GRGR(4) Re: TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[Doug Millison]

At 5:48 PM -0400 6/20/99, Paul Mackin wrote:
>My reply to Max was in regard to WWII, which was what he was emphasizing. I
>didn't really think he meant to imply what I suggested. Mine was a rhetorical
>(?)question. About Doug's applying the mad scientist stuff to the 60s I
>suppose it's impossible to read what went on at the White Visitation without
>thinking of the LSD experiments on those unwitting subjects of later times. I
>don't think for a minute however that the real perpetrators ever dreamed of
>anything as outlandish as Pointman and company did. Anything's possible
>though.

"The navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation agent when
American investigators learned of mind control experiments carried out by
Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.... the
drug...afforded certain advantages to SS interrogators, who were
consistently able to draw 'even the most intimate secrets from the subject
when questions were cleverly put.' ... The mescaline experiments at Dachau
were described in a lengthy report by the US Naval Technical Mission, which
swept across Europe in search of every scrap of industrial material and
scientific data that could be garnered from the fallen Reich. That mission
set the stage for the wholesale importation of more than six hundred top
Nazi scientists under the auspices of Project Paperclip, which the CIA
supervised during the early years of the Cold War. Among those who
emigrated to the US in such a fashion was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the
German scientist whose chief subordinates... were directly involved in
'aviation medicine' experiments at Dachau, which included the medical
atrocities during the war. ...After Wernher von Braun, he was the top Nazi
scientist employed by the American government, and he was subsequently
hailed by NASA as the 'father of space medicine.'  The CIA, meanwhile, had
launched an intensive research effort geared toward developing 'special'
interrogation techniques. Two methods showed promise in the late 1940s. ...
CIA doctors attempted to extend the stuporous limbo as long as possible.
... The idea was to produce a 'push' -- a sudden outpouring of thoughts,
emotions, confidences, and whatnot."
--from _Acid Dreams_, Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, pp. 5-7

Sounds a bit like old Slothrop's trip, doesn't it? Note that the
above-mentioned experiments came before the CIA discovered LSD and began to
study how it might be used in interrogation, mind control, and espionage.
Of one such series of experiments (using LSD) conducted by Dr. Ewen
Cameron,  Lee and Shlain say:  "Like the Nazi doctors at Dachau, the CIA
victimized certain groups of people who were unable to resist:  prisoners,
mental patients, foreigners, the termally ill, sexual deviants, ethnic
minorites." (p. 24)

These efforts heated up considerably and shifted focus, according to Lee
and Shlain, after Allen Dulles -- a name that sometimes comes up in close
readings of Pynchon's novels, including, I believe, GR -- took over the CIA
in the early 1950s, as part of the infamous MK-ULTRA program. One unit
within the CIA, the Technical Services Staff (TSS) suggested that "a
surreptitious dose of LSD might disrupt a person's thought process and
cause him to act strangely or foolishly in public. A CIA document notes
that administering LSD 'to high officials [gotta love that 'high' in this
context] would be a relatively simple matter and could have a signficant
effect at key meetings." (p. 28)

In Pynchon's old stomping grounds, Lee and Shlain write, "George Hunter
White, a tough, old-fashioned narcotics officer who ran a training school
for American spies during World War II . . . . rented an apartment in
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. . . . 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. . . . In
addition to providing data about LSD . . . 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. . . . The safehouse experiments
continued without interruption until 1963." (pp. 32-33)





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