{"id":148519,"date":"2019-12-02T12:01:25","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T12:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=148519"},"modified":"2019-11-28T07:02:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T07:02:12","slug":"inside-the-archive-of-an-lsd-researcher-with-ties-to-the-cias-mkultra-mind-control-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/inside-the-archive-of-an-lsd-researcher-with-ties-to-the-cias-mkultra-mind-control-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher with Ties to the CIA\u2019s MKUltra Mind Control Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo illustration: Soohee Cho\/The Intercept; Photos: Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Nov 2019 – <\/em>On the night of July 4, 1954, San Antonio, Texas, was shaken by the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl. The man accused of these crimes was Jimmy Shaver, an airman at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record. Shaver claimed to have lost his memory of the incident.<\/p>\n

The victim, 3-year-old Chere Jo Horton, had disappeared around midnight outside the Air Force Base, where her parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.<\/p>\n

Within an hour, the group came upon a car parked next to a gravel pit; Chere\u2019s underwear was hanging from one of the car\u2019s doors. Shaver wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as \u201cdazed\u201d and in a \u201ctrance-like\u201d state.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going on here?\u201d he asked. He didn\u2019t seem drunk, but he couldn\u2019t say where he was, how\u2019d he gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton\u2019s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she\u2019d been raped.<\/p>\n

Deputies arrested Shaver. At 29, he was recently remarried with two children and no history of violence. He\u2019d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he\u2019d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver had seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.<\/p>\n

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn\u2019t drunk. One later testified that he \u201cprobably was not normal \u2026 he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.\u201d He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.<\/p>\n

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn\u2019t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: He could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn\u2019t remember anything, he reasoned, he must have done it.<\/p>\n

Two months later, in September, Shaver\u2019s memories still hadn\u2019t returned. The commander of the base hospital, Col. Robert S. Bray, ordered a psychiatric evaluation, to be performed by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of psychiatric services at the air base. It fell to West to decide if Shaver\u00a0had been legally sane at the time of the murder.<\/p>\n

Shaver spent the next two weeks under West\u2019s supervision. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, or \u201ctruth serum,\u201d to see if he could clear his amnesia.<\/p>\n

While Shaver was under, according to testimony, he recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She\u2019d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, \u201cBeth Rainboat,\u201d who\u2019d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he \u201chad visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Shaver was under hypnosis, he confessed to killing the young girl. At trial, he maintained his innocence.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the trial, West made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court later ruled that he\u2019d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his\u00a033rd birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.<\/p>\n

The trial, which hinged on Shaver\u2019s testimony, might have ended differently had the jury known\u00a0about West\u2019s past. According to newly surfaced papers from\u00a0West\u2019s archives,\u00a0the psychiatrist had some of the clearest, most nefarious ties of any scientist to the CIA\u2019s Project MKUltra. West\u2019s files \u2014 especially his correspondence with the CIA\u2019s longtime poisons expert, Sidney Gottlieb \u2014 shed new light on one of the most infamous projects in the agency\u2019s history. Likely comprising more than\u00a0149 subprojects and at least 185 researchers working at institutions across America and Canada<\/a>, MKUltra was, as the New York Times put it, \u201ca secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.\u201d Its experiments violated international laws, not to mention the agency\u2019s charter, which forbids domestic activity.<\/p>\n

At the trial, West maintained that Shaver had suffered a bout of temporary insanity on the night of Chere Jo Horton\u2019s killing, but he argued that Shaver was \u201cquite sane now.\u201d In the courtroom, Shaver didn\u2019t look that way. One newspaper account said he \u201csat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,\u201d saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker.<\/p>\n

Large portions of West\u2019s truth serum interview with Shaver were read into the court record. The doctor had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. \u201cTell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,\u201d he\u2019d said. The transcript of the interview, which survived among West\u2019s papers, also showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: \u201cJimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?\u201d Or: \u201cAfter you took her clothes off, what did you do?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI never did take her clothes off,\u201d Shaver said.<\/p>\n

The interview was divided into thirds, and the middle third hadn\u2019t been recorded. When the transcript picked up, it said: \u201cShaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.\u201d<\/p>\n

West asked, \u201cNow you remember it all, don\u2019t you, Jimmy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, sir,\u201d Shaver replied.<\/p>\n

Though lawyers scrutinized Shaver\u2019s medical history, little mention was made of the base hospital where West\u2019s archived letters indicate he had conducted his MKUltra experiments. Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he\u2019d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. His condition was severe enough that the Air Force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who\u2019d attempted to recruit him was\u00a0not named in court records or transcripts.<\/p>\n

On the stand, West said he\u2019d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated in the experimental program. Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, according to the base\u2019s archivist, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with \u201cSa\u201d through \u201cSt\u201d had vanished.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Louis Jolyon West in San Francisco, Calif., in 1976.
Photo: Lawrence Schiller\/Polaris Communications\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

West\u2019s professional fascination with LSD was practically as old as the drug itself. For several decades, he was one of an elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland\u2019s Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a new substance. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who\u2019d discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a \u201csacred drug\u201d that gestured toward \u201cthe mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the \u201950s, even before hippies embraced the drug, \u201cVery few people took LSD without having somebody being a \u2018trip leader,\u2019\u201d Charles Fischer, a drug researcher, told me. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to that associated with hypnosis; West had studied the two in tandem. \u201cYou can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,\u201d Fischer explained. \u201cHammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

West seems to have used chemicals liberally in his medical practice, and his\u00a0tactics\u00a0left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play<\/a> about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my 50 years in the profession, that was the most dramatic moment ever \u2014 when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl,\u201d Rose said in 2002 of Shaver and the truth serum interview. But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. Hypnotism, he said, was not part of the protocol for the interview.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were involved from the first day,\u201d Rose recalled. \u201cJolly phoned me the morning of the murder. He initiated it.\u201d<\/p>\n

West claimed he was in the courtroom the day Shaver was sentenced to death. Around this time, he became vehemently opposed to capital punishment. Did he know his experiments might\u2019ve led to the execution of an innocent man and the death of a child? If his correspondence with CIA head of MKUltra Gottlieb \u2014 predating the crime by just a year \u2014 had been presented at trial, would the outcome have been the same?<\/p>\n

Almost as soon<\/u> as they had access to it, government scientists saw LSD as a potential Cold War miracle drug. Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command.<\/p>\n

In 1949, the CIA, then in its infancy, launched Project Bluebird, a mind-control program that tested drugs on American citizens \u2014 most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases \u2014 who didn\u2019t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.<\/p>\n

Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they\u2019d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists: The POWs must have been \u201cbrainwashed.\u201d The word, a literal translation of the Chinese \u201cxi nao,\u201d didn\u2019t appear in English before 1950. It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in postwar America: that a new class of chemicals could rewire and automate the human mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,\u201d Fischer explained. \u201cHammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the American POWs returned, the Army brought in a team of scientists to \u201cdeprogram\u201d them. Among those scientists was West. Born in Brooklyn in 1924, he had enlisted in the Air Force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. His friends called him \u201cJolly,\u201d for his middle name, impressive girth, and oversized personality. When he got out, he researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. He would later claim to have studied 83 prisoners of war, 56 of whom had been forced to make false confessions. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.<\/p>\n

West\u2019s success with the POWs gained him entrance into the upper echelons of the intelligence community. Gottlieb,\u00a0the poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA\u2019s Technical Services Staff, along with Richard Helms, the CIA\u2019s chief of operations for the Directorate of Plans had convinced the agency\u2019s then-director, Allen Dulles, that mind control ops were the future. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further potential brainwashing by the Soviets. But the defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.<\/p>\n

In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that communist spies could turn the American mind into \u201ca phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius.\u201d Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKUltra in motion.<\/p>\n

Little is known about the program. After Watergate, Helms (who by that time was CIA director) ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKUltra papers; in January 1973, the Technical Services staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens.<\/p>\n

In the mid-1970s, after the Times revealed the existence of MKUltra on its front page, the government launched three separate investigations, all of which were hobbled by the CIA\u2019s destruction of its files: Vice President Nelson Rockefeller\u2019s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (1975); Senator Frank Church\u2019s Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975-6); and Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Inouye\u2019s joint Senate Select Committee hearings on Project MKUltra, the CIA\u2019s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification (1977). When records were available, they were redacted; when witnesses were summoned to testify before Congress, they were forgetful.<\/p>\n

We do know the project\u2019s broadest goal was \u201cto influence human behavior.\u201d Under its umbrella were at least 149 subprojects, many involving research on unwitting participants. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality earned him the nickname the \u201cBlack Sorcerer,\u201d developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.<\/p>\n

The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley \u2014 farmed out to scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes, including those of their unknowing subjects.<\/p>\n

Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to \u201cinduced pain\u201d and \u201cpsychosis.\u201d They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn\u2019t do the trick, they\u2019d try to master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.<\/p>\n

MKUltra was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in 1961, he was not informed of its existence until 1963. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of it at any period during its 20-year history.<\/p>\n

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Sidney Gottlieb in 1977. Photo: AP<\/p><\/div>\n

West headed the<\/u> psychiatry department at UCLA and the school\u2019s renowned neuroscience center until his retirement in 1988. One day, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis in West\u2019s archives there, I found letters between West and his CIA handler, \u201cSherman Grifford\u201d \u2014 the cover name, according to John Marks\u2019s \u201cThe Search for the Manchurian Candidate,\u201d for Sidney Gottlieb. West, who had once written to a magazine editor that he had \u201cnever worked for the CIA,\u201d had in fact worked closely with the agency\u2019s \u201cBlack Sorcerer\u201d himself.<\/p>\n

The letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKUltra started, when West was chief of the psychiatric service at the air base at Lackland.<\/p>\n

Who would the guinea pigs be?\u00a0West listed four groups: basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and \u201cothers, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Addressing Gottlieb as \u201cS.G.,\u201d West outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. He began with a plan to discover \u201cthe degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and\/or alteration of the subject\u2019s recollection of the information he formerly knew.\u201d Another item proposed honing \u201ctechniques for implanting false information into particular subjects \u2026 or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.\u201d He hoped to create \u201ccouriers\u201d who would carry \u201ca long and complex message\u201d embedded secretly in their minds, and to study \u201cthe induction of trance-states by drugs.\u201d His list lined up perfectly with the goals of MKUltra.<\/p>\n

\u201cNeedless to say,\u201d West added, the experiments \u201cmust eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.\u201d To this end, he asked Gottlieb for \u201csome sort of carte blanche.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups: basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and \u201cothers, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.\u201d Only the volunteers would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasn\u2019t spelled out, unwitting. It would be easier to preserve his secrecy if he were \u201cinducing specific mental disorders\u201d in people who already exhibited them. \u201cCertain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments.\u201d Official investigations into MKUltra yielded little information about its subjects, but West\u2019s letter suggests that the program cast a wide net.<\/p>\n

Gottlieb\u2019s reply came on letterhead from \u201cChemrophyl Associates,\u201d a front company he used to correspond with MKUltra subcontractors. \u201cMy Good Friend,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. \u2026 you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: \u201cWe have gained quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

West returned the camaraderie: \u201cIt makes me very happy to realize that you consider me \u2018an asset,\u2019\u201d he replied. \u201cSurely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1954,<\/u> around the same time as Chere Jo Horton\u2019s murder, West began to split his time between Lackland and the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, where he would lead the psychiatry department.<\/p>\n

West had told his prospective employer that his Lackland duties were \u201cpurely clinical\u201d and that he\u2019d \u201cbeen doing no research, classified or otherwise\u201d \u2014 and he asked the board of directors at Oklahoma for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called \u201ca non-profit private research foundation.\u201d In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another of Gottlieb\u2019s fictions, a shell organization enabling him.<\/p>\n

In 1956, West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he\u2019d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. In a 1956 paper titled \u201cThe Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,\u201d he claimed to have achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace \u201ctrue memories\u201d with \u201cfalse ones\u201d in human beings without their knowledge. Without detailing specific incidents, he put it in layman\u2019s terms: \u201cIt has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.\u201d He\u2019d done it, he claimed, by administering \u201cnew drugs\u201d effective in \u201cspeeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of \u201cThe Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility\u201d that the CIA turned over to Senators Kennedy and Inouye\u00a0in 1977. West\u2019s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But the CIA\u2019s version was also shorter, and watered down in comparison. West\u2019s document was 14 pages. This one was five, including a cover page. Most glaringly, there was no mention of West\u2019s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of \u201cthe memory of a definite event in the life of an individual\u201d with a \u201cfictional event.\u201d<\/p>\n

One passage, not in West\u2019s original, claims the CIA never used LSD in studies at all: \u201cThe effects of [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.\u201d<\/p>\n

West, of course, had studied those effects for years. But when it came to elaborating on his findings about implanting memories and controlling thoughts, even in the paper found in West\u2019s own files, he offered few details. He seems to have been in a rudimentary phase of his research. Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, \u201ca person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken place\u2026so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss\u2026An individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had the CIA doctored West\u2019s original document to mislead the Senate committee? And if so, why would the agency have gone to so much trouble to hide experimental findings that weren\u2019t ultimately all that revealing? Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading to mocking headlines like the \u201cThe Gang That Couldn\u2019t Spray Straight.\u201d Perhaps the agency wanted the world to assume that MKUltra was a bust, and to forget the whole thing.<\/p>\n

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The official seal of the CIA in 1974.
Photo: Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The CIA seems<\/u>\u00a0to have pared MKUltra back in the mid-\u201960s, according to congressional testimony and surviving financial records, but Jolly West\u2019s government-funded research continued apace. Late in the fall of 1966, West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies and LSD. Tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past, he cobbled together a new wardrobe and started skipping haircuts. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma, nominally to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his participation in a program there.<\/p>\n

When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, West was the only scientist in the world who\u2019d predicted the emergence of potentially violent \u201cLSD cults\u201d such as Charles Manson\u2019s Family. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, West had contributed a chapter called \u201cHallucinogens,\u201d warning students of a \u201cremarkable substance\u201d percolating through college campuses and into cities. LSD was known to leave users \u201cunusually susceptible and emotionally labile.\u201d It appealed to alienated kids who would crave \u201cshared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another of his papers, 1965\u2019s \u201cDangers of Hypnosis,\u201d foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by \u201ccrackpots\u201d who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. He cited two cases: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a \u201cmilitary offense\u201d induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. (It\u2019s not at all clear that the latter referred to Shaver\u2019s killing of Chere Jo Horton.)<\/p>\n

He\u2019d also supervised a study in Oklahoma City,\u00a0in which he\u2019d hired informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender \u201ca fundamental change\u201d in \u201cbasic moral, religious or political matters.\u201d The title of the project was \u201cMass Conversion,\u201d and it\u00a0had been funded by Gottlieb.<\/p>\n

In the Haight, West arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on Frederick Street, where he\u00a0set up what he described as a \u201claboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.\u201d The \u201cpad\u201d opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. He installed six graduate students in the \u201cpad,\u201d telling them to \u201cdress like hippies\u201d and \u201clure\u201d itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn\u2019t mind grad students taking notes on their behavior.<\/p>\n

According to records in West\u2019s files, his \u201ccrash pad\u201d was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. Dr. Gordon Deckert, West\u2019s successor as chair at the University of Oklahoma, told me that he found papers in West\u2019s\u00a0desk that revealed that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.<\/p>\n

This wouldn\u2019t have been the agency\u2019s first \u201cdisguised laboratory\u201d in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men. White later wrote to his CIA handler, \u201cI was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the Haight-Ashbury pad, though, West\u2019s motives were vague. No one\u00a0seemed to have\u00a0a firm grasp of the project\u2019s purpose \u2014 not even those involved in it. The grad students hired to\u00a0staff\u00a0West\u2019s \u201ccrash pad\u201d lab were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all of these students admitted that something didn\u2019t add up. They weren\u2019t sure what they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

One of the diaries in West\u2019s files belonged to a Stanford psychology grad student who lived at the pad that summer. The experience was aimless to the point of worthlessness, she wrote. When \u201ccrashers\u201d showed up, \u201cno one made much of a point of finding out about [them].\u201d More often, hippies failed to show up at all, since many of them apparently looked on the pad with suspicion. \u201cWhat the hell is Jolly doing, it is like a zoo,\u201d the student fumed. \u201cIs he studying us or them?\u201d<\/p>\n

When West made one of his rare appearances, he was dressed like a \u201csilly hippie\u201d; sometimes he brought friends to the house. Their general attitude,\u00a0she wrote, \u201cwas that this was a good opportunity to have fun. \u2026 They spent a good deal of the time stoned.\u201d She added, \u201cI feel like no one is being honest and straight and the whole thing is a gigantic put on. \u2026 What is he trying to prove? He is interested in drugs, that is clear. What else?\u201d<\/p>\n

In December 1974,<\/u> MKUltra finally came to light in a terrific flash of headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the Times: \u201cHuge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.\u201d The three government investigations that followed \u2014 the Rockefeller Commission, Church Committee, and the Kennedy-Inouye Select Committee hearings \u2014 looked into illegal domestic activities of various federal intelligence agencies, including wiretapping, mail opening, and unwitting drug testing of U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Church Committee\u2019s\u00a0final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKUltra by the CIA\u2019s inspector general. \u201cPrecautions must be taken,\u201d the document warned, \u201cto conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.\u201d A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: \u201cA final phase of the testing of MKUltra products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Church Committee found that MKUltra had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient who\u2019d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a military-contracted scientist who\u2019d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for \u201ctreatment.\u201d (Continued investigation by Olson\u2019s son, Eric \u2014 dramatized by Errol Morris in the series \u201cWormwood<\/a>\u201d \u2014 strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide,\u00a0throwing him out of the window\u00a0because they feared\u00a0he would blow the whistle on MKUltra and the military\u2019s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Statler Hotel in New York, N.Y. where Frank Olson fell to his death.
Photo: Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The news of Olson\u2019s death shocked a nation already reeling from Watergate, and now less inclined than ever to trust its institutions. The government tried to quell the controversy by passing new regulations on human experimentation. Gottlieb\u2019s destruction of the MKUltra files was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, \u201cquietly dropped.\u201d Gottlieb had testified before the Senate in 1977 only under the condition that he received criminal immunity.<\/p>\n

The Senate demanded the formation of a federal program to locate the victims of MKUltra experiments, and to pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators. That program never coalesced. Surviving records named 80 institutions, including 44 universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among them Louis Jolyon West. The Times identified\u00a0West as one of less than a dozen suspected scientists who\u2019d secretly participated in MKUltra under academic cover.<\/p>\n

Yet not one researcher was ever federally investigated, nor were any victims ever notified. Despite the outrage of congressional leaders and more than three years of headlines about the brutalities of the program, no one \u2014 not the \u201cBlack Sorcerer\u201d Sidney Gottlieb, nor senior CIA official Richard Helms, nor Jolly West \u2014 suffered any legal consequences.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________–<\/p>\n

This article is an adapted excerpt from \u201c<\/em>Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom O\u2019Neill<\/a> <\/em>
\nDan Piepenbring<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Nov 2019 – On the night of July 4, 1954, San Antonio, Texas, was shaken by the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl. The man accused of these crimes was Jimmy Shaver, an airman at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record. Shaver claimed to have lost his memory of the incident\u2026 Despite the outrage of congressional leaders and more than three years of headlines about the brutalities of the program, no one \u2014 not the \u201cBlack Sorcerer\u201d Sidney Gottlieb, nor senior CIA official Richard Helms, nor Jolly West \u2014 suffered any legal consequences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":148523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[133,135,1650,487,1648,1649,109,287,1447,95,70,126],"class_list":["post-148519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-cia","tag-drugs","tag-human-experiment","tag-human-rights","tag-lsd-research","tag-mkultra-mind-control-cia","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-science-and-medicine","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}