Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (8 page)

Right from the start White had plenty of leeway in running his operations. He rented an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, and with funds supplied by the CIA he transformed it into a safehouse complete with two-way mirrors, surveillance equipment, and the like. Posing as an artist and a seaman, White lured people back to his pad and slipped them drugs. A clue as to how his subjects fared can be found in White’s personal diary, which contains passing references to surprise LSD experiments: “Gloria gets horrors. . . . Janet sky high. “The frequency of bad reactions prompted White to coin his own code word for the drug: “Stormy,” which was how he referred to LSD throughout his fourteen-year stint as a CIA operative.

In 1955 White was transferred to San Francisco, where two more safehouses were established. During this period he initiated Operation Midnight Climax, in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment. As payment for their services the hookers received $100 a night, plus a guarantee from White that he’d intercede on their behalf should they be arrested while plying their trade. In addition to providing data about LSD, Midnight Climax enabled the CIA to learn about the sexual proclivities of those who passed through the safe-houses. White’s harem of prostitutes became the focal point of an
extensive CIA study of how to exploit the art of lovemaking for espionage purposes.

When he wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse, White would cruise the streets of San Francisco tracking down drug pushers for the Narcotics Bureau. Sometimes after a tough day on the beat he invited his narc buddies up to one of the safehouses for a little “R & R.” Occasionally they unzipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises—much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns in shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD. “So far as I’m concerned,” White later told an associate, “ ‘clear thinking’ was non-existent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times like I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session.”

White had quite a scene going for a while. By day he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night he dispensed them to strangers. Not everyone was cut out for this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, and White often relied on the bottle to reconcile the two extremes. But there were still moments when his Jekyll-and-Hyde routine got the best of him. One night a friend who had helped install bugging equipment for the CIA stopped by the safehouse only to find the roly-poly narcotics officer slumped in front of a full-length mirror. White had just finished polishing off a half gallon of Gibson’s. There he sat, with gun in hand, shooting wax slugs at his own reflection.

The safehouse experiments continued without interruption until 1963, when CIA inspector general John Earman accidentally stumbled across the clandestine testing program during a routine inspection of TSS operations. Only a handful of CIA agents outside Technical Services knew about the testing of LSD on unwitting subjects, and Earman took Richard Helms, the prime instigator of MK-ULTRA, to task for not fully briefing the new CIA director, John J. McCone. Although McCone had been handpicked by President Kennedy to replace Allen Dulles as the dean of American intelligence, Helms apparently had his own ideas about who was running the CIA.

Earman had grave misgivings about MK-ULTRA and he prepared a twenty-four-page report that included a comprehensive overview
of the drug and mind control projects. In a cover letter to McCone he noted that the “concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical.” But the harshest criticism was reserved for the safehouse experiments, which, in his words, placed “the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” Earman stated that LSD had been tested on “individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign.” Numerous subjects had become ill, and some required hospitalization for days or weeks at a time. Moreover, the sophomoric procedures employed during the safehouse sessions raised serious questions about the validity of the data provided by White, who was hardly a qualified scientist. As Earman pointed out, the CIA had no way of knowing whether White was fudging the results to suit his own ends.

Earman recommended a freeze on unwitting drug tests until the matter was fully considered at the highest level of the CIA. But Helms, then deputy director for covert operations (the number two position within the Agency), defended the program. In a memo dated November 9, 1964, he warned that the CIA’s “positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing,” and he called for a resumption of the safehouse experiments. While admitting that he had “no answer to the moral issue,” Helms argued that such tests were necessary “to keep up with Soviet advances in this field.”

This Cold War refrain had a familiar ring. Yet only a few months earlier Helms had sung a different tune when J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, asked him to report on Soviet mind control initiatives. Helms stated his views in a document dated June 26, 1964: “Soviet research in the pharmacological agents producing behavioral effects has consistently lagged five years
behind
Western research [emphasis added].” Furthermore, he confidently asserted that the Russians did not have “any singular, new potent drugs. . . to force a course of action on an individual.”

The bureaucratic wrangling at CIA headquarters didn’t seem to bother George Hunter White, who kept on sending vouchers for “unorthodox expenses” to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. No definitive record exists as to when the unwitting acid tests were terminated, but it appears that White and the CIA parted ways when he retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1966. Afterwards White reflected upon his
service for the Agency in a letter to Gottlieb: “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

By this time the CIA had developed a “stable of drugs,” including LSD, that were used in covert operations. The decision to employ LSD on an operational basis was handled through a special committee that reported directly to Richard Helms, who characterized the drug as “dynamite” and asked to be “advised at all times when it was intended for use.” A favorite plan involved slipping “P-i” (the code name for LSD when used operationally) to socialist or left-leaning politicians in foreign countries so that they would babble incoherently and discredit themselves in public.

Fidel Castro was among the Third World leaders targeted for surprise acid attacks. When this method proved unworkable, CIA strategists thought of other ways to embarrass the Cuban premier. One scheme involved dusting Castro’s shoes with thalium salts to make his beard fall out. Apparently they thought that Castro would lose his charisma along with his hair. Eventually the Agency shifted its focus from bad trips and close shaves to eliminating Castro altogether. Gottlieb and his TSS cohorts were asked to prepare an array of bizarre gadgets and biochemical poisons for a series of murder conspiracies allying the CIA with anti-Castro mercenaries and the Mob.

Egyptian president Gamal Abdal Nasser also figured high on the CIA’s hallucinogenic hit list. While he managed to avoid such a fate, others presumably were less fortunate. CIA documents cited in a documentary by ABC News confirm that Gottlieb carried a stash of acid overseas on a number of occasions during the Cold War with the intention of dosing foreign diplomats and statesmen. But the effects of LSD were difficult to predict when employed in such a haphazard manner, and the CIA used LSD only sparingly in operations of this sort.

The Hallucination Battlefield

While the CIA was interested in LSD primarily as an instrument of clandestine warfare, the United States Army pursued a more grandiose
scheme. During the Cold War top-level military brass waxed enthusiastic over the prospect of a new kind of chemical weapon that would revolutionize combat. They imagined aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of “madness gas” that would disorient people and dissolve their will to resist. This scenario appealed to those in the Pentagon who felt hamstrung by the possibility of a nuclear shoot-out with the Russkies. They realized that new methods of waging limited warfare would have to be developed, and psychochemical weapons seemed to offer an attractive alternative.

According to Major General William Creasy, chemical incapacitants went hand in glove with the strategic requirements of the Cold War. As chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps, Creasy promoted the psychochemical cause with eccentric and visionary zeal. He maintained that this type of warfare was not only feasible but tactically advantageous in certain situations. Consider, for example, the difficult task of dislodging enemy soldiers from a city inhabited by an otherwise friendly population—an industrial center perhaps, bustling with activity. Assume that the city housed numerous museums and cultural landmarks. Why blow to smithereens the best and worst alike with an old-fashioned artillery barrage? The prospect of obliterating the whole kit and caboodle seemed downright foolish to Creasy if you could get away with less.

Suppose instead you found a way to spike the city’s water supply or to release a hallucinogen in aerosol form. For twelve to twenty-four hours all the people in the vicinity would be hopelessly giddy, vertiginous, spaced-out. Those under the spell of madness gas would be incapable of raising a whimper of protest while American troops established themselves on what was once forbidden turf. Victory would be a foregone conclusion, as smooth and effortless as the French army in
The King of Hearts
strolling into a town inhabited solely by asylum inmates.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to take the teeth out of war and at the same time make its result so final? Just blow their minds, move in, and take over,- it was that simple—or so Creasy claimed. As soon as the citizenry recovered from their relatively brief stint in the ozone, everyone would return to a nine-to-five schedule. There’d be no fatalities and, except for a few borderline psychotics pushed over the edge by the drug, no sick or wounded needing medical care. Most important, the local economy would have suffered no significant setback.

Psychochemical weapons, Creasy argued, offered the most humane way of conducting the dirty business of warfare. He preached a new military gospel: war without death. An era of bloodless combat was just around the proverbial corner. There was only one problem. The sadly misinformed lay public and their elected officials harbored a knee-jerk aversion to chemical weapons.

In May 1959 Creasy took his case directly to the people by granting interviews to reporters and stumping for psychochemicals on a crosscountry lecture tour. “I do not contend that driving people crazy—even for a few hours—is a pleasant prospect,” he told
This Week
magazine. “But warfare is never pleasant. And to those who feel that
any
kind of chemical weapon is more horrible than conventional weapons, I put this question: Would you rather be temporarily deranged, blinded, or paralyzed by a chemical agent, or burned alive by a conventional fire bomb?”

Creasy testified a short time later to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. He explained to the bewildered congressmen how a psychochemical “attacks the sensory, perception, and nerve centers of the body. . . discombobulating them. . . . Your hearing might be affected, your sight might be affected, your physical balance might be affected.” Moreover, these drugs worked so swiftly that people wouldn’t even know they’d been hit.

Representative James Fulton (R-Pa.) was disturbed by Creasy’s remarks. He wondered if some foreign power might already be subjecting people in the United States to such agents. “How can we determine it?” Fulton asked. “What is the test to see whether we are already being subjected to them? Are we under it now?. . . Are we the rabbits and the guinea pigs?. . . How are we to know?”

Simple, said Creasy. If LSD or a related drug was administered to members of Congress, “we could possibly have you dancing on the desks, or shouting Communist speeches.”

Fulton gasped. “Have you ever tried them on Congress?”

“I can assure you of one thing,” said Creasy. “The Chemical Corps of the Army has not found it necessary to do it up until now.”

Creasy’s five-star performance succeeded in winning the hearts, minds, and appropriations of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A sizable budget increase was awarded to the Chemical Corps for the express purpose of developing a nonlethal incapacitant that could subdue a foe without inflicting permanent injury. Apparently Creasy neglected to inform the congressmen of the death of Harold Blauer
in 195 3. Blauer, a tennis professional, was the subject of a drug study conducted by a group of doctors working under army contract at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He died a few hours after receiving an injection of MDA (methyl di-amphetamine, known in latter-day street parlance as the “love drug”) supplied by Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the Army Chemical Corps. “We didn’t know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him,” an army researcher later admitted.

The scientist who directly oversaw this research project was Dr. Paul Hoch, an early advocate of the theory that LSD and other hallucinogens were essentially psychosis-producing drugs. In succeeding years Hoch performed a number of bizarre experiments for the army while also serving as a CIA consultant. Intraspinal injections of mescaline and LSD were administered to psychiatric patients, causing an “immediate, massive, and almost shocklike picture with higher doses.” Aftereffects (“generalized discomfort,” “withdrawal,” “oddness,” and “unreality feelings”) lingered for two to three days following the injections. Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psychosurgery. (“It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value,” Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.