a traveling radio road show. Liddy was a CHAOS veteran.25

  On September 12, 1970, Tim Leary escaped from prison, aided, according to Benjamin Woolly, “by the Weather Underground . . . apparently funded by [CIA runamuck] Ronald Stark and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” Leary’s famed flight to Switzerland was facilitated by CIA contractees: “May 1971,” writes Riebling, “Leary and his wife escape to Switzerland with the assistance, according to Leary, of an ‘Algerian bureaucrat named Ali,’ who ‘made no bones about his connection to the CIA’ . . . and [Leary says] that’s the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century.’”

  The prison escape was financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the LSD distributed by the Brotherhood was provided by convicted CIA terrorist Ron Stark. Profits from the sale of the LSD were deposited in Castle Bank, a CIA hot money cooler legally represented by Paul Helliwell, a business promoter for Meyer Lansky and the CIA’s chief launderer of heroin proceeds.26

  NOTES

  1. Jim Fouratt, “Denver Festival: Mace with Music,” Rolling Stone, no. 38, July 26, 1969, pp. 6–8.

  2. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents, New York. William Morrow. 1978. pp. 20. 74–75.

  3. Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, New York: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1992, pp. 191, 321.

  4. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CI
A, New York: Pocket Books, 1979, pp. 319–20.

  5. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent, Berkeley, 1974, pp. 211–12.

  6. Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, New York, Grove Weidenfleld, 1992, p. 187.

  7. Ibid, p. 188. “Hard core Cosa Nostra-type criminal figures [run] an extremely well-organized traffic in hallucinogenic drugs”—James Finlator, FDA official.

  8. Ibid., pp. 188–89.20.

  9. David E. Smith, MD biography, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic publicity release. Manson was released from prison in March 1967. Dr. David Smith, according to Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter, “got to know the [Manson] group through his work in the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic” (p. 222). Before opening the clinic, Smith had lived in the Haight-Ashbury district for 32 years. He was a student at the University of California at San Francisco medical school, specializing in psychopharmacology, the study of the effects of drugs on the mind.

  Smith is a past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was succeeded as president of ASAM in 1995 by Dr. G. Douglas Talbott, MD, who served three years in the Korean War as an Air Force captain. He was Chief of Medicine at the 275th Hospital, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, a medical aide to both the Secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Upon his discharge in 1956, he returned to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, where he entered private practice. He worked closely with NASA in its nascent Nazi-overrun days, and was a civilian consultant in charge of crew selection for Project Mercury, among other responsibilities.