The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  Clinical responsibility for the mind control experiments lies with the doctors, who should have been constrained by the Hippocratic Oath. National Security interests are the proper responsibility of the CIA, and the CIA is not governed by the Hippocratic Oath. That the CIA created Manchurian Candidates is a fact, but this book is not about the CIA, the military or the government. It is not based on conspiracy theory and it does not advance a conspiracy theory. I am not a critic of the CIA and I am not privy to the intelligence imperatives behind the Manchurian Candidate programs.

  My focus in The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists is on psychiatry and the dissociative disorders. My intent is to prove that the Manchurian Candidate is real, and to set the Manchurian Candidate programs in a historical and clinical context. The CIA Doctors documents extensive human rights violations by psychiatrists in North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Many thousands of prisoners and mental patients were subjected to unethical mind control experiments by leading psychiatrists and medical schools. Organized academic psychiatry has never acknowledged this history. The network of mind control doctors involved in BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other mind control programs has done a great deal of harm to the field of psychiatry and to psychiatric patients. My goal is to break the ugly silence.

  The CIA Doctors was originally published in the year 2000, with the title BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation Of Multiple Personality By Psychiatrists. I decided to change the title in this edition because potential readers might not know about BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and other CIA mind control programs. Therefore it might be unclear to them what the book is about. I changed the subtitle in order to provide a clearer focus for the book. This edition contains no new references or documents. I have done some light revising and reorganizing and added some concluding comments about mind control programs that are ongoing in the twenty-first century.

  I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  To understand creation of Manchurian Candidates by CIA and military mind control doctors, it is necessary to have some historical background. The work of the mind control doctors did not occur in a vacuum. The importation of Nazi doctors to the United States through secret programs like PAPERCLIP is part of the context.

  Likewise, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study helps us understand how mind control experimentation was not only tolerated by medical professionals, but published in the peer-reviewed literature. Just as the results of the Tuskeegee Study were published in the medical literature141, 253, 309 so was the mind control research condoned and tolerated via publication in psychiatric and medical journals. The climate was permissive, supportive and approving of mind control experimentation.

  Radiation experiments conducted by doctors on behalf of the military, Atomic Energy Commission and other branches of government overlapped with biological and chemical weapons research and also with mind control. For instance, Dr. William Sweet participated in both brain electrode implant experiments and the injection of uranium into medical patients at Harvard University89, 183. The 925-page Final Report. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments89 tells the story of the radiation experiments, and their linkage to mind control.

  1

  PROJECT PAPERCLIP

  At the end of World War II, German scientists and technical experts were being held in a variety of detainment camps by the allies and Russians. The British, French, Americans and Russians became embroiled in highly competitive recruiting efforts to secure the services of these German specialists. Many of the scientists, however, could not qualify for immigration visas into the United States because they were war criminals or had actively served the Nazi cause. The prospect of losing the industrial and scientific services of these German experts lead to the creation of a series of secret programs including PAPERCLIP, PROJECT 63 and NATIONAL INTEREST40, 135, 287, 288.

  Through these programs, over 1000 German scientists and their families were secretly brought into the United States without State Department scrutiny or approval. Recruitment of German scientists through PAPERCLIP and related projects continued into the 1980’s. The most famous individual brought over in this manner was Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist.

  Von Braun was the head of the German V2 rocket program during World War II. The V2 rocket factory was the Mittlewerk, a site visited personally by von Braun. Labor for the factory was provided by the inmates of nearby Camp Dora. It is estimated that 20,000 inmates were worked to death at the Mittlewerk; 6000 bodies were found on the ground when American troops liberated the camp late in the War.

  One of the survivors of Camp Dora, Yves Beon, said that workers were given one piece of bread and margarine per day. Despite these conditions, workers were able to sabotage some of the V2 rockets by tampering with parts or urinating on them. When sabotage was discovered, the prisoners were hanged in their work tunnels. Beatings by prison guards were routine.

  Besides visiting the Mittlewerk personally, von Braun attended a meeting at which the Nazis discussed bringing French civilians in as slave labor for building rockets. At the Nuremberg trials, von Braun was said by a Nazi defendant to have worked closely with Dr. Albin Sawatzi. Camp Dora prisoners identified Sawatzi as being in charge of much of the deadly treatment they received, and as personally administering beatings.

  A report by the Office of Military Government U.S., the OMGUS Security Report, listed von Braun as an ardent Nazi and a security threat to the United States, hence the need for routing through PAPERCLIP. Two weeks after the first U.S. moon landing, on August 2, 1969, von Braun wrote a letter to retired Major General Julius Klein on his Director of Marshall Space Flight Center stationery, in which he said, “It’s true that I was a member of Hitler’s elite SS. The columnist was correct. I would appreciate it if you would keep the information to yourself as any publicity would harm my work with NASA.”

  The NASA rockets that took Neil Armstrong to the moon were built by von Braun and his colleagues. When Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, he did not realize that he was stepping on the ashes of 20,000 people who died at Camp Dora. Arthur Rudolph, head of production at the Mittlewerk, became the head of the U.S. Saturn V Rocket Program. Another Mittlewerk team member, Kurt Debus, became the first Director of the Kennedy Space Center.

  Medical doctors also came over under PAPERCLIP. Dr. Albertus Strughold was named chief scientist of the Aerospace Medical Division of the U.S. Air Force in 1961. He is regarded as the father of aviation medicine. Strughold’s first job in the U.S. was head of the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas. In 1949 he took charge of the newly created Department of Space Medicine. Honors awarded Strughold included the Americanism Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Also, June 15, 1985 was declared “Dr. Albertus Strughold Day” by the Texas Senate. The Aerospace Library at the School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas is dedicated to Strughold.

  An article in The Dallas Morning News, October 27, 1993 (page 8A) describes efforts by the Simon Weisenthal Center and other groups to have honors paid to Dr. Strughold, including the Library dedication, removed.

  Strughold was head of the Luftwaffe Institute of Aviation Medicine in Berlin during the War. At the Nuremberg trials his military superiors, close associates and a subordinate were all tried for war crimes. Strughold, however, was never arrested, interrogated or called as a witness. Nuremberg investigator Herbert Meyer was given firsthand information about Strughold’s direct involvement in war crimes for which people close to him were tried. Hermann Becker-Freysing, who gave this information to Meyer, was found guilty at Nuremberg and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  One study conducted by Nazi aviation doctors involved an attempt to ascertain the effects of ejecting from an airplane at high altitudes. Concentration camp prisoners were placed in a special chamber and the pressure would suddenly be dropped to the equivalent of 39,260 feet. One question addressed in the experiment was whether the decom
pression was more painful in the prone or sitting position. Some subjects went insane and some died.

  At Dachau, Himmler personally approved the use of 200 prisoners (Jews, Russians, and members of the Polish resistance) in experiments by Dr. Sigmund Rascher. The experiments were expected to be fatal. Rascher went a step beyond prior research; he instantly decompressed subjects to the equivalent of 69,000 feet, which caused many to pull out their hair, tear their faces with their fingernails, and pound their heads on the wall.

  Nearly eighty men died from being kept at simulated high altitude for up to thirty minutes. Others were taken out of the chamber alive, held under water till they drowned, then autopsied to determine the amount of air embolism in their brains. The reactions of the men inside the chambers were often filmed.

  Karl Hoellenrainer was a gypsy prison-camp inmate who survived experiments at Dachau prison hospital conducted by Dr. Wilhelm Beigelboeck. Hoellenrainer was in Auschwitz briefly, where his own child, and his sister and her two children were killed. He was to have been transported from there to Buchenwald but was rerouted to Dachau. There, he and other subjects were starved then forced to drink putrid seawater, or seawater treated by one of two purification methods. Those who refused were tied up and force-fed by tubes.

  Subjects in these experiments became violently ill, some went into coma, some were seriously wounded, and some died when their livers were punctured to drain off blood and water. The purpose of the experiments was to develop methods that would enable Nazi pilots downed at sea to survive by drinking seawater.

  Besides strictly medical experiments, Dachau was also the site of mind control experiments involving the drug mescaline. Nazi doctors including Dr. Kurt Plotner administered mescaline to unwitting subjects by spiking prisoner’s drinks184. During the same period, similar experiments involving mescaline, marijuana, barbiturates, and scopolamine were conducted by Dr. Winfred Overholser at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C.

  The U.S. mind control experiments at St. Elizabeth’s were conducted under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. A participant in the experiments, OSS officer George White, later became the contractor on the CIA’s MKULTRA Subprojects 3, 14, 16, 42 and 149 that ran from 1953 to at least 1964.

  An unanswered question is whether any Nazi psychiatrists or mind control experts were brought over under PAPERCLIP or related projects156. The full range of German scientific technical expertise was recruited through these programs including medical doctors, rocket scientists, propulsion experts, and experts in ball bearings, film, lubricants, jet engines and countless other areas of interest to the military. It seems unlikely that no psychiatrists were included in the recruitment programs, especially since the OSS was already testing and interested in the same mind control methods studied in the death camps.

  It is not difficult to identify possible PAPERCLIP scientists in the medical literature. Theodore Wagner-Jauregg was a chemist born on May 2, 1903 in Vienna and educated in Munich and Vienna. He died on February 19, 1992. His father, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for research on syphilis42.

  Theodore Wagner-Jauregg worked at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute in Germany before the War and then worked at Edgware Arsenal from 1948 to 1955 before returning to Europe. Edgeware Arsenal was one of the key centers for CIA and Army LSD and mind control research during the 1950’s and 1960’s. In a paper on a defensive chemical weapon, an antidote to a class of drug called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors104 the authors say in a footnote that, “The experimental results in this paper were obtained several years ago, but its publication has been delayed for various reasons.”

  Most likely, publication was delayed until the results of the work were declassified. Under the listing of authors, the paper is said to be, “From the Research Directorate, United States Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratories, Army Chemical Center, Maryland.” Whether or not Wagner-Jauregg came over under PAPERCLIP is not the point; the point is that any psychiatrists brought over as mind control experts ought to be identifiable.

  There was a round of declassification of mind control documents in the 1970’s, which were the foundation of books published in the 1970’s and 1980’s38, 65, 105, 158, 184, 278, 301. These documents and books did not examine the possible role of German PAPERCLIP psychiatrists in mind control experimentation. The subject remains untouched by scholarly and investigative hands, but is an essential part of the historical background.

  2

  THE TUSKEEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY

  Like the mind control research, the results of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study were published in the peer-reviewed medical literature309, 253. The Tuskeegee Syphilis Study was clearly unethical and harmful to the subjects. The Study violated the 1943 Henderson Act, an Alabama public health statute for mandatory reporting of tuberculosis and venereal disease, and state health laws passed in 1927, 1957, and 1969141. In 1964 the World Health Organization issued the Helsinki Declaration, which provided ethical guidelines for medical research. The Tuskeegee Syphilis Study violated the Helsinki rule that research subjects must give informed consent.

  The Study was started in Macon County, Alabama in 1932 as a spinoff from a 1930 project funded by the Rosenwald fund with a grant of $50,000.00. The study was run by the Public Health Service, which also co-funded mind control research after World War II. During its forty years, numerous accounts of the Study were published in medical journals including a 1964253 paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled, “The Tuskeegee Study of Untreated Syphilis: The 30th Year of Observation.”

  The paper begins, “The year 1963 marks the 30th year of the long-term evaluation of the effect of un-treated syphilis in the male Negro conducted by the Venereal Disease Branch, Communicable Disease Center, United States Public Health Service. This paper summarizes the information obtained in this study - well known as the “Tuskeegee Study” - from earlier publications.”

  People and organizations that knew about the Tuskeegee Study included the Surgeon General, the American Heart Association, the Macon County Medical Society, the Public Health Service, and the Center for Disease Control. The first recorded protest about Tuskeegee by a medical doctor did not occur until 1964, when Dr. Irwin J. Schatz, a staff member at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, wrote to the first author of a 1964 paper on the study.

  Dr. Schatz’s letter was referred to the Center for Disease Control where it was filed but not answered. A note by Dr. Anne R. Yobs, a coauthor of the 1964 paper, was stapled to Dr. Schatz’s letter. It read, “This is the first letter of this type we have received. I do not plan to answer this letter.”

  Throughout its forty-year course, the Tuskeegee Study was praised and received various honors. Eunice Rivers, the black nurse who ran the study for decades, received the Oveta Culp Hobby Award for her work in the Study on April 18, 1958. This is the highest commendation the Department of Health, Education and Welfare can bestow on an employee.

  What was the design of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study? In 1932, 399 illiterate poor rural black men with syphilis were recruited as subjects, along with 201 controls without syphilis. The purpose of the Study was to make sure the 399 men never got treatment. They were followed up for decades to see how the syphilis affected them. Part of the purpose of the Study was to compare the results to a similar study done in Norway by Dr. Trygve Gjestland, who visited the Tuskeegee Study in November 1951.

  The subjects and their families had no idea what the Study was all about. They weren’t told they had syphilis and didn’t know it was treatable. A black woman described in the book about Tuskeegee, Bad Blood141, is quoted as saying that injections received at medical clinics were making women in Macon County pregnant. These people had no understanding of disease or modern medicine. Bad blood was a term used to describe all kinds of problems in the rural south, ranging from syphilis to pellagra to a general run down condition. The Tuskeegee subjects were told that they had
bad blood.

  In 1932, the standard treatment for syphilis was a combination of mercury, arsphenamine and neoarsphenamine. Although this treatment was primitive, it stopped the progression of the disease and made patients noninfectious. Public Health Service carried out large-scale screening, education and treatment programs for syphilis throughout the 1930’s.

  The cure for syphilis, penicillin, was introduced in the early 1940’s. It was withheld from the Tuskeegee men for thirty years. If any of the men showed up at a non-Study clinic or doctor’s office, the Study nurse would contact the staff and say, “He’s under study and not to be treated.”

  The published results of the Study showed, as expected, that the men with untreated syphilis were sicker and died younger than controls. This is only part of the problem. How many acts of unprotected sexual intercourse did these 399 men engage in over forty years? How many women were infected with syphilis because these men were deliberately not treated? How many children were born with congenital syphilis because of the Study? It is a medical certainty that the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study resulted in preventable cases of congenital syphilis.