pynchon-l-digest V2 #1993

[Doug Millison]

from Lee & Shlain's _Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: 
The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond_, this intriguing  bit of history, 
in light of the characterization Pynchon creates for Oedipa's shrink 
in COL49, and Slothrop's drugged interrogation in GR:

"After the war, the CIA and the military picked up where the OSS had 
left off in the secret search for a truth serum. The navy took the 
lead when it initiated Project CHATTER in 1947, the same year the CIA 
was formed. Described as an "offensive" program, CHATTER was supposed 
to devise means of obtaining information people independent of their 
volition but without physical duress.  Toward this end, Dr. Charles 
Savage conducted experiments with mescaline [...] at the Naval 
Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But these studies, 
which involved animal as well as human subjects, did not yield an 
effective truth serum, and CHATTER was terminated in 1953. 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 WWII. 
After administering the halluncinogen to thirty prisoners,  the Nazis 
concluded that it was "impossible to impose one's will on another 
person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had 
been given." But the drug still 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. This mission was the 
stqage 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 fashioin was Dr. Hubertus 
Strughold, the German scientist whose chief subordinates (Dr. Sigmund 
Ruff and Dr. Sigmund Rascher) were directly involved in "aviation 
medicine" experiments at Dachau, which included the mescaline 
studies. Despite recurring allegations that he sanctioned medical 
atrocities during the war, Strughold settled in Texas and became an 
important figure in America's space program. 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. [...] "Like the Nazi doctors at Dachau, the CIA victimized 
certain groups of people who were unable to resist:  prisoners, 
mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, sexual deviants, 
ethnic minorities." "
--Lee & Shlain, pp. 5-6, citing a Congressional records on Project 
CHATTER and "German Aviation Research at the Dachau Concentration 
Camp ," US Naval Technical Mission [Report No. 331-N45] October 1945; 
p. 24.

As a Pynchon reader I find it interesting that the CIA's involvement 
with psychedelic drugs (after mescaline came a host of substances 
until the agency hit on LSD) finds its foundations in Nazi aviation 
research in a concentration camp -- echoes, to my ears if not to any 
other reader's, of  the origins of the U.S. rocket program, 
considering the role of Holocaust slave laborers in the manufacture 
of the V-2.

News of the CIA experiments with LSD was widely publicized -- and 
apparently came as a surprise to more than a few of the Senators in 
attendance -- at  Senate hearings in 1977 led by Ted Kennedy as 
chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific 
Research.  Acid Dreams is based in part on a study of the CIA records 
gathered by Senate investigators for those hearings.

IF (a big if, perhaps too much of a stretch for some readers, 
perhaps, and I put it forward here only as something to think about, 
if you like thinking about that sort of thing), if Pynchon has based 
Slothrop's drugged interrogation in GR on CIA research with LSD, then 
P would have been in touch with information that very much under 
wraps at the time he was writing the book (even if news of the 
officially-sponsored research by Leary and the several other 
scientists in the 50s and very early 60s had been mentioned in the 
press in addition to specialist publications and conferences, the CIA 
experiments were not widely known). It's also possible that, when he 
wrote of Slothrop's drugged interrogations and the wildly 
hallucinogenic material they contain, Pynchon may have had in mind 
Project CHATTER, which does not appear to have been kept secret the 
same way the CIA kept their own despicable experiments and medical 
atrocities secret -- Pynchon might have seen the U.S. military and 
Congressional records on Project CHATTER and the contribution to the 
U.S. rocket program from Nazi researchers who experimented on 
concentration camp prisoners with mescaline, or perhaps he heard 
about them from somebody else.

Naming a company with Pynchonian echoes, Lee & Shlain also report:

"During the mid-1960's he [Hubbard, described as "Johnny Appleseed of 
LSD" for his early work in evangelizing use of the substance] was 
employed by Teledyne, a major defense subcontractor as "director of 
human factors research." In this capacity Hubbard served as adviser 
and consultant to a combined navy and NASA proejct that involved 
testing the effects of psychochemical agents on a newly designed 
"helicopter avionics system." Teledyne worked closely with various 
government organizations, including the CIA, to apply these 
techniques to additional areas of military interest. "
--Lee & Shlain, p. 53

Whether Pynchon intends any connections for Dr. Hubertus with 
Oedipa's Dr. H, Slothrop's drug adventures in GR, etc., who knows, 
but I think it's fun to know this stuff as I read P's books.

Speaking of "experimentally-induced insanity", early LSD researchers 
carried out their work with the belief that the substance induced a 
reaction similar to that seen in "insane" subjects -- LSD was often 
called a "pschotomimetic" for that reason.



"jbor"
>Later on Herr Doktor admits that at the end of WWII he was working at
>Buchenwald on "experimentally-induced insanity" on the Jewish prisoners (by
>pulling faces at them!), but says that since then he has "tried to atone".
>(p. 95) It seems to me that whatever the purpose/s of the current LSD
>experiments in Kinneret -- I don't think it's ever made explicit in the text
>what these might be (even so, it is certainly possible that the community
>hospital and Hilarius have differing agendas) -- Hilarius has viewed his
>work in the U.S. as part of this atonement phase, a type of "penance".
>
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>