The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  The history of the termination of the Lafeyette Clinic brain electrode project parallels the demise of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study in several ways: it was initiated by a single individual; the involved doctors were prepared to continue; and public funding was withdrawn only in response to negative publicity. The same is true for Dr. Louis Jolyon West’s UCLA Violence Center (see Chapter 10). These facts illustrate how the history of the different elements of mind control, biological and chemical weapons development, radiation testing, and the creation of Manchurian Candidates are intertwined and part of the same historical period.

  9

  NON-LETHAL WEAPONS

  The network of mind control doctors, as it existed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, included specialists in non-lethal weapons. Non-lethal weapons is a broad category which includes devices for beaming various kinds of energy at human targets in order to temporarily incapacitate them, or to control or affect their behavior. Non-lethal weapons research has been conducted at universities in the United States on contract to the CIA, and has overlapped with research on hallucinogens and brain electrode implants. Funding of the experiments began in MKULTRA.

  MKULTRA and MKSEARCH contractor Dr. Charles Geschickter described some of the early non-lethal weapons research in Senate testimony transcribed in Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977 (p. 90.):

  Senator KENNEDY: Was the NIH [National Institute of Health] involved in any of the research projects?

  Dr. GESCHICKTER: There was NIH involvement.

  Senator KENNEDY: Could you tell us the nature of that involvement?

  Dr. GESCHICKTER: I can tell you the nature of it accurately.

  One was on studies on concussion in which they rocked the heads of animals back and forth to try to cause them amnesia by concussion of the brain. And that was for $100,000.

  The other, which was funded through this later business [Dr. Geschickter being used to funnel CIA money to other researchers through separate bank accounts] was the use of radar to put monkeys to sleep, to see if they could be, should I say, instead of Mickey Finn, they could put them under with radar directed towards the monkey’s brain.

  Senator SCHWEIKER: Could they?

  Dr. GESCHICKTER: Did they go to sleep?

  Senator SCHWEIKER: Yes.

  Dr. GESCHICKTER: Yes, sir. But, Senator, it showed if you got into too deep a sleep, you injured the heat center of the brain the way you cook meat, and there was a borderline there that made it dangerous.

  The research described by Dr. Geschickter is MKULTRA Subproject 62, conducted at the National Institutes of Health by Dr. Maitland Baldwin24, a neurosurgeon. Subproject 62 documents describe Dr. Baldwin’s interest in sensory isolation experiments, and a Subproject status report states that, “certain kinds of radio frequency energy have been found to effect reversible neurological changes in chimpanzees.”

  In the publication resulting from Subproject 62, entitled, “Effects of radio-frequency energy on primate cerebral activity,” Baldwin, Bach and Lewis25 thank the Naval Research Laboratory and Rome Air Force Base for supplying equipment used to generate the radio waves.

  Dr. Baldwin also did a study in which he gave LSD to monkeys25. In the experiment, control monkeys were compared to monkeys who had had their temporal lobes removed surgically. Based on the responses of the two groups of monkeys to LSD, Dr. Baldwin concluded that the temporal lobes must be in place for monkeys to experience the effect of LSD. The LSD used by Dr. Baldwin was supplied by Sandoz Laboratories.

  Li and Baldwin160 described a technique for implanting electrodes in the human brain; at that point in time they had implanted electrodes in the brains of 30 people over a five-year period. Penfield and Baldwin234 performed a series of temporal lobectomies at the Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University during the same time period that Dr. Ewen Cameron (contractor on MKULTRA Subproject 68) was the Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill, and Dr. James Tyhurst of McGill was attending BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE meetings in Montreal (see Chapter 12 for information on other CIA and military contracts at McGill).

  MKSEARCH Subproject 1 documents, for which Dr. Baldwin was the investigator, have not yet been released by the CIA. Baldwin was a Lieutenant in the Navy from 1944 to 1947 and joined the Naval Reserve in 1957.

  Through MKULTRA Subproject 54, the CIA gave $62,400.00 to the Office of Naval Research in 1955. The researcher funded in this project was studying how to produce concussions from a distance using mechanical blast waves propagated through the air. Under a heading of “POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH FINDINGS,” the contractor says that such concussion “is always followed by amnesia for the actual moment of the accident.” He also states:

  The blast duration would be in the order of a tenth of a second. Masking of a noise of this duration should not be difficult. It would be advantageous to establish the effectiveness of both of the above methods as a tool in brain-wash therapy.

  MKULTRA Subproject 119 was a literature review that included a summary of existing information on “Techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means.”

  This early experimental and scholarly research under MKULTRA was the foundation of non-lethal weapons programs that are currently active. According to a report in Defense Electronics299, consideration was given to using non-lethal weapons technology on David Koresh during the Branch Davidian siege in the spring of 1993.

  A Russian expert on non-lethal weapons, Dr. Igor Smirnov, was brought to the United States for a series of meetings in northern Virginia that began on March 17, 1993. The meetings were attended by representatives of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Civilian attendees included Dr. Richard Nakamura of the National Institute of Mental Health and Dr. Christopher Green, Director of Biomedical Research at General Motors Corp.

  According to the article, the device was not used on David Koresh because of software incompatibility problems. Smirnov could not guarantee its safety. A firm called Psychotechnologies Corp, based in Richmond, Virginia entered into an agreement with the Russians to share and develop this technology for American use.

  Pasternak233 described non-lethal weapons research in the 1990’s in an article in U.S. News and World Report. According to the article, acoustic weapons research is ongoing at Scientific Applications & Research Associates, Inc. in Huntington Beach, California, with testing at nearby Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base; Mission Research Corps in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Armstrong Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. From 1980 to 1983, according to Pasternak, the Marine Corps Nonlethal Electromagnetic Weapons project was run by a man named Eldon Byrd, who did work at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Bethesda is the location of the National Institute of Mental Health, a representative of which attended the meetings with Dr. Igor Smirnov in 1993.

  There is abundant evidence in the public domain233 that non-lethal weapons research is ongoing and funded annually in the tens of millions of dollars, or more. Given the fact that chemical and biological weapons, mind control drugs and radiation have been tested on unwitting civilian populations, it is possible that non-lethal weapons have also been tested on unwitting civilians.

  As is true for mind control experimentation, physicians must be involved in non-lethal weapons programs. Non-lethal weapons programs therefore pose a problem in medical ethics and require official policies and guidelines from the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. To date, organized, academic medicine has acted as if non-lethal weapons do not exist.

  10

  DR. LOUIS JOLYON WEST

  Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948, prior to Air Force LSD and MKULTRA contracts carried out there. He did his psychiatry residency f
rom 1949 to 1952 at Cornell (an MKULTRA Institution and site of the MKULTRA cutout The Human Ecology Foundation). From 1948 to 1956 he was Chief, Psychiatry Service, 3700th USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. This base is not far from Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, which houses the Albertus Strughold Library (see Chapter 1).

  While at Lackland Air Force Base, Dr. West examined Air Force pilots who had been converted to Communism while held as POWs in the Korean War. Based on this experience he published a paper315 entitled, “United States Air Force prisoners of the Chinese Communists. Methods of Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Interviews.”

  Other papers published by Dr. West were entitled: “Sleep deprivation”41 “Lysergic acid diethylamide: Its effects on the male asiatic elephant”330 “Brainwashing”316 “Hypnosis and experimental psychopathology”68; “Sensory isolation”317; “Monkeys and brainwashing”319; “Psychiatry, brainwashing, and the American character”320; “Brainwashing, conditioning, and ddd (debility, dependency, and dread)”90; “Dissociative reaction”321; “Hallucinogens”181; “Psychobiology of racial violence”322; “Flight from violence: Hippies and the green rebellion”10; “Hippie culture”327; “Campus unrest and the counter culture”323; “Contemporary cults:

  Utopian images, internal reality”324 “Cults, liberty, and mind control”325; and “Persuasive techniques in contemporary cults”326.

  A list of Dr. West’s military appointments obtained from his curriculum vitae is included in Appendix G. His curriculum vitae does not mention that he received TOP SECRET clearance from the CIA as the contractor on MKULTRA Subproject 43. This was a $20,800.00 grant given to Dr. West in 1956 while he was Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma. The Subproject proposal submitted to the CIA by Dr. West is entitled, “PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF HYPNOSIS AND SUGGESTIBILITY” and an accompanying document is entitled “STUDIES OF DISSOCIATIVE STATES.” This latter document reads:

  An examination of current descriptions of dissociative reactions reveals a rather stereotyped concept, differing little from [whited out] original one, and offering limited definition of the dissociative mechanisms and their role in normal and abnormal psychological functions. The literature concerning clinical entities ordinarily considered to constitute the dissociative reactions is fairly well limited to case-studies of patients with fugues, amnesia, somnambulisms, and multiple personalities.

  Unpublished studies by the writer have led him to a greatly expanded concept of dissociation. Dissociative phenomena are found in everyday life. Such manifestations include “highway hypnosis”, states of “fascination” in flyers, hypnagogic and phantasy hallucinations, transient anaesthesias, and many other examples. These reactions have many features in common with a variety of clinical disorders including “sleep paralysis”, trance states, Gilles de la Tourette’s disease, latah, “Arctic hysteria”, and a number of other disturbances in addition to the well-known dissociative reactions of the text-books.

  There is considerable experimental evidence pointing to the significant role played by dissociative mechanisms in the production of the various phenomena of hypnosis. In fact, hypnosis may be considered to be a pure-culture, laboratory controlled dissociative reaction. Of the entire phenomenology of the various states described above, there is not one single manifestation which cannot be produced experimentally in the hypnotic subject. Thus, through the use of hypnosis as a laboratory device, the dissociative mechanisms can be studied with a high degree of objectivity.

  Of increasing interest at the present time are the actions of a variety of new drugs which alter the state of psychological functioning. Some of these agents produce disturbances of perception and integration (mescaline, lysergic acid, etc.). Others produce alterations of autonomic reactivity through inhibition of central (hypothalamic?) functions, so that “emotional responsiveness” is diminished (reserpine, chlorpromazine, etc.). The effects of these agents upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of dissociated states have never been studied.

  Only the first page of this document, stamped “WARNING NOTICE SENSITIVE INTELLIGENCE SOURCES AND METHODS INVOLVED”, and reproduced in its entirety above, is available under the Freedom of Information Act. That Dr. West continued to study dissociation intensively into the 1960’s is demonstrated by the fact that he wrote the section entitled “Dissociative Reactions” in the major textbook of psychiatry in North America321.

  In 1980, Dr. West co-authored a chapter in the next edition of this textbook, The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, with Dr. Margaret Singer329 entitled, “Cults, quacks, and nonprofessional psychotherapies.” Dr. Singer289 thanks, among others, Richard Ofshe and Louis Jolyon West for support of her work in the Acknowledgements to her book Cults in Our Midst289, 290. In the Introduction she writes:

  After a number of years at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, I went to Washington, D.C., as a senior psychologist in the laboratory of psychology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, among other things, I worked with people who were studying prisoners of war from the Korean War. I became knowledgeable about, and intrigued with, the forms of coercive persuasion, or thought-reform programs, that not only prisoners of war but also civilians in a variety of milieus had been exposed to in the Far East. I also interviewed a number of Jesuit priests who had been exposed to thought-reform processes while imprisoned in Mainland China.

  In his MKULTRA Subproject 43 proposal, Dr. West describes a research plan that involved many of the mind control techniques of both the Communist Chinese and leaders of destructive cults:

  It is proposed that the experiments begun during 1955-56 involving hypnotizability, suggestibility, and the role of certain drugs in altering these attributes, be continued and extended during 1956-57 … Experiments involving altered personality function as a result of environmental manipulation (chiefly sensory isolation) have yielded promising leads in terms of suggestibility and the production of trance-like states. There is reason to believe that environmental manipulations can affect the tendencies for dissociative phenomena to occur. Isolation, in particular, can markedly change the individual’s response to suggestion in the form of verbal communication …

  All of the above-recommended experimental procedures will require special equipment, special methodologies, and special skills. In order to make possible a continuing research program in this area, a psychophysiological research team is being developed at the [whited out]. Facilities of the [whited out], and the [whited out] are available. However, within the overall framework of these facilities, a unique laboratory must be organized and constructed. This laboratory will include a special chamber, in which all psychologically significant aspects of the environment can be controlled. This chamber will contain, among other things, a broad-spectrum polygraph for simultaneous recordings of a variety of psychophysiological reactions of the individual being studied. In this setting the various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated in a controlled fashion and quantitative recordings of the reactions of the experimental subjects will be made.

  Dr. West devoted four decades to study, writing and experimentation on dissociation, hypnosis, Communist mind control, hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, and methods of social influence; he concluded that the methods used by destructive cults result in the creation of new identities and dissociated states328. The same methods, when applied to experimental subjects under BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA, also resulted in the creation of amnesia, new identities and dissociated states. This was the Manchurian Candidate program.

  In his Chapter on destructive cults in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry329, Dr. West writes disparagingly of psychiatrists who are interested in parapsychology and hallucinogens:

  In the past few years some psychiatrists have shown a growing and unabashed interest in parapsychology, including telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and
presience. A distinguished psychiatrist (Stevenson, 1966) has written on reincarnation, another (Eisenbud, 1967) on mediums, a third (Ullman, 1973) on thought transference in dreams. Experiences with hallucinogenic drugs have led some behavioral scientists, such as Castaneda (1968) to formulate different, even mystical, ways of knowing reality. However, even the biological scientist (Lilly, 1972) and the astronaut (Mitchell, 1974) are no longer hesitant about involving themselves in experiments and self-revelations that would have seemed outrageously mystical 20 years ago but that are now taken as a matter of course.

  Astrology and prophecy seem to be as much in vogue today as they were in the 16th century. Many citizens eagerly accept the idea that the earth is being visited regularly by benign denizens of other solar systems who are ferried by spacecraft seen as unidentified flying objects (UFO’s).

  ESP research was conducted at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute by CIA consultant, Dr. Thelma Moss while Dr. West was the Director. The CIA funded paranormal research through STARGATE and MKULTRA; Dr. West himself obtained research funds through MKULTRA. Dr. Moss was an Assistant Professor at the Neuropsychiatric Institute beginning in 1966; her curriculum vitae lists 43 publications from 1961 to 1973, many of which are on ESP and the paranormal.