Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  The book was all the more potent because of its impressive scientific credentials. Kietzman’s editor, Janice Hopper of Washington, D.C.’s Institute for Cross Cultural Research, backed up Kietzman’s methodology by revealing its roots: Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Galvão’s monumental paper, “Indigenous Culture Areas of Brazil, 1900–1959,” which refined for Brazil the “culture area” classification first brought to the Americas from Germany by the renowned Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology. The book also contained a bibliography of Brazilian ethnology up to 1960 by Herbert Baldus and, most important, an earlier demographic study of the tribes based on SPI’s archives by SIL’s chief Brazilian benefactor before the coup, Darcy Ribeiro. Entitled “Indigenous Cultures and Languages of Brazil,” Ribeiro’s remarkable study classified tribes on the basis of their degree of integration into the national Brazilian culture.

  But SIL’s survey was the book’s centerpiece. Kietzman’s report contained mild praise for the SPI three years after Darcy Ribeiro had denounced it for corruption and abuse of the Indians it was supposed to protect.19 Kietzman repeatedly described tribes as being “aided by the SPI,”20 despite Ribeiro’s conclusion that military control over the SPI since 1958 had led it to “the lowest point of its history, bringing it down in certain regions to the degrading condition of an agent and prop of the despoilers and murderers of Indians.”21 Instead, Kietzman portrayed the SPI in its official guise as savior of the Indian, offering “protection”22 from attacks by colonists. Not once in his survey of all Brazil’s tribes was there even a hint that something was rotten in the halls of the SPI.

  Nor was there a hint anywhere in the book that its publisher had ties to any U.S. government agency, much less the CIA. The Institute for Cross Cultural Research was a division of Operations and Policy Research, a private group that, in turn, received CIA money in 1963, 1964, and 1965.23 The 1965 CIA grant was for another study on Brazil that explained trends in voting that could be useful in trying to measure the Brazilian people’s political interests and loyalties, including their willingness to participate in the elections under the generals’ new political regime. The book was written by Ronald Schneider, who, using CIA documents, had earlier written a book vindicating the CIA’s 1954 coup in Guatemala. That book had been commissioned by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, whose assistant director was a former CIA officer and Rockefeller aide, William Kintner, a friend of SIL’s Robert Schneider.

  SIL’s “Hostile Tribes” and Rockefeller-Allied Companies in Brazilian Amazon

  In 1966, two years after the military coup in Brazil and following a survey of the Indian frontier by SIL missionaries for the Brazilian government, Dale Kietzman identified areas of “potentially hostile Indians” in maps prepared for Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century.

  Sources: Dale Kietzman, “Indians and Culture Areas,” in Janice H. Hopper, ed., Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century, “Wycliffe Bible Translators in Brazil” (Huntington Beach, Calif.: Wycliffe Bible Translators, c. 1976); Annual Report of the Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Brasília: SIL, 1976); Engineering and Mining Journal (November 1975), pp. 159, 170–71; Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle, pp. 94–95; “Rondônia, Capital do Estanho,” Visão, August 28, 1972; “La Politica de Genocidio Contra los Indios de Brasil,” report to the 41st Congress of Americanists, 1974, p. 19; International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 1983 (Tulsa, Okla.: PennWell Publishing Company, 1983), p. 105.

  Ronald Schneider’s Brazilian Election Factbook had been published by another division of Operations and Policy Research, the Institute for Comparative Study of Political Systems. From a strategic perspective, Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century was a sociological companion to Schneider’s political study of Brazilian society. It surveyed the social conditions of indigenous populations that occupied the Amazonian frontier, the escape valve for the pressure cooker that Brazilian society had become. In the minds of many generals and the political and economic interests behind them in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—and in Washington and New York—the Indians of Brazil, by defending their land against road builders, corporations, cattlemen, and destitute peasants brought in from the Northeast, stood in the way of prosperity and the diffusing of a dangerous political powder keg.

  Janice Hopper, Kietzman’s editor, was the recent widow of Rex Hopper, a behind-the-scenes collaborator in her book, acknowledged in her preface for his “encouragement, criticisms and suggestions.” Rex Hopper had earned his own measure of infamy in 1965 as director of Project Camelot, the counterinsurgency operation par excellence. Hopper himself defined Camelot’s purpose as a study designed to assess the potential for “internal war” in South America, as well as “the effects of government action on such potential.”24

  Rex Hopper had studied how “indigenous groups” could be trained and used by the U.S. military to control change in South American society, politics, and economics. Project Camelot’s goal, however, was not just to “use” indigenous groups, but to spy on them for potential unrest that could lead to revolts and internal civil war. The strategy of divide and conquer had been practiced since the Romans. In Central and South America, Spaniards had used Indian tribes to conquer their former Aztec and Incan overlords. In North America, the British, French, and U.S. military had used Indians to fight for opposing colonial powers. Now, in his zeal for God and SIL’s mission to reach the Bibleless tribes, Dale Kietzman inadvertently had shown the modern enemies of the Indians of Brazil precisely where the indigenous groups could be found, not to avoid them, but to “reach” them.

  Brazilian generals had their own reasons for locating the tribes. The Jungle Warfare Training Center outside Manaus had recently been set up with support from the CIA and the Green Berets. The CIA had reports that arms were being shipped up the Amazon and its tributaries to guerrillas across the Brazilian border, in Peru definitely, and quite possibly in Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Moreover, there was always the threat—real or perceived—of a guerrilla insurgency within Brazil itself. Indeed, by the early 1970s, Surui Indians would be used to hunt down followers of former Brazilian Communist Party leader and congressman Carlos Marighella in the Araguaia River region of the Amazon; Aché Indians would be similarly deployed in Paraguay against rebels near the Brazilian border, as were Indians in the Caquetá River region of southern Colombia.

  Tribal peoples, as the inhabitants of remote areas where rebels of governments usually launched guerrilla wars, had to be reached for military, as well as economic reasons. Potential allies of the government’s enemies had to be identified and located. Even if guerrilla allies could not be invented, as they had been among the Mayorunas along the Peru-Brazil border in 1964, “hostiles” by their very designation were a “danger to society.”

  Among the regime’s American advisers, this was a concern that dated back to the conquest of the American West. Whether they were missionaries reporting on “hostiles” for John D. Rockefeller or the U.S. Cavalry in the 1880s or SIL’s naive linguists in the 1960s, the result was the same: trouble spots were identified for those who wanted the Indians’ lands and the riches beneath them.

  SHAMANS OF THE COLD WAR

  One of the CIA officers who teamed up with King in the Amazon was William Buckley, a seasoned MKULTRA operative and the jungle warfare expert who, as the future chief of station in Beirut, would die in 1985 as a hostage of the Hizballah (“Army of God”) fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas.

  Both Buckley and King knew that the Amazon was a virtual reservoir of deadly poisons. One such poison, curare, which some Indians put on their arrows and blowgun darts, had been stored by the CIA for simulating heart attacks in people who were targeted for assassination. Another was a leaf that killed cattle. Still another leaf caused hair to fall out. Some plants killed fish. One sap rendered victims temporarily blind.25

  Much of this research had been carried out by scientists at pharmaceutical companies or at academic centers with chemical-ind
ustry affiliations. But by 1965 the CIA was forced to change some of its specific fronts and code names. Studies of the CIA’s operations that Kennedy ordered after the Bay of Pigs finally produced a critical report by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. As a result of Kirkpatrick’s report, Deputy Director Helms in 1965 agreed to a change: MKULTRA was henceforth called MKSEARCH. But its goal remained the same: to “develop, test and evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical and radioactive material systems.”26

  By January 1967, Buckley had left the Amazon and returned to Vietnam; that month, Nicole Maxwell also left King’s Amazonian adventure. With her departure, ANDCO plunged into darker, more sinister missions. Maxwell had already suspected that something was amiss, since King kept putting off the royalty contract he had promised her. She had given him all her notes on the plants, and after ten months, she had nothing to show for her work but a small salary. So she insisted that she had to know the status of the contract. His reply was crisp and evasive. Marketing was for a “nebulous future.” He found it “distressing” that she should be “worrying about anything so remote and undefined.” She should be content with her work as “the realization of your dreams of many years.”27

  In that case, she decided she would quit. Besides, her health had deteriorated.

  King showed up at her door and whisked her off to a small hospital in Maryland. There, doctors claimed that she had become infected by a small parasite named “Providence.”

  King settled her accounts and gave her severance pay and compensation for her furniture. He wanted her out of Iquitos. Maxwell never got her contract from King or any royalties from the patent ANDCO took on sangre de drago.

  With Maxwell gone, ANDCO’s collaboration with the CIA’s MKSEARCH specialists proceeded at a brisk pace. ANDCO botanists sent hallucinogenic plants back to the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb for testing on apes and monkeys.28 Gottlieb’s scientists at Georgetown University Hospital, led by Dr. Charles Geschickter, had already bombarded the animals’ brains with radio-frequency energy waves until they fell unconscious; autopsies revealed that their brains had fried in their skulls.29 Then Gottlieb’s scientists fed simians food that was laced with dust from pulverized Amazonian magic plants to see if they could be induced to kill one another. This experiment, which drove the animals insane, succeeded.

  ANDCO’s purported mission of funding jungle medicines provided the perfect cover for MKSEARCH and other covert operations along the Amazon.

  King had already begun to recruit unwitting students. To do so, he solicited and got the cooperation of the United States’ leading economic botanist, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University.

  Schultes’s star had risen high since World War II, when he worked briefly for the Rockefeller Agricultural Mission to Mexico and then joined the U.S. effort to get rubber out of the Amazon-basin countries. An assignment in Colombia with the Department of Agriculture continued after the war and his reports included descriptions of the politics of various individual Colombians during the civil war. When the end of the Korean War quelled fears of another rubber emergency, he returned to Harvard’s Peabody Museum, where he soon imparted his knowledge of the Aztec Indians’ magic mushrooms to R. Gordon Wasson before the banker-turned-mycologist left for Mexico. Over subsequent years, Schultes’s scientific papers had built his reputation as the United States leading expert on Amazonian rubber varieties, hallucinogens, and Indian herbal medicines. He founded Economic Botany, a magazine that published his scientific findings and promoted the commercial exploitation of Amazonian flora.

  The CIA kept abreast of all these discoveries through the magazine and a network that included informants at the Department of Agriculture.30 Schultes’s professional network included some of the most prestigious ethnobotanists and botanists in the world, including the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hoffman. For years, the Agency had been tracking disbursements of LSD from Sandoz laboratories in Basle, Switzerland, where Hoffman worked. It also bought Eli Lilly’s entire supply of its own newly synthesized LSD. Sidney Gottlieb hoped to corner the mind-altering drug for CIA covert operations.31

  Whether Schultes himself knew of CIA’s MKULTRA experiments, some of Harvard’s top officials did. They were aware of CIA contracts in the university and exercised at least some degree of oversight.32

  On special collecting expeditions, Schultes continued to hack his way through the rain forests of Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, pursuing the secrets of the magical plants that soon, he often explained matter-of-factly to students, would die with the Indians.

  Stories abounded of his marching up to his waist in water through the jungle during the rainy season while balancing a portage pack on his head, going for days without food when game was scarce—all to find the botanical treasures of the jungle. Indian plants became an obsession, with the Indians themselves merely a means toward that end.

  One of Schultes’s favorite stories was of his search during the Korean War for a rare dwarf variety of the Havea rubber tree. They grew only in the “lost world” atop one of the sandstone mountains that rear up from the flat grasslands at the headwaters of the Apáporis River in southeast Colombia. The trick was to get the Indians to take him there. The local shaman warned that trespassers met certain death from hordes of elflike men who suddenly appeared to defend the hill at the approach of people.

  “I don’t know what you will think,” he wrote the Department of Agriculture, “when I tell you that I have been dancing, chewing coca, drinking Chicha de Chontaduro for two days as part of my Point IV work!”

  By entering the festivities and dancing in the mask and palm skirt that the natives made for me, I have finally convinced the medicine man that I am the type of person who would do his trolls no harm. For last night, when we were smoking a three foot communal cigar … Marakayooreena told me that he had thought about the trip to the mountain, and that he would take me there. He said that, as I was not an Indian, I would not be able to see the dwarf people but that they would be there nevertheless. He would practice his magic and tell them my mission was to collect plants, not to molest them. I would hear them, he assured me, but I would think it is the wind rustling the tree tops.

  So, tomorrow, the dancers rest after their three day and night ordeal. Then, I shall send ahead to cut a small path to the Cerro de la Gente Chiquita. When it is ready, we shall see what botanical treasures be there for me.33

  By 1966, Schultes was a legend. Some of his colleagues were already on the CIA or Pentagon payroll, probing the mysteries of native medicines and poisons. It did not seem out of place for King, a former drug company executive, to approach Schultes for his help or for Schultes to assent. Some of the professor’s young protégés soon found themselves in the Amazon, working for King.

  William Buckley, ANDCO’s first paramilitary guard, remembered King sitting in a canvas chair on a large houseboat he used for collecting expeditions. He would sit there for hours, sipping scotch, while his botanists hacked away at the jungle, most of them stoned on yagé, one of the hallucinogens ANDCO sent back to the United States.

  The ANDCO experience seemed to cast a veil of conformity over everyone who took part in it, creating an ambience of plausible deniability. Like Nicole Maxwell, student Timothy Plowman would deny knowledge of King’s CIA sponsorship, insisting that ANDCO collected only medicinal plants, never hallucinogens, never poisons.34 Later confronted by investigators using declassified MKULTRA and MKSEARCH documents, Plowman changed his story. Yes, he admitted, ANDCO shipped back a paralytic agent named Chondodendron toxi-coferum, which was “absolutely lethal in high doses.”35

  SIL was drawn into aiding the botanists simply by its pervasive presence among the jungle’s tribes. SIL missionaries were stationed among tribes throughout the Amazon. They had collected a vast store of data on Indian cultures through their Bible-translation efforts. When one of Schultes’s botanists, Homer Pinkley, needed help collecting linguistic data to identify hallucinogenic p
lants used in tribal ceremonial drinks, he turned to Limoncocha. SIL was willing and able to help.36

  Another collaboration between SIL and Schultes’s network was more ominous. This one took place in Ecuador and Peru, when Dr. Dermot B. Taylor, chairman of UCLA’s Pharmacology Department, used Limoncocha and Yarinacocha to collect plants for the U.S. Army. Taylor did not try to hide his purpose. His study, “Medical Aspects of Chemical Warfare,” was published by the Pentagon. Its goal was “to determine through clinical research the effect of selected toxic compounds and of drugs antagonistic thereto.… Also, to advise and assist in the search for more effective toxic compounds.” Taylor’s three-man expedition to the Amazon rain forests was a great success; more than 2,500 plants were collected. Extracts of the plants were prepared “and screened for biological activity.”37

  Another expedition that swung through SIL’s Peruvian base was composed of former U.S. Marine-turned-author, Margaret Kreig, who was compiling data for her book, Green Medicine, and Bruce Halstead, M.D., a former Loma Linda University trainer of Fundamentalist Christian medical missionaries. Although Halstead was an expert on marine poisons and then under contract with the Pentagon, his purported mission on this 1962 trip with Kreig was to collect information on medicinal plants from Indians and Protestant missionaries for the Pfizer chemical company. However, he was not interested only in Indian medicines; hallucinogens were definitely on his mind. “Halstead naturally was alert whenever we went for new methods of preparing ayahuasca and for botanical specimens of the vine,” Kreig wrote at the time. “I recorded on tape a number of … native recipes, all highly contradictory, and wondered whether the Pfizer researchers would make any use of them.”38 Later, she discovered that they did not. But Halstead nevertheless was anxious to get his plants back to his own new $15 million World Life Research Institute for preliminary studies. “We have no secrets,” he told an American missionary among the Campa Indians. “If any of these plants prove out, we will relay the information to you so that the natives can use them more efficiently in care of themselves.”39 The Indians, however, had little need of American efficiency in using their own tribal medicines.