The Manchurian Veterans

The Manchurian Veterans

by Jeff Huber
E Pluribus Media
19 November 2006

Stories of American service members returning from the Middle East wars with physical and emotional scars have focused national attention on the plight of the country's combat veterans. But still overlooked are G.I.s who suffered severe damage from service to their country as human test experiments. The tale of the uniformed guinea pigs who participated in America's Cold War mind control program is, perhaps, one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of the country that became the world's "sole superpower."

The Mind Control Gap

The United States Army established its chemical experimentation facility at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland in 1917. But it wasn't until 1954 that Edgewood became a temporary duty station for G.I.s who volunteered to participate in Project MK-ULTRA and more than 150 other projects involved in the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program.

In the early 1950s, reports of Chinese and Russian brainwashing techniques used on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean Conflict had reached American intelligence operatives. In 1953, eager to close the perceived gap in mind control capabilities during the heart of the "red scare" era, then CIA director Allen Dulles launched a mind control program of his own.

To head the project, Dulles named Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, a shadowy figure whose personality reflected the bizarre and horrifying nature of the mind control program itself.

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They Were Expendable

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson authorized scientific experimentation on active duty military members in a document now infamously known as the Wilson Memo. Between 1954 and 1975, more than seven thousand Army and Air Force personnel are thought to have participated in Sidney Gottlieb's mind control program. Many of these veterans have sought compensation for the physical and psychological damage they suffered at the hands of Gottlieb and his assistants, but to date the government has balked at honoring their claims.

James B. Stanley joined the Army at age 15. By the age of 20, he was one of the Army's youngest master sergeants. In 1958, while a volunteer at Edgewood, Stanley was given a clear liquid to drink. No one told him the liquid contained a psychoactive drug, nor did anyone explain to him the hallucinations he experienced, or the nature of the emotional problems he consequently suffered that disrupted his life, leading to a demotion two years after his Edgewood service and to his divorce in 1970. ''I couldn't get along with my family or co-workers or anyone else,'' Stanley later said in an interview with the New York Times . "Even my children were afraid of me, and I'd always been close to my kids. I was afraid to go see the Army doctors for fear I would be thrown out of the Army."

Only in 1975--the year of the Church and Rockefeller Commission hearings--did Stanley figure out what had happened to him when he received a letter from the Army asking him to participate in a follow-up study of former LSD experiment subjects.

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http://www.epluribusmedia.org/features/2006/20061115_manchurian_veterns_p1.html

The CIA's purple haze

TV stars run amok; geriatric criminals terrorize nation.

By Douglas Cruickshank

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Or how about the Central Intelligence Agency dosing unsuspecting United States' citizens with LSD? True, it's an old story, but it may well be a true story, and one of its longest chapters closed last week when a New York jury, in the court of U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood (You remember Kimba. Not Simba! Kimba!), ruled against the estate of artist Stanley Glickman. Until his death in 1992, Glickman insisted that a CIA agent, who for 40 years he consistently described as having a clubfoot, had slipped him a mind-bending mickey in a glass of Chartreuse liqueur at a bar in Paris in 1952, driving Glickman mad and destroying his life.

Glickman's sad predicament, whatever brought it on, is a long and tangled story. The New York jury didn't buy his claim that the CIA played a part, but the spooksters' role in widely -- and wildly -- experimenting with LSD, even on unaware members of the public, has long been the focus of journalistic and government inquiries. In addition to newspaper and magazine articles, and sworn testimony given at the 1977 Senate hearings on CIA abuses, chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy, at least two books feature extensive, and colorful, coverage of the Company's psychoactive shenanigans -- "Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion," by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (1985) and "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream" by Jay Stevens (1987).

According to "Acid Dreams," and a Feb. 14 article in The Observer, in the 1950s the U.S. government began operating a covert drug-testing program called MK-ULTRA (Where did they get those names? "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." wasn't even on the air yet.) The Observer states that the "architect" of MK-ULTRA was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, who became head of the CIA's chemical division, and two decades later would testify at the Kennedy hearings "about spiking the drinks of unsuspecting Americans" and also "admit that MK-ULTRA tested an array of techniques and substances on dozens of unsuspecting people, and there may well have been hundreds." The U.S. government, the Observer reported, "has over the years issued various qualified denials in the course of seeking to have the case dismissed."

After Gottlieb's Senate testimony was made public, the Glickman family filed suit in 1983 -- for a period, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark was Glickman's lawyer -- and the case finally went to trial earlier this year, though the artist himself died in 1992. Oddly, on April 27, as the trial was wrapping up, Judge Dominick DiCarlo dropped dead while exercising in the federal court gym. Judge Kimba Wood presided at the remainder of the trial. (Coincidentally -- the Glickman case is full of bizarre intersections -- Wood had thrown out the suit in 1977, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals later reinstated it.)

In any event, it's all over now and it's just as well, perhaps, that Stanley Glickman wasn't around to hear what the jury thought of his story. But two Richard Kimballesque details remain: For more than four decades, Glickman's physical description of the man who dosed him never varied. And even the CIA doesn't deny that Gottlieb, whose activities didn't become public knowledge for over 20 years after Glickman drank the Chartreuse, had a clubfoot.

SOURCE:

http://www.salon.com/people/rogue/1999/05/06/cia

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Manchurian Candidate

by Maureen Farrell
BuzzFlash May 18, 2004

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In 1975, as this information was exposed, the government paid $750,000 restitution to Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson's family, after admitting the CIA slipped Dr. Olson LSD days before his 1953 fall from a New York City building. When the Ford administration finally came clean, they promised they'd revealed everything. Yet key officials, including White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, pushed to continue to conceal information. "The family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family," the Baltimore Sun reported in 2002. "Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library."

Operation ARTICHOKE, a CIA program that preceded MK-ULTRA, involved the development of "special and extreme methods of interrogation," according to declassified documents given to the family by the late CIA Director William Colby. The chief architects of the program were also "very concerned with the problem of disposing of ‘blown agents’ and with finding a way to produce amnesia in operatives who had seen too much and could no longer be relied upon." By the time Dr. Olson’s family uncovered the truth about Olson’s death, the role Operation ARTICHOKE played became clear. "In these documents the overall context for Frank Olson’s death is related not to the infamous MK-ULTRA program for mind and behavior control, as is generally assumed," the family reported. "The Colby documents locate Olson’s death in the context of a CIA operation called ARTICHOKE."

Both MK-ULTRA and ARTICHOKE grew out of "Operation Paperclip," in which Nazi scientists were smuggled into the U.S. to provide the government with information on everything from rocket science to germ warfare to torture and interrogation techniques. This "assimilation of Nazis into the U.S. government," the National Catholic Reporter explained, also spawned the now common practice of labeling people of conscience "enemies of the state." (Findarticles.com)

A German documentary on Operation ARTICHOKE put it succinctly: "The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany."

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In 2002, all of the pieces fell into place. Dr. Frank Olson, it was discovered, ran the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, which, in addition to dealing with anthrax and mind control research, was involved in "assassinations materials research," "biological warfare experiments in populated areas" and "terminal interrogations." Dr. Olson did not commit suicide due to a nervous breakdown, as the family was originally told, nor did he commit suicide because of a reaction to LSD, as they were told in 1975. Dr. Olson, who was posthumously outed as a CIA agent, was simply a man who knew too much. During an August 2002 press conference, the family spelled it out:

1. "The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.

2. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a "bad trip." He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called "ARTICHOKE" in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed cover-up of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new cover-up involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration."

"These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth,'' Eric Olson said, regarding memos that uncovered Cheney and Rumsfeld’s role in perpetuating the deceit. "For 22 years there was a cover-up. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new cover-up.'' (Mercury News)

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http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/05/far04017.html

CIA's Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp

US Official Poisoner Dies

Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's Technical Services Division, died on March 10. His obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post tended to focus own Gottlieb's testing of LSD on himself and other CIA officers, portraying him as a kind of Merry Prankster, the CIA's very own Ken Kesey.

In fact, with Gottlieb's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.

Incredibly, neither the Times nor the Post obituaries mention Gottlieb's crucial role in the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who worked for the US Army's biological weapons center at Fort Detrick. At a CIA sponsored retreat in rural Maryland on November 18, 1953, Gottlieb gave the unwitting Olson a glass of Cointreau liberally spiked with LSD. Olson developed psychotic symptoms soon thereafter and within a few days had plunged to his death from an upper floor room at the New York Statler-Hilton. Olson was sharing the room with Gottlieb's number two, a CIA man called Robert Lashbrook, who had taken the deranged man to see a CIA-sponsored medic called Harold Abramson who ran an allergy clinic at Mount Sinai, funded by Gottlieb to research LSD.

The night Olson made his terminally abrupt descent from the hotel window the New York police asked Lashbrook to turn out his pockets. On a piece of paper were initials GW and MH, identified later as George White and Morgan Hall, White's alias. White was retained by Gottlieb to run a CIA safehouse at 81 Bedford St in Greenwich Village, in cooperation with Harry Anslinger's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, for which White had previously worked. Gottlieb's men fixed up the house with one-way mirrors listening devices and secret cameras. From the fall of 1953 to the spring of the following year White threw parties on Bedford St, dosing his guests with sodium pentothal, Nembutal and of course LSD. Later White moved the CIA operation to San Francisco, with the same sort of set-up. He hired prostitutes to dose the guests, in an exercise known as Operation Midnight Climax. The encounter were filmed, on the walls White, put photos of women being tortured and whipped. Gottlieb flew out to visit the safe house at 225 Chestnut Street several times a year. Another senior CIA man, John Gittinger would interview the hookers about their drugs and sex habits.

SNIP...

Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell's research notes indicates that he gave the men "quadruple" the "normal" dosages. The doctor marveled at the men's apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that "this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type."

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http://www.counterpunch.org/gottlieb.html

From Father Bill O'Donnell:

...Dr. Dorothy Legarreta, co-founder of NARS, introduced us. When she died unexpectedly two years later, Father Bill officiated at her funeral Mass, saying she died in a one-car crash. I called him the next day, noting that he had not used the word “accident.” He said, “That’s right. Dorothy was murdered. That was no accident.”

http://www.catholicvoiceoakland.org/Archives/Archive011204L.html

THE RADIATION STORY
NO ONE WOULD TOUCH

by Geoffrey Sea
Columbia Journalism Review March/April 1994

Sea is an Oakland-based writer, radiological health physicist, and international activist on radiation issues. He is the founder and director of In Vivo: Radiation Response and the Atomic Reclamation and Conversation Project of the Tides Foundation, and a co-founder of IRIS: International Radiation Injury Survivors.

Suddenly, at the close of 1993, the public was bombarded with "news" about the feeding of radioactive substances to pregnant women and mentally retarded students, about the unethical irradiation of workers, soldiers, medical patients, and prison inmates, and about the government's own internal fears that these experiments had "a little of the Buchenwald touch." But the story that appeared in The Albuquerque Tribune (circulation: 35,000) on November 15-17, and was then projected into the national headlines by the forthright admissions and initiatives of Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, was hardly new.

By 1984, activists and researchers across the country were systematically investigating the human experimentation program and attempting to bring it to public attention. By 1986, documentation of the program was massive, solid, and publicly available.

I am among those who persistently tried to get national media coverage of this outrageous example of government wrongdoing. To say that the media were reluctant to listen would be an understatement. The fact is that, for more than a decade, documentation was ignored and facts were misreported.

SNIP...

In California, Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a laboratory technician, organizes the National Association of Radiation Survivors (NARS) and starts to write a book about human experimentation. In 1982, while examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton -- the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California -- at the library of the University of California at Berkeley, she comes across a 1950 memo written to Shields Warren, then director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of biology and medicine. The memo advised that large primates -- chimpanzees, for example -- be substituted for humans in the planned studies on radiation's cognitive effects (the very same program of experimentation that Dr. Saenger was to execute). The use of humans, Hamilton wrote, might leave the AEC open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had "a little of the Buchenwald touch."

After Legarreta finds the so-called Buchenwald memo, Hamilton's papers are removed from public access by University of California administrators. Soon after this, Legarreta files a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Energy, asking for all documents concerning experiments in which humans were intentionally exposed to radioactive materials through injection or ingestion. Later that year, NARS receives a two-foot-high carton of documents in response -- documents that, for the first time, expose the widespread human experimentation program of the U.S. governmen

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http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp