The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  The contribution of the Tuskeegee men to medical science was recognized and rewarded. In 1958 a certificate bearing the Seal of the U.S. Public Health Service and the signature of the Surgeon General, Dr. Leroy E. Burney, was given to each surviving subject. The certificate read, “This certificate is awarded to ____________ in grateful recognition of 25 years of active participation in the Tuskeegee medical research study.”

  The men were also given $25.00 each, one dollar for each year of participation. Study subject Herman Shaw testified at a Hearing of the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate (1973). The Proceedings include a transcript of the following conversation between Mr. Shaw and Senator Edward Kennedy:

  Senator KENNEDY: Did you feel during this period that you were being cured, that they were looking after your medical needs?

  Mr. SHAW: I just got a slap on the back and they said you are good for 100 years. That is all I ever had.

  Senator KENNEDY: How many years have they been slapping you on the back?

  Mr. SHAW: Forty years.

  Senator KENNEDY: You were in the study for forty years?

  Mr. SHAW: Yes, sir.

  Senator KENNEDY: Did they give you any kind of compensation while they were doing this study?

  Mr. SHAW: No sir, with the exception of a 25-year certificate.

  Senator KENNEDY: Twenty-five year what?

  Mr. SHAW: Twenty-five year health certificate.

  They gave us a dollar a year, $25.00.

  Senator KENNEDY: A dollar a year?

  Mr. SHAW: Yes, sir. Up to that time, from 1932, up until the time the 25-year limit ran out.

  Senator KENNEDY: So the only compensation you received has been the $25.00?

  Mr. SHAW: That is right.

  Senator KENNEDY: What was the certificate of merit for?

  Mr. SHAW: I do not know, sir. It was for regular attendance, that is all I can figure.

  Senator KENNEDY: Do you think because you kept going back to the nurse or the doctor and letting them take your blood as they told you to do?

  Mr. SHAW: Yes, sir.

  Senator KENNEDY: When you were told to go back, did you think it was a check up and that since they didn’t prescribe medication, that therefore you were healthy? What did you assume?

  Mr. SHAW: Every year they would give us a white tablet for pain and a little vial - I guess it was some type of tonic. Every year for forty years up to now, we had two different doctors. We would never get the same doctor back each time.

  Senator KENNEDY: Different doctors?

  Mr. SHAW: Different doctor every year.

  Senator KENNEDY: When was the last time you were at the clinic?

  Mr. SHAW: Last year.

  Senator KENNEDY: What did they tell you last year?

  Mr. SHAW: Slap on the back and said I was good for 100 years. I guess it was routine.

  The Tuskeegee Syphilis Study was eventually shut down in 1972 because of the efforts of Peter Buxtun, an investigative journalist. There is no evidence to suggest that the government or the medical profession had any intention of closing the study as of 1972.

  In December 1965 Buxtun was hired as a venereal disease investigator by the Public Health Service. As part of his job he began to hear about the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study. He wrote to the Center for Disease Control about it, and was brought to the Center at government expense in 1967. As a result of his visit a panel was convened by the Center for Disease Control on February 6, 1969. The panel, which consisted of five medical doctors, decided to continue the study, which by this time had been taken over by the Center for Disease Control.

  Eventually, Buxtun talked about Tuskeegee with his longtime friend, Edith Lederer, an International Affairs reporter with Associated Press. She turned the story over to Jean Heller in Washington, D.C., who published it in the Washington Post on July 25, 1972.

  Once the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study was in the media, official medical reaction condemned it, and it was shut down. On July 23, 1973 attorney Fred Gray filed a $1.8 billion class action suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. Defendants in the suit were the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the U.S. Public Health Service, the Center for Disease Control, the State of Alabama, the State Board of Health for Alabama, and the Millbank Fund.

  In December, 1974 the government agreed to an out-of-court settlement for $10 million. Cash payments were made as follows: $37,500.00 for every living subject; $15,000.00 to the heirs of deceased subjects; $16,000.00 to living control subjects; and $5,000.00 to the heirs of deceased controls. In May, 1997 President Clinton issued an official apology to the Tuskeegee subjects and their families.

  The Tuskeegee Syphilis Study is relevant to mind control in several ways. It establishes that a large network of doctors and organizations were willing to participate in, fund and condone grossly unethical medical experimentation into the 1970’s. This is the general setting for psychiatric participation in mind control and creation of the Manchurian Candidate. The Study proves that such experiments resulted in serious damage to study subjects and their children. Finally, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study proves that considerable external pressure is often required before the medical profession takes the necessary action to terminate such experimentation.

  The role of general medicine in Tuskeegee is the same as psychiatry’s role in mind control.

  3

  RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

  Unethical radiation experiments were conducted on about 600 subjects in the United States beginning in the 1940’s and running into the 1970’s 45, 89, 311. These experiments overlapped with chemical and biological weapons research and mind control experimentation. The radiation experiments were funded by a variety of government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the CIA. Subjects did not give meaningful informed consent.

  As was true of mind control and biological weapons research, radiation experiments were conducted on children and unwitting civilians. Physicians were directly involved in administering the radiation and measuring its effects. The radiation experiments are part of the historical background of psychiatric participation in mind control.

  President Clinton set up a Committee to look into radiation experiments after they were described in the media in late 1993. The information had been made public in a Senate Subcommittee report produced by Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts in 1986311, but it didn’t generate any public reaction at that time. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments issued its Final Report in October, 1995.

  An example of unethical radiation research is the experiment done on Ebb Cade, a 53-year old black man who was in a car accident on March 24, 1945. He was in treatment for fractures and other injuries at Oak Ridge Army Hospital when he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium on April 10, five days before his fractures were set. The experimental protocol was to sample his blood for four hours after injection, bone tissue ninety-six hours after, and bodily excretions for 40-60 days, all to measure the plutonium levels. Bone samples were taken when his fractures were set, and also some teeth were extracted for analysis.

  Data on Mr. Cade were presented at a “Conference on Plutonium” in Chicago in May, 1945 by Wright Langham of the Los Alamos Laboratory’s Health Division. Mr. Cade was given the subject number HP-12 which stood for “human product”, a code also used in radiation experiments at the University of Rochester. Ebb Cade died as a result of heart failure on April 13, 1953 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

  Many people were injected with plutonium, x-rayed and exposed to other forms of radiation without their informed consent. Elmer Allen and his wife Fredna, a black couple, were pleased when, in 1973, doctors offered them a free trip to New York to study why he had survived bone cancer for so long (The Dallas Morning News, December 31, 1993, page 1A). As part of the trip they were picked up by limousine in Chicago and Mr. Allen was taken to the Argonne National Laborat
ory while his wife went sightseeing.

  Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco injected Mr. Allen with plutonium on July 14, 1947, four days before his leg was amputated for bone cancer. Mr Allen and seventeen other patients were injected with plutonium in an experiment run by the MANHATTAN PROJECT.

  John Simpson311, a retired astrophysicist who worked for the MANHATTAN PROJECT commented on these plutonium injections by saying, “We should be extremely cautious about criticizing their work.” He claimed that without such experiments, “radioactive dangers would be greater throughout the world today.”

  Although that claim is dubious, it misses the point even if accurate. The problem with the experiments is the lack of informed consent and the deceptive rationalizations of the physicians for their ongoing interest in Mr. Allen. These continued into the 1970’s and are serious ethical violations even if there was no physical harm to Mr. Allen from the plutonium, and even if the experiments yielded valuable information.

  Other subjects were financially compensated for their participation in radiation experiments. Prisoners in Washington and Oregon state prisons were paid to have their testicles irradiated; they got $5.00 a month for the irradiation, $10.00 each time a testicle was biopsied, and $100.00 for completing the experiment. According to project director Dr. Carl Heller, the prisoners received vasectomies “to avoid the possibility of contaminating the general population with irradiation-induced mutants.”

  Because of the need for vasectomies, Catholic prisoners were excluded from participating. During the experiment, which ran from 1963 to 1971, the subjects’ testicles were exposed to 600 roentgen of radiation, which is 100 times the maximum recommended dose. In 1976 a group of subjects filed suit, as a result of which the Oregon State Legislature made an award of $2,215.00. This sum was split among nine men.

  Other experiments were conducted at Los Alamos (site of the MANHATTAN PROJECT); Dugway Proving Ground, Utah (site of Army LSD experiments); Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford Nuclear Facility, Richmond, Washington from 1948 to 1952. Clouds of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere and tracked as they moved downwind, often through populated areas. In one experiment code-named GREEN RUN, radioactive iodine-131 was released from the Hanford Nuclear Facility and drifted over Spokane. The cloud contained hundreds and perhaps thousands as times as much radiation as was released accidentally at Three Mile Island in 1979.

  Another project run jointly by Massachusetts General Hospital and the Health Physics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was called the Boston Project. An investigator in this Project was Dr. William Sweet, a neurosurgeon whose brain electrode experiments will be discussed in a later chapter. In 1995 testimony to the Advisory Committee, Dr. Sweet claimed that all subjects injected with uranium in the Boston Project gave informed consent. However, Boston Project subject VI was injected after he arrived at the Emergency Ward unconscious, and he died of a subdural hematoma, without being identified and without regaining consciousness.

  Chapter 7 of the Final Report is entitled “Nontherapeutic Research on Children.” In 1961 researchers at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University School of Medicine gave radioactive iodine to seventy retarded children at Wrentham State School. These institutions also received CIA mind control money through MKULTRA.

  Other MKULTRA institutions that injected nontherapeutic radioactive materials into children included Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT gave radioactive substances to children at the Fernald School by putting it in their food. The Advisory Committee notes that no risks of radioactivity were mentioned in the consent form signed by the parents. The consent form stated that the purpose of the experiments was “helping to improve the nutrition of our children.”

  The Advisory Committee says of the nutritional claim, “This was simply not true.” (page 344).

  In the 1940’s, 751 women receiving prenatal care at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee were given experimental radiation doses. Several of the children of these pregnancies died of cancer. One died of leukemia at age 5.

  The radiation experiments were interwoven with research on chemical and biological weapons, and infectious diseases251. As in the radiation experiments, children were the subjects of biological experiments. It is unknown how many mentally retarded children have been injected with viruses and bacteria in North America. Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University and his staff deliberately injected severely mentally retarded children at Willowbrook State School with hepatitis virus in the 1950’s and 1960’s154.

  Dr. Krugman’s research was funded by the Army Medical Research and Development Command, Department of the Army under contract DA-49-193-MD-2331. It was also sponsored by the Commission on Viral Infections, Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, Office of the Surgeon General. Additionally, it was reviewed and approved by the New York University School of Medicine Committee on Human Experimentation and the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. The ethics of Krugman’s (1971) research were debated in The Lancet107, 153, 282.

  Dr. Krugman defended the morality of the project and said that it was scientifically justified. Although to date there has been no compensation for victims of unethical biological experiments, the federal government has officially disagreed with apologists for the radiation experiments. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced in New York on November 19, 1996 that twelve families of victims of radiation experiments were being compensated for a total of $4.8 million (The Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1996, page 6A). The only victim still alive to receive compensation directly was Mary Jean Connell, a 74-year old woman living in Avon, New York.

  The radiation experiments are part of the cultural background of psychiatric participation in mind control. Many doctors and leading academic institutions participated directly in the research. The work was conducted in the absence of any public discussion, and without guidelines or monitoring from professional Associations. Informed consent was not obtained, funding sources were not revealed, and subjects were given disinformation about the intent of the experiments by doctors.

  The participation of psychiatrists, other physicians and psychologists, and leading medical schools in mind control and radiation research was not an anomaly or aberration. It was not a matter of isolated rogue doctors and the experiments were not conducted during a period with different ethical standards. Much of the research was published in professional journals, though never with acknowledgement that experiments were funded by the CIA. The radiation experiments are part of the climate and historical background for mind control experimentation.

  II. COLD WAR

  MIND CONTROL EXPERIMENTATION

  In this section, the major body of information about mind control and the creation of the Manchurian Candidate is presented. The experiments began during World War II and at least some elements of the programs, such as non-lethal weapons, have continued up to the present. Paranormal experiments under STARGATE continued until 1984, and Army doctors were actively involved in LSD testing at least until the late 1970’s. Still-classified CIA mind control programs were operational at least into the early 1970’s.

  Subjects of LSD experiments included children as young as five years old, and brain electrodes were implanted in children as young as eleven years of age. Four of the CIA’s MKULTRA Subprojects were on children, a fact that has not been publicly documented before.

  The mind control experiments were conducted by a network of doctors that included the leaders of psychiatry and the major medical schools. The mind control doctors included Presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and psychiatrists who received full-page obituaries in The American Journal of Psychiatry. In this section of The CIA Doctors, extensive documentation of the interconnections between the mind control doctors and institutions is presented. The evidence refutes any claim that the mind control experiments involved only a few isolated renegades, or doctors pr
acticing in an era with different ethical standards.

  A number of individual mind control doctors are studied in detail because extensive information about them is available. All psychiatrists and medical schools are implicated because the network is so extensive. Responsibility for the unethical experimentation lies first with the individual doctors, but also collectively with the medical profession as a whole, and with academia as a whole. The Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, for instance, may experience blowback resulting from decades of collusion, secrecy, and direct participation in mind control experimentation. Blowback is a CIA term for negative publicity resulting from clandestine operations287. Somewhere in this network of doctors and medical schools there are as-yet-unidentified creators of Manchurian Candidates.