NP? The CIA and Mind Control ...and the Kenosha Kid

[Doug Millison]

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
  The CIA and Mind Control
by John Marks

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks1.htm
[...]  Less than 200 miles from Hofmann's laboratory,
doctors connected to the S.S. and Gestapo were doing
experiments that led to the testing of mescaline (a
drug which has many of the mind-changing qualities of
LSD) on prisoners at Dachau. Germany's secret
policemen had the notion, completely alien to Hofmann,
that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring
unwilling people under their control. According to
research team member Walter Neff, the goal of the
Dachau experiments was "to eliminate the will of the
person examined." 
    At Dachau, Nazis took the search for scientific
knowledge of military value to its most awful extreme.
There, in a closely guarded, fenced-off part of the
camp, S.S. doctors studied such questions as the
amount of time a downed airman could survive in the
North Atlantic in February. Information of this sort
was considered important to German security, since
skilled pilots were in relatively short supply. So, at
Heinrich Himmler's personal order, the doctors at
Dachau simply sat by huge tubs of ice water with
stopwatches and timed how long it took immersed
prisoners to die. In other experiments, under the
cover of "aviation medicine," inmates were crushed to
death in high-altitude pressure chambers (to learn how
high pilots could safely fly), and prisoners were
shot, so that special blood coagulants could be tested
on their wounds. 
    The mescaline tests at Dachau run by Dr. Kurt
Plotner were not nearly so lethal as the others in the
"aviation" series, but the drug could still cause
grave damage, particularly to anyone who already had
some degree of mental instability. The danger was
increased by the fact that the mescaline was
administered covertly by S.S. men who spiked the
prisoners' drinks. Unlike Dr. Hofmann, the subjects
had no idea that a drug was causing their extreme
disorientation. Many must have feared they had gone
stark mad all on their own. Always, the subjects of
these experiments were Jews, gypsies, Russians, and
other groups on whose lives the Nazis placed little or
no value. In no way were any of them true volunteers,
although some may have come forward under the delusion
that they would receive better treatment. 
    After the war, Neff told American investigators
that the subjects showed a wide variety of reactions.
Some became furious; others were melancholy or gay, as
if they were drunk. Not surprisingly, "sentiments of
hatred and revenge were exposed in every case." Neff'
noted that the drug caused certain people to reveal
their "most intimate secrets." Still, the Germans were
not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for
their more physical methods of interrogation. They
went on to try hypnosis in combination with the drug,
but they apparently never felt confident that they had
found a way to assume command of their victim's mind. 
    Even as the S.S. doctors were carrying on their
experiments at Dachau, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), America's wartime intelligence agency,
set up a "truth drug" committee under Dr. Winfred
Overholser, head of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in
Washington. The committee quickly tried and rejected
mescaline, several barbiturates, and scopolamine.
Then, during the spring of 1943, the committee decided
that Cannabis indica—or marijuana—showed the most
promise, and it started a testing program in
cooperation with the Manhattan Project, the TOP SECRET
effort to build an atomic bomb. It is not clear why
OSS turned to the bomb makers for help, except that,
as one former Project official puts it, "Our secret
was so great, I guess we were safer than anyone else."
Apparently, top Project leaders, who went to
incredible lengths to preserve security, saw no danger
in trying out drugs on their personnel. 
    The Manhattan Project supplied the first dozen
test subjects, who were asked to swallow a
concentrated, liquid form of marijuana that an
American pharmaceutical company furnished in small
glass vials. A Project man who was present recalls:
"It didn't work the way we wanted. Apparently the
human system would not take it all at once orally. The
subjects would lean over and vomit." What is more,
they disclosed no secrets, and one subject wound up in
the hospital. 
    Back to the drawing board went the OSS experts.
They decided that the best way to administer the
marijuana was inhalation of its fumes. Attempts were
made to pour the solution on burning charcoal, and an
OSS officer named George White (who had already
succeeded in knocking himself out with an overdose of
the relatively potent substance) tried out the vapor,
without sufficient effect, at St. Elizabeth's.
Finally, the OSS group discovered a delivery system
which had been known for years to jazz musicians and
other users: the cigarette. OSS documents reported
that smoking a mix of tobacco and the marijuana
essence brought on a "state of irresponsibility,
causing the subject to be loquacious and free in his
impartation of information." 
    The first field test of these marijuana-laced
cigarettes took place on May 27, 1943. The subject was
one August Del Gracio, who was described in OSS
documents as a "notorious New York gangster."[2]
George White, an Army captain who had come to OSS from
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, administered the drug
by inviting Del Gracio up to his apartment for a smoke
and a chat. White had been talking to Del Gracio
earlier about securing the Mafia's cooperation to keep
Axis agents out of the New York waterfront and to
prepare the way for the invasion of Sicily.[3] 
    Del Gracio had already made it clear to White that
he personally had taken part in killing informers who
had squealed to the Feds. The gangster was as tough as
they came, and if he could be induced to talk under
the influence of a truth drug, certainly German
prisoners could—or so the reasoning went. White plied
him with cigarettes until "subject became high and
extremely garrulous." Over the next two hours, Del
Gracio told the Federal agent about the ins and outs
of the drug trade (revealing information so sensitive
that the CIA deleted it from the OSS documents it
released 34 years later). At one point in the
conversation, after Del Gracio had begun to talk, the
gangster told White, "Whatever you do, don't ever use
any of the stuff I'm telling you." In a subsequent
session, White packed the cigarettes with so much
marijuana that Del Gracio became unconscious for about
an hour. Yet, on the whole the experiment was
considered a success in "loosening the subject's
tongue." 
    While members of the truth-drug committee never
believed that the concentrated marijuana could compel
a person to confess his deepest secrets, they
authorized White to push ahead with the testing. On
the next stage, he and a Manhattan Project
counterintelligence man borrowed 15 to 18 thick
dossiers from the FBI and went off to try the
marijuana on suspected Communist soldiers stationed in
military camps outside Atlanta, Memphis, and New
Orleans. According to White's Manhattan Project
sidekick, a Harvard Law graduate and future judge,
they worked out a standard interrogation technique: 

Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes,
remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a
hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the
cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed
the pack.... We sat down with a particular soldier and
tried to win his confidence. We would say something
like "This is better than being overseas and getting
shot at," and we would try to break them. We started
asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would
let them see that we had the folder on them... We had
a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the
drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass.
The stuff actually worked.... Everyone but one—and he
didn't smoke—gave us more information than we had
before. 

    The Manhattan Project lawyer remembers this swing
through the South with George White as a "good time."
The two men ate in the best restaurants and took in
all the sights. "George was quite a guy," he says. "At
the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans after we had
interviewed our men, we were lying on the beds when
George took out his pistol and shot his initials into
the molding that ran along the ceiling. He used his.22
automatic, equipped with a silencer, and he emptied
several clips." Asked if he tried out the truth drug
himself, the lawyer says, "Yes. The cigarettes gave
you a feeling of walking a couple of feet off the
floor. I had a pleasant sensation of well-being. ...
The fellows from my office wouldn't take a cigarette
from me for the rest of the war."

    Since World War II, the United States government,
led by the Central Intelligence Agency, has searched
secretly for ways to control human behavior. This book
is about that search, which had its origins in World
War II. The CIA programs were not only an extension of
the OSS quest for a truth drug, but they also echoed
such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and
Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.  [...] 



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<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

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