The CIA 1

What follows is a chapter from Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's book, Acid Dreams. The book is a terrific read. The following selection is chapter 1, which examines the development of the CIA's interest in the mysterious new drug, LSD. It is alternately funny, disgusting, and horrific.

At first, the CIA thought LSD would make them virtual masters of the universe. Later, after sober second thought, they realized they might have to set their sights little lower, but they continued their enthusiasm for the drug (which Richard Helms called "dynamite").

The CIA realized that an adversary intelligence service could employ LSD "to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity". The only way to be sure that an operative would not freak out under such circumstances would be to give him a taste of LSD (a mind control vaccine?) before he was sent on a sensitive overseas mission. Such a person would know that the effects of the drug were transitory and would therefore be in a better position to handle the experience. CIA documents actually refer to agents who were familiar with LSD as "enlightened operatives".

At one point, CIA employees were running around, dosing themselves and their buddies in acid to either "immunize" themselves to its effects, or just test its limits. This part makes amusing reading -- to borrow the hackneyed phrase: truth is stranger than fiction.

Finally, someone had to clamp down on the CIA's LSD consumption. One of my favorite passages quotes a security memo (dated Dec. 15, 1954) dealing with a rumored proposal to "spike" the annual CIA Christmas party punch with acid.

The writer of this memo concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did "not recommend [LSD] testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties".

CIA was consumed with interest in developing the perfect drug for every emotion/intellectual brain reaction. Dial-a-brain drugs.

What's more, according to a document dated May 5, 1955, the CIA placed a high priority on the development of a drug "which will produce 'pure euphoria' with no subsequent letdown".

All this interest led to extravagant CIA funding of LSD research everywhere -- including a soon-to-be famous fellow named Timothy Leary.

Martin A Lee and Bruce Shlain Grove Press, New York: 1985 ISBN 0-394-55013-7

In the spring of 1942, General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, chief of the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor, assembled a half-dozen prestigious American scientists and asked them to undertake a top-secret research program. Their mission, Donovan explained, was to develop a speech-inducing drug for use in intelligence interrogations. He insisted that the need for such a weapon was so acute as to warrant any and every attempt to find it.

The use of drugs by secret agents had long been a part of cloak-and-dagger folklore, but this would be the first concerted attempt on the part of an American espionage organization to modify human behavior through chemical means. "We were not afraid to try things that had never been done before," asserted Donovan, who was known for his freewheeling and unconventional approach to the spy trade. The OSS chief pressed his associates to come up with a substance that could break down the psychological defenses of enemy spies and POWs, thereby causing an uninhibited disclosure of classified information. Such a drug would also be useful for screening OSS personnel in order to identify German sympathizers, double-agents, and potential misfits.

Dr Windfred Overhulser, superintendent of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, was appointed chairman of the research committee. Other members included Dr Edward Strecker (then president of the American Psychiatric Association) and Harry J Anslinger (head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics). The committee surveyed and rejected numerous drugs -- including alcohol, barbituates, and caffeine. Peyote and scopolamine were also tested, but the visions produced by these substances interfered with the interrogation process. Eventually, marijuana was chosen as the most likely candidate for a speech-inducing agent.

OSS scientists created a highly-potent extract of cannabis and, through a process known as esterification, a clear and viscous liquid was obtained. The final product had no color, odor, or taste. It would be nearly impossible to detect when administered surreptitiously -- which is exactly what the spies intended to do. "There is no reason to believe that any other nation or group is familiar with the preparation of this particular drug," stated one classified OSS document. Henceforth, the OSS referred to the marijuana extract as "TD" -- a rather transparent cover for "Truth Drug".

Various ways of administering TD were tried upon witting and unwitting subjects. OSS operatives found that the medicated goo could "be injected into any type of food, such as mashed potatoes, butter, salad dressing, or in such things as candy." Another scheme relied on using facial tissues impregnated with the drug. But these methods had drawbacks. What if someone had a particularly ravenous appetite? Too much TD could knock a subject out and render him useless for interrogation. The OSS eventually determined that the best approach involved the use of a hypodermic syringe to inject a diluted TD solution into a cigarette or cigar. After smoking such an item, the subject would get suitably stoned, at which point a skillful interrogator would move in and try to get him to spill the beans.

"TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern an individual's discretion and caution. It accentuates the senses and makes manifest any strong characteristics of the individual. Sexual inhibitions are lowered, and the sense of humor is accentuated to the point where any statement or situation can become extremely funny to the subject. On the other hand, a person's unpleasant characteristics may also be heightened. It may be stated that, generally speaking, the reaction will be one of great loquacity and hilarity."

(This was a rather mild and playful assessment of the effects of marijuana compared to the public rantings of Harry Anslinger, the narcotics chief, who orchestrated an unrelenting media campaign against "the killer weed".)

After testing TD on themselves, their associates, and US military personnel, OSS agents utilized the drug operationally, although on a limited basis. The results were mixed. In certain circumstances, TD subjects felt a driving necessity "to discuss psychologically-charged topics. Whatever the individual is trying to withhold will be forced to the top of his subconscious mind." But there were also those who experienced "toxic reactions" -- better known in latter-day lingo as "bummers". One unwitting doper became irritable and threatening and complained of feeling like he was "two different people". The peculiar nature of his symptoms precluded any attempt to question him.

That was how it went, from one extreme to the other. At times, TD seemed to stimulate "a rush of talk"; on other occasions, people got paranoid and didn't say a word. The lack of consistency proved to be a major stumbling block and "Donovan's dreamers" -- as his enthusiastic OSS staffers have been called -- reluctantly weaned themselves from their reefer madness. A handwritten comment in the margins of an OSS document summed up their stoned escapades:

"The drug defies all but the most expert and searching analysis and, for all practical purposes, can be considered beyond analysis."

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 from people independent of their volition but without physical duress. Toward this end, Dr Charles Savage conducted experiments with mescaline (a semi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus that produces hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD) at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But these studies, which involved animal as well as human subjects, did not yield as 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 World War II. After administering the hallucinogen to 30 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 where cleverly put." Not surprisingly, "sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case."

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 set the stage for the wholesale importation of more than 600 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 (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 Werner 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. The first involved narco-hypnosis -- in which a CIA psychiatrist attempted to induce a trance state after administering a mild sedative. A second technique involved a combination of two different drugs with contradictory effects. A heavy dose of barbituates was given to knock the subject out, and then he received an injection of a stimulant, usually some type of amphetamine. As he started to come out of a somnambulant state, he would reach a certain ineffable point prior to becoming fully conscious. Described in CIA documents as "the twilight zone", this groggy condition was considered optimal for interrogation.

CIA doctors attempted to extend the stuporous limbo as long as possible. In order to maintain the delicate balance between consciousness and unconsciousness, an intravenous hookup was inserted in both the subject's arms. One set of works contained a downer, the other an upper (the classic "goofball" effect), with a mere flick of the finger an interrogator could regulate the flow of chemicals. The idea was to produce a "push" -- a sudden outpouring of thoughts, emotions, confidences, and whatnot. Along this line, various combinations were tested. Seconal and Dexedrine; Pentothal and Desoxyn; and depending on the whim of the spy in charge, some marijuana (the old OSS stand-by, which the CIA referred to as "sugar") might be thrown in for good measure.

The goofball approach was not a precision science. There were no strictly prescribed rules or operating procedures regarding what drugs should be employed in a given situation. The CIA interrogators were left to their own devices, and a certain degree of recklessness was perhaps inevitable. In one case, a group of CIA experts hastily drafted a memo after reviewing a report prepared by one of the Agency's special interrogation teams. The medical consultants pointed out that "the amounts of scopolamine administered were extremely heavy." They also noted that the best results were obtained when two or at most three different chemicals were used in a session. In this case, however, heavy doses of scopolamine were administered along with thiamine, sodium luminal, atropine sulfate, sodium pentothal and caffeine sulfate. One of the CIA's professional consultants in "H" techniques also questioned why hypnosis was attempted "after a long and continuous use of chemicals, after the subject had vomited, and after apparently a maximum tolerance point had been reached with the chemicals." Everyone who read the interrogation report agreed that hypnosis was useless, if not impossible, under such conditions. Nevertheless, the memo concluded by reaffirming that "no criticism is intended whatsoever" and that "the choice of operating weapons" must be left to the agents in the field.

Despite the potential hazards and tenuousness of the procedure as a whole, special interrogations were strongly endorsed by Agency officials. A CIA document dated November 26, 1951, announced:

"We're now convinced that we can maintain a subject in a controlled state for a much longer period of time that we heretofore had believed possible. Furthermore, we feel that by use of certain chemicals or combinations, we can, in a very high percentage of cases, produce relevant information."

Although these techniques were still considered experimental, the prevailing opinion among members of the special interrogation teams was that there had been enough experiments "to justify giving the green light to operational use of the techniques." "There will be many a failure," a CIA scientist acknowledged, but he was quick to stress that "very success with this method will be pure gravy."

In an effort to expand its research program, the CIA contacted academics and other outside experts who specialized in areas of mutual interest. Liaison was established with the research sections of police departments and criminology laboratories; medical practitioners, professional hypnotists, and psychiatrists were brought on as paid consultants, and various branches of the military provided assistance. Oftentimes, these arrangements involved a cover to conceal the CIA's interest in behavior modification. With the bureaucratic apparatus already in place, the CIA's mind control efforts were integrated into a single project under the codename BLUEBIRD. Due to the extreme sensitivity of the project, the usual channels for authorization were bypassed -- instead of going through the Projects Review Committee, the proposal for BLUEBIRD was submitted directly to CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who authorized the use of un-vouchered funds to finance the hush-hush undertaking. With this seal of approval, the CIA's first major drug-testing program was officially launched. BLUEBIRD was to remained a carefully guarded secret, for if word of the program leaked out, it would have been a great embarrassment and a detriment to American intelligence. As one CIA document put it, BLUEBIRD material was "not fit for public consumption."

From the outset, the CIA's mind control program had an explicit domestic angle. A memo dated July 13, 1951, described the Agency's mind-bending efforts as "broad and comprehensive, involving both domestic and overseas activities, and taking into consideration the programs and objectives of other departments, principally the military services." BLUEBIRD activities were designed to create as "exploitable alteration of personality" in selected individuals; specific targets included "potential agents, defectors, refugees, POWs," and a vague category of "others." A number of units within the CIA participated in this endeavor, including the Inspection and Security Staff (the forerunner of the Office of Security), which assumed overall responsibility for running the program and dispatching the special interrogation teams. Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the chairman of the BLUEBIRD steering committee, consistently pushed for a more reliable speech-inducing substance. By the time BLUEBIRD evolved into Operation ARTICHOKE (the formal change in codenames occurred August 1951), Security officials were still searching for the magic technique -- the deus ex machina -- that would guarantee surefire results.

The whole concept of a truth drug was a bit farfetched to begin with. It presupposed that there was a way to chemically bypass the mind's censor and turn the psyche inside out, unleashing a profusion of buried secrets, and that surely some approximation of "truth" would emerge amidst all the personal debris. In this respect the CIA's quest resembled a skewed version of a familiar mythological theme from which such images as the Philosopher's Stone and the Fountain of Youth derive -- that through touching or ingesting something one can acquire wisdom, immortality, or eternal peace. It is more than a bit ironic that the biblical inscription on the marble wall of the main lobby at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, reads, "And ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free".

The freewheeling atmosphere that prevailed during the CIA's early years encouraged an "anything goes" attitude among researchers associated with the mind control program. This was before the Agency's bureaucratic arteries began to harden, and those who participated on Operation ARTICHOKE were intent on leaving no stone unturned in an effort to deliver the ultimate truth drug. A number of agents were sent on fact-finding missions to all corners of the globe to procure samples of rare herbs and botanicals. The results of one such trip were recorded in a heavily deleted document entitled "Exploration of Potential Plant Resources in the Caribbean Region". Among the numerous items mentioned in this report, a few were particularly intriguing. A plant called a "stupid bush", characterized by the CIA as a psychogenic agent and a pernicious weed, was said to proliferate in Puerto Rico and Saint Thomas. Its effects were shrouded in mystery. An "information bush" was also discovered. This shrub stumped CIA experts, who were at a loss to pin down its properties. The "information bush" was listed as a psychogenic agent followed by a lingering question mark. What type of information -- prophetic or mundane -- might be evoked by this unusual herb was unclear. Nor was it known whether the "information bush" could be used as an antidote to the "stupid bush" or vice versa. [grin grin grin]

The CIA studied a veritable pharmacopoeia of drugs with the hope of achieving a breakthrough. At one point during the early 1950s Uncle Sam's secret agents viewed cocaine as a potential truth serum. "Cocaine's general effects have been somewhat neglected", noted an astute researcher. Whereupon tests were conducted that enabled the CIA to determine that the precious powder "will produce elation, talkativeness, etc." when administer by injection. "Larger doses," according to a previously classified document, "may cause fearfulness and alarming hallucinations." The document goes on to report that cocaine "counteracts... the catatonia of catatonic schizophrenics" and concludes with the recommendation that the drug be studied further.

A number of cocaine derivatives were also investigated from an interrogation standpoint. Procaine, a synthetic analogue, was tested on mental patients and the results were intriguing. When injected into the frontal lobe of the brain through trephine holes in the skull, the drug "produced free and spontaneous speech within two days in mute schizophrenics". This procedure was rejected as "too surgical for our use". Nevertheless, according to a CIA pharmacologist, "it is possible that such a drug could be gotten into the general circulation of subject without surgery, hypodermic or feeding." He suggested a method known as iontophoresis, which involves using an electric current to transfer the ions of a chosen medicament into the tissues of the body.

The CIA's infatuation with cocaine was short-lived. It may have titilated the nostrils of more than a few spies and produced some heady speculation, but after the initial inspiration it was back to square one. Perhaps their expectations were too high for any drug to accommodate. Or maybe a new approach to the problem was required.

The search for an effective interrogation technique eventually led to heroin. Not the heroin that ex-Nazi pilots under CIA contract smuggled out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia on CIA proprietary airlines during the late 1940s and 1950s; nor the heroin that was pumped into America's black and brown ghettos after passing through contraband networks controlled by mobsters who moonlighted as CIA hit-men. The Agency's involvement in worldwide heroin traffic, which has been well documented in _The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia_ by Alfred McCoy, went far beyond the scope of Operation ARTICHOKE, which was primarily concerned with eliciting information from recalcitrant subjects. However, ARTICHOKE scientists did see possible advantages in heroin as a mind control drug. According to a CIA document dated April 26, 1952, heroin was "frequently used by police and intelligence officers _on a routine basis_ [emphasis added]". The cold turkey theory of interrogation: CIA operatives determined that heroin and other habit-forming substances "can be useful in reverse because of the stresses produced when they are withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use".

It was with the hope of finding the long-sought miracle drug that CIA investigators first began to dabble with LSD-25 in the early 1950s. At the time very little was known about the hallucinogen, even in scientific circles. Dr Werner Stoll, the son of Sandoz president Arthur Stoll and a colleague of Albert Hoffmann's, was the first person to investigate the psychological properties of LSD. The results of his study were presented in the _Swiss Archives of Neurology_ in 1947. Stoll reported that LSD produced disturbances in perception, hallucinations, and acceleration in thinking; moreover, the drug was found to blunt the usual suspiciousness of schizophrenic patients. No favorable aftereffects were described. Two years later in the same journal Stoll contributed a second report entitled "A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts".

The fact that LSD caused hallucinations should not have been a total surprise to the scientific community. Sandoz first became interested in ergot, the natural source of all lysergic acid. The rye fungus had a mysterious and contradictory reputation. In China and parts of the Mideast it was thought to possess medicinal qualities, and certain scholars believe that it may have been used in sacred rites in ancient Greece. In other parts of Europe, however, the same fungus was associated with the horrible malady known as St Anthony's Fire, which struck periodically like the plague. Medieval chronicles tell of villages and towns where nearly everyone went mad for a few days after ergot-diseased rye was unknowingly milled into flour and baked as bread. Men were afflicted with gangrenous limbs that looked like blackened stumps, and pregnant women miscarried. Even in modern times, there have been reports of ergot-related epidemics.

FOOTNOTE: In 1951 hundreds of respectable citizens in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small French village, went completely berserk one evening. Some of the town's leading citizens jumped from windows into the Rhone. Others ran through the streets screaming abut being chased by lions, tigers, and "bandits with donkey ears". Many died, and whose who survived suffered strange aftereffects for weeks. In his book _The Day of St Anthony's Fire_, John C Fuller attributes this bizarre outbreak to rye flour contaminated with ergot.

The CIA inherited this ambiguous legacy when it embraced LSD as a mind control drug. An ARTICHOKE document dated October 21, 1951, indicates that acid was tested initially as part of a pilot study of the effects of various chemicals "on the conscious suppression of experimental or non-threat secrets". In addition to lysergic acid this particular survey covered a wide range of substances, including morphine, ether, Benzedrine, ethyl alcohol, and mescaline. "There is no question," noted the author of this report, "that drugs are already on hand (and new ones are being produced) that can destroy integrity and make indiscreet the most dependable individual." The report concluded by recommending that LSD be critically tested "under threat conditions beyond the scope of civilian experimentation". POWs, federal prisoners, and Security officers were mentioned as possible candidates for these field experiments.

In another study designed to ascertain optimal dosage levels for interrogation sessions, a CIA psychiatrist administered LSD to "at least 12 human subjects _of not too high mentality_". At the outset the subjects were "told only that a new drug was being tested and promised that nothing serious or dangerous would happen to them.... During the intoxication they realized something was happening, but were never told exactly what." A dosage range of 100 to 150 micrograms was finally selected, and the Agency proceeded to test the drug in mock interrogation trials.

Initial reports seemed promising. In one instance LSD was given to an officer who had been instructed not to reveal "a significant military secret". When questioned, however, "he gave all the details of the secret... and after the effects of the LSD had worn off, the officer had no knowledge of revealing the information (complete amnesia)." Favorable reports kept coming in, and when this phase of experimentation was completed, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) prepared a lengthy memorandum entitled "Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare". LSD was said to be useful "for eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during interrogation". Moreover, the data on hand suggested that LSD might help in reviving memories of past experiences.

It almost seemed to good to be true -- a drug that unearthed secrets buried deep in the unconscious mind but also caused amnesia during the effective period. The implications were downright astounding. Soon the entire CIA hierarchy was head over heels as news of what appeared to be a major breakthrough sent shock waves rippling through headquarters. (C.P.Snow once said, "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head.") For years they had searched, and now they were on the verge of finding the Holy Grail of the cloak-and-dagger trade. As one CIA officer recalled, "We had thought at first this was the secret that was going to unlock the universe."

But the sense of elation did not last long. As the secret research progressed, the CIA ran into problems. Eventually they came to recognize that LSD was not really a truth serum in the classical sense. Accurate information could not always be obtained from people under the influence of LSD because it induced a "marked anxiety and loss of reality contact". Those who received unwitting doses experienced an intense distortion of time, place, and body image, frequently culminating in full-blown paranoid reactions. The bizarre hallucinations caused by the drug often proved more of a hindrance than an aid to the interrogation process. There was always the risk, for example, that an enemy spy who started to trip out would realize he'd been drugged. This could make him overly suspicious and taciturn to the point of clammy up entirely.

There were other pitfalls that made the situation even more precarious from an interrogation standpoint. While anxiety was the predominant characteristic displayed during LSD sessions, some people experienced delusions of grandeur and omnipotence. An entire operation might backfire if someone had an ecstatic or transcendental experience and became convinced that he could defy his interrogators indefinitely. And then there was the question of amnesia, which was not as cut-and-dried as first supposed. Everyone agreed that a person would probably have a difficult time recalling exactly what happened while he was high on LSD, but that didn't mean his mind would be completely blank. While the drug might distort memory to some degree, it did not destroy it.

When CIA scientists tested a drug for speech-inducing purposes and found that it didn't work, they usually put it aside and tried something else. But such was not the case with LSD. Although early reports proved overoptimistic, the Agency was not about the discard such a powerful and unusual substance simply because it did not live up to its original expectations. They had to shift gears. A reassessment of the strategic implications of LSD was necessary. If, strictly speaking, LSD was not a reliable truth drug, then how else could it be used?

CIA researchers were intrigued by this new chemical, but they didn't quite know what to make of it. LSD was significantly different from anything else they knew about. "The most fascinating thing about it," a CIA psychologist recalled, "was that such minute quantities had such a terrible effect." Mere micrograms could create "serious mental confusion... and render the mind temporarily susceptible to suggestion". Moreover, the drug was colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and therefore easily concealed in food and beverage. But it was hard to predict the response to LSD. On certain occasions acid seemed to cause an uninhibited disclosure of information, but oftentimes the overwhelming anxiety experienced by the subject obstructed the interrogation process. And there were unexplainable mood swings -- from total panic to boundless blissout. How could one drug produce such extreme behavior and contradictory reactions? It didn't make sense.

As research continued, the situation became even more perplexing. At one point a group of Security officers did an about-face and suggested that acid might best be employed as an anti-interrogation substance:

"Since information obtained from a person in a psychotic state would be unrealistic, bizarre, and extremely difficult to assess, the _self-administration_ of LSD-25, which is effective in minute doses, might in special circumstances offer an operative temporary protection against interrogation [emphasis added]."

This proposal was somewhat akin to a suicide pill scenario. Secret agents would be equipped with micro-pellets of LSD to take on dangerous assignments. If they fell into enemy hands and were about to be interrogated, they could pop a tab of acid as a preventive measure and babble gibberish. Obviously this idea was impractical, but it showed just how confused the CIA's top scientists were about LSD. First they thought it was a true serum, then a lie serum, and for a while they didn't know what to think.

To make matters worse, there was a great deal of concern within the Agency that the Soviets and the Red Chinese might also have designs on LSD as an espionage weapon. A survey conducted by the Officer of Scientific Intelligence noted that ergot was a commercial product in numerous Eastern Bloc countries. The enigmatic fungus also flourished in the Soviet Union, but Russian ergot had not yet appeared in foreign markets. Could this mean the Soviets were hoarding their supplies? Since information on the chemical structure of LSD was available in scientific journals as early as 1947, the Russians might have been stockpiling raw ergot in order to convert it into a mind control weapon.

"Although no Soviet data are available on LSD-25," the OSI study concluded, "it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and are capable of producing it at any time."

Were the Russian really into acid? "I'm sure they were," asserted John Gittlinger, one of the CIA's leading psychologists during the Cold War, "but if you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of it." While hard evidence of a Soviet LSD connection was lacking, the CIA wasn't about to take any chances. What would happen, for example, if an American spy was caught and dosed by the Commies? The CIA realized that an adversary intelligence service could employ LSD "to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity". The only way to be sure that an operative would not freak out under such circumstances would be to give him a taste of LSD (a mind control vaccine?) before he was sent on a sensitive overseas mission. Such a person would know that the effects of the drug were transitory and would therefore be in a better position to handle the experience. CIA documents actually refer to agents who were familiar with LSD as "enlightened operatives".

Along this line, Security officials proposed that LSD be administered to CIA trainee volunteers. Such a procedure would clearly demonstrate to select individuals the effects of hallucinogenic substances upon themselves and their associates. Furthermore, it would provide an opportunity to screen Agency personnel for "anxiety proneness"; those who couldn't pass the acid test would be excluded from certain critical assignments. This suggestion was well received by the ARTICHOKE steering committee, although the representative from the CIA's Medical Office felt that the test should not be "confined merely to male volunteer trainee personnel, but that it should be broadened to include all components of the Agency". According to a CIA document dated November 19, 1953, the Project Committee "verbally concurred in this recommendation".

During the next few years numerous CIA agents tried LSD. Some used the drug on repeated occasions. How did their firsthand experience with acid affect their personalities? How did it affect their attitude to their work -- particularly those who were directly involved in mind control research? What impact did it have on the program as a whole?

At the outset of the CIA's behavior control endeavors the main emphasis was on speech-inducing drugs. But when acid entered the scene, the entire program assumed a more aggressive posture. The CIA's turned-on strategic came to believe that mind control techniques could be applied to a wide range of operations above and beyond the strict category of "special interrogation". It was almost as if LSD blew the Agency's collective mind-set -- or was it mind-rut? With acid acting as a catalyst, the whole idea of what could be done with a drug , or drugs in general, was suddenly transformed. Soon a perfect compound was envisioned for every conceivable circumstance: there would be smart shots, memory erasers, "anti-vitamins", knock-out drops, "aphrodisiacs for operational use", drugs that caused "headache clusters" or uncontrollable twitching, drugs that could induce cancer, a stroke or a heart attack without leaving a trace as to the source of the ailment. There were chemicals to make a drunk man sober and a sober man as drunk as a fish. Even a "recruitment" pill was contemplated. What's more, according to a document dated May 5, 1955, the CIA placed a high priority on the development of a drug "which will produce 'pure euphoria' with no subsequent letdown".

This is not to suggest that the CIA had given up on LSD. On the contrary, after grappling with the drug for a number of years, the Agency devised new methods of interrogation based on the "far-out" possibilities of this mind-altering substance. When employed as a third-degree tactic, acid enabled the CIA to approach a hostile subject with a great deal of leverage. CIA operatives realized that intense mental confusion could be produced by deliberately attacking a person along psychological lines. Of all the chemicals that caused mental derangement, none was as powerful as LSD. Acid not only made people extremely anxious, it also broke down the character defenses for handling anxiety. A skillful interrogator could exploit this vulnerability by threatening to keep an unwitting subject in a tripped-out state indefinitely unless he spilled the beans. This tactic often proved successful where others had failed. CIA documents indicate that LSD was employed as an aid to interrogation on an operational basis from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s.

When the CIA first became interested in LSD, only a handful of scientists in the United States were engaged in hallucinogenic drug research. At the time there was little private or public support for this relatively new field of experimental psychiatry, and no one had undertaken a systematic investigation of LSD. The CIA's mind control specialists sensed a golden opportunity in the making. With a sizable treasure chest at their disposal they were in a position to boost the careers of scientists whose skill and expertise would be of maximum benefit to the CIA. Almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence as money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits or "cutouts" such as the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, and the Josiah Macy, Jr Foundation.

Among those who benefited from t he CIA's largesse was Dr Max Rinkel, the first person to bring LSD to the United States. In 1949 Rinkel, a research psychiatrist, obtained a supply of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and gave the drug to his partner, Dr Robert Hyde, who took the first acid trip in the Western Hemisphere. Rinkel and Hyde went on to organize an LSD study at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a pioneering mental health clinic affiliated with Harvard University. They tested the drug on 100 volunteers and reported the initial findings in May 1950 (nearly three years before the CIA began funding their work) at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Rinkel announced that LSD had produced "a transitory psychotic disturbance" in normal subjects. This was highly significant, for it raised the possibility that mental disorders could be studied objectively in a controlled experimental setting.

Rinkel's hypothesis was supported and expanded upon during the same forum by Dr Paul Hoch, a prominent psychiatrist who would also proffer his services to the CIA in the years ahead. Hoch reported that the symptoms produced by LSD, mescaline, and related drugs were similar to those of schizophrenia: intensity of color perception, hallucinations, depersonalization, intense anxiety, paranoia, and in some cases catatonic manifestations. As Hock put it, "LSD and Mescaline disorganize the psychic integration of the individual." he believed that the medical profession was fortunate to have access to these substances, for now it would be possible to reconstruct temporary or "model" psychoses in the laboratory. LSD was considered an exceptional research tool in that the subject could provide a detailed description of his experience while he was under the influence of the drug. It was hoped that careful analysis of these data would shed new light on schizophrenia and other enigmatic mental diseases.

Hock's landmark thesis -- that LSD was a "psychotomimetic" or "madness-mimicking" agent -- caused a sensation in scientific circles and led to several important and stimulating theories regarding the biochemical basis of schizophrenia. This in turn sparked an upsurge of interest in brain chemistry and opened new vistas in the field of experimental psychiatry. In light of the extremely high potency of LSD, it seemed completely plausible that infinitesimal traces of a psychoactive substance produced through metabolic dysfunction by the human organism might cause psychotic disturbances. Conversely, attempts to alleviate a "lysergic psychosis" might point the way toward cutting schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness.

FOOTNOTE: While the miracle cure never panned out, it is worth nothing that Thorazine was found to mollify an LSD reaction and subsequently became a standard drug for controlling patients in mental asylums and prisons.

As it turned out, the model psychosis concept dovetailed particularly well with the secret schemes of the CIA, which also viewed LSD in terms of its ability to blow minds and make people crazy. Thus it is not surprising that the CIA chose to invest in men like Rinkel and Hoch. Most scientists were flattered by the government's interest in their research, and they were eager to assist the CIA in its attempts to unravel the riddle of LSD. This was, after all, the Cold War, and one did not have to be a blue-ribboned hawk or a hard-liner to work in tandem with American intelligence.

In the early 1950s the CIA approached Dr Nick Bercel, a psychiatrist who maintained a private practice in Los Angeles. Bercel was one of the first people in the United States to work with LSD, and the CIA asked him to consider a haunting proposition. What would happen if the Russians put LSD in the water supply of a large American city? A skillful saboteur could carry enough acid in his coat pocket to turn an entire metropolis into a loony bin, assuming he found a way to distribute it equally. In light of this frightening prospect, would Bercel render a patriotic service by calculating exactly how much LSD would be required to contaminate the water supply of Los Angeles? Bercel consented, and that evening he dissolved a tiny amount of acid in a glass of tap water, only to discover that the chlorine neutralized the drug. "Don't worry," he told his CIA contact, "it won't work."

The Agency took this as a mandate, and another version of LSD was eventually concocted to overcome the drawback. A CIA document state accordingly,

"If the concept of contaminating a city's water supply seems, or in actual fact, is found to be far-fetched (this is by no means certain), there is still the possibility of contaminating, say, the water supply of a bomber base or, more easily still, that of a battleship.... Our current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce hysteria (unaccountable laughing, anxiety, terror).... It requires little imagination to realize what the consequences might be if a battleship's crew were so affected."

The CIA never got in touch with Bercel again, but they monitored his research reports in various medical journals. When Bercel gave LSD to spiders, they spun perfectly symmetrical webs. Animal studies also showed that cats cringed before untreated mice, and fish that normally swam close to the bottom of a water tank hovered near the top. In another experiment Dr Louis Joylon ("Jolly") West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma, injected an elephant with a massive dose of 300,000 micrograms. Dr West, a CIA contract employee and an avid believer in the notion that hallucinogens were psychotomimetic agents, was trying to duplicate the periodic "rut" madness that overtakes male elephants for about one week each year. But the animal did not experience a model elephant psychosis; it just keeled over and remained in a motionless stupor. In attempting to revive the elephant, West administered a combination of drugs that ended up killing the poor beast.

Research on human subjects showed that LSD lodged primarily in the liver, spleen, and kidneys. Only a tiny amount (.01%) of the original dose entered the brain, and it only remained there for 20 minutes. This was a most curious finding, as the effect of LSD was not evident until the drug had disappeared entirely from the central nervous system. Some scientists thought LSD might act as a trigger mechanism, releasing or inhibiting a naturally occurring substance in the brain, but no one could figure out exactly why the drug had such a dramatic effect on the mind.

Many other questions were in need of clarification. Could the drug be fatal? What was the maximum dose? Were the effects constant, or were there variations according to different personality types? Could the reaction be accentuated by combining LSD with other chemicals? Was there an antidote? Some of these questions overlapped with legitimate medical concerns, and researchers on CIA stipends published unclassified versions of their work in prestigious scientific periodicals. But these accounts omitted secret data given to the CIA on how LSD affected "operationally pertinent categories" such as disturbance of memory, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting information, increasing suggestibility, and creating emotional dependence.

The CIA was particularly interested in psychiatric reports suggesting that LSD could break down familiar behavior patterns, for this raised the possibility of reprogramming or brainwashing. If LSD temporarily altered a person's view of the world and suspended his belief system, CIA doctors surmised, then perhaps Russian spies could be cajoled into switching loyalties while they were tripping. The brainwashing strategy was relatively simple: find the subject's weakest point (his "squeaky board") and bear down on it. Use any combination or synthesis which might "open the mind to the power of suggestion to a degree never hitherto dreamed possible". LSD would be employed to provoke a reality shift, to break someone down and tame him, to find a locus of anonymity and leave a mark there forever.

To explore the feasibility of this approach, the Agency turned to Dr Ewen Cameron, a respected psychiatrist who served as president of the Canadian, the American, and the World Psychiatric Association before his death in 1967. Cameron also directed the Allain Memorial Institute at Montreal's McGill University, where he developed a bizarre and unorthodox method for treating schizophrenia. With financial backing from the CIA he tested his method on 53 patients at Allain. The so-called treatment started with "sleep therapy", in which subjects were knocked out for months at a time. The next phase, "depatterning", entailed massive electroshock and frequent doses of LSD designed to wipe out past behavior patterns. Then Cameron tried to recondition the mind through a technique known as "psychic driving". The patients, once again heavily sedated, were confined to "sleep rooms" where tape-recorded messages played over and over from speakers under their pillows. Some heard the message a quarter of a million times.

Cameron's methods were later discredited, and the CIA grudgingly gave up on the notion of LSD as a brainwashing technique. But that was little consolation to those who served as guinea pigs for the CIA's secret mind control projects. Nine of Cameron's former patients have sued the American government for $1,000,000 each, claiming that they are still suffering from the trauma they went through at Allain. These people never agreed to participate in a scientific experiment -- a fact which reflects little credit on the CIA, even if the Agency officials feared that the Soviets were spurting ahead in the mind control race. The CIA violated the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics by sponsoring experiments on unwitting subjects. Ironically, Dr Cameron was a member of the Nuremberg tribunal that heard the case against Nazi war criminals who committed atrocities during World War II.

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. One project took place at the Addiction Research Centre of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington was ostensibly a place where heroin addicts could go to shake a habit, and although it was officially a penitentiary, all the inmates were referred to as "patients". The patients had their own way of referring to the doctors -- "hacks" or "croakers" -- who patrolled the premises in military uniforms.

The patients at Lexington had no way of knowing that it was one of 15 penal and mental institutions utilized by the CIA in its super-secret drug development program. To conceal its role the Agency enlisted the aid of the navy and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which served as conduits for channeling money to Dr Harris Isbell, a gung-ho research scientist who remained on the CIA payroll for over a decade. According to CIA documents the directors of NIMH and the National Institutes of Health were fully cognizant of the Agency's "interest" in Isbell's work and offered "full support and protection".

When the CIA came across a new drug (usually supplied by American pharmaceutical firms) that needed testing, the frequently sent it over to their chief doctor at Lexington, where an ample supply of captive guinea pigs was readily available. Over 800 compounds were farmed out to Isbell, including LSD and a variety of hallucinogens. It became an open secret among street junkies that if the supply got tight, you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell's wacky drug experiments. (Small wonder that Lexington had a return rate of 90%.) Dr Isbell, a longtime member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs, defended the volunteer program on the grounds that there was no precedent at the time for offering inmates cash for their services.

CIA documents describe experiments conducted by Isbell in which certain patients -- nearly all black inmates -- were given LSD for more than 75 consecutive days. In order to overcome tolerance to the hallucinogen, Isbell administered "double, triple and quadruple doses". A report dated May 5, 1959, comments on an experiment involving psilocybin (a semi-synthetic version of the magic mushroom). Subjects who ingested the drug became extremely anxious, although sometimes there were periods of intense elation marked by "continuous gales of laughter". A few patients felt that they

"had become very large, or had shrunk to the size of children. Their hands of feet did not seem to be their own and sometimes took on the appearance of animal paws.... They reported many fantasies or dreamlike states in which they seemed to be elsewhere. Fantastic experiences, such as trips to the moon or living in gorgeous castles, were occasionally reported."

"Despite these striking subjective experiences, the patients remained oriented in time, place, and person. In most instances, the patients did not lose their insight but realized that the effects were due to the drug. Two of the nine patients, however, did lose insight and felt that their experiences were cased by the experimenters controlling their minds."

In addition to his role as a research scientists, Dr Isbell served as a go-between for the CIA in its attempt to obtain drug samples from European pharmaceutical concerns which assumed they were providing "medicine" to a US Public Health official. The CIA in turn acted as a research coordinator, passing information, tips, and leads to Isbell and its other contract employees so that they could keep abreast of each other's progress; when a new discovery was made, the CIA would often ask another researcher to conduct a follow-up study for confirmation. One scientist whose work was coordinated with Isbell's in such a manner was Dr Carl Pfeiffer, a noted pharmacologist from Princeton who tested LSD on inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey.

Isbell, Pfeiffer, Cameron, West, and Hoch -- all were part of a network of doctors and scientists who gathered intelligence for the CIA. Through these scholar-informants the Agency stayed on top of the latest developments within the "aboveground" LSD scene, which expanded rapidly during the Cold War. By the mid-1950s numerous independent investigators had undertaken hallucinogenic drug studies, and the CIA was determined not to let the slightest detail escape its grasp. In a communique dated May 26, 1954, the Agency ordered all domestic field offices in the United States to monitor scientists engaged in LSD research. People of interest, the memo explained,

"will most probably be found in biochemistry departments of universities, mental hospitals, private psychiatric practice.... We do ask that you remember their importance and report their work when it comes to your attention."

The CIA also expended considerable effort to monitor the latest development in LSD research on a world-wide scale. Drug specialists funded by the Agency made periodic trips to Europe to confer with scientists and representatives of various pharmaceutical concerns, including, of course, Sandoz Laboratories. Initially the Swiss firm provided LSD to investigators all over the world free of charge, in exchange for full access to their research data. (CIA researchers did not comply with this stipulation.) By 1953, Sandoz had decided to deal directly with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which assumed a supervisory role in distributing LSD to American investigators from then on. It was a superb arrangement as far as the CIA was concerned, for the FDA went out of its way to assist the secret drug program. With the FDA as its junior partner, the CIA not only had ready access to supplies of LSD (which Sandoz marketed for a while under the brand name Delysid) but also was able to keep a close eye on independent researchers in the United States.

The CIA would have been content to let the FDA act as an intermediary in its dealings with Sandoz, but business as usual was suspended when the Agency learned of an offer that could not be refused. Prompted by reports that large quantities of the drug were suddenly available, top-level CIA officials authorized the purchase of 10 _kilos_ of LSD from Sandoz at an estimated price of 4240,000 -- enough for a staggering 100 million doses. A document dated November 16, 1953, characterized the pending transaction as a "risky operation", but CIA officials felt it was necessary, if only to preclude any attempt the Communists might make to get their hands on the drug. What the CIA intended to do with such an incredible stash of acid was never made clear.

The CIA later found out that Sandoz had never produced LSD in quantities even remotely resembling ten kilograms. Apparently only 10 milligrams were for sale, but a CIA contact in Switzerland mistook a kilogram, 1,000 grams, for a milligram (.001 grams), which would explain the huge discrepancy. Nevertheless, Sandoz officials were pleased by the CIA's interest in their product, and the two organizations struck up a cooperative relationship. Arthur Stoll, president of Sandoz, agreed to keep the CIA posted whenever new LSD was produced or a shipment was delivered to a customer. Likewise, any information concerning LSD research behind the Iron Curtain would be passed along confidentially.

But the CIA did not want to depend on a foreign company for supplies of a substance considered vital to American security interests. The Agency asked the Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis to try to synthesize a batch of all-American acid. By mid-1954 Lilly had succeeded in breaking the secret formula held by Sandoz. "This is a closely guarded secret," a CIA document declared, "and should not be mentioned generally." Scientists as Lilly assured the CIA that "in a matter of months LSD would be available in tonnage quantities".

In a speech before the National Alumni Conference at Princeton University on April 10, 1953, newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles lectured his audience on "how sinister the battle for men's minds had become in Soviet hands". The human mind, Dulles warned, was a "malleable tool", and the Red Menace had secretly developed "brain perversion techniques". Some of these methods were "so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them". Dulles continued,

"The minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment... are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts. Parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat the thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside. In effect the brain... becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on the spindle by an outside genius over which is has no control."

Three days after delivering this address Dulles authorized Operation MK-ULTRA, the CIA's major drug and mind control program during the Cold War. MK-ULTRA was the brainchild of Richard Helms, a high-ranking member of the Clandestine Services (otherwise known as the "dirty tricks department") who championed such methods throughout his career as an intelligence officer. As helms explained to Dulles when he first proposed the MK-ULTRA project,

"Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field... gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy's theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are."

The super-secret MK-ULTRA program was run by a relatively small unit within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Originally established as a supplementary funding mechanism to the ARTICHOKE project, MK-ULTRA quickly grew into a mammoth undertaking that outflanked earlier mind control initiatives. For a while both the TSS and the Office of Security (which directed the ARTICHOKE project) were engaged in parallel LSD tests, and a heated rivalry developed between the two groups. Security officials were miffed because they had gotten into acid first and then this new clique started cutting in on what the ARTICHOKE crowd considered their rightful turf.

The internecine conflict grew to the point where the Office of security decided to have one of its people spy on the TSS. This set off a flurry of memos between the Security informant and his superiors, who were dismayed when they learned that Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed the MK-ULTRA program, had approved a plan to give acid to unwitting American citizens. The Office of Security had never attempted such a reckless gesture -- although it had its own idiosyncrasies; ARTICHOKE operatives, for example, were attempting to have a hypnotized subject skill someone while in a trance.

Whereas the Office of Security utilized LSD as an interrogation weapon, Dr Gottlieb had other ideas about what to do with the drug. Because the effects of LSD were temporary (in contrast to the fatal nerve agents), Gottlieb saw important strategic advantages for its use in covert operations. For instance, 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 would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc." But Gottlieb realized there was a considerable difference between testing LSD in a laboratory and using the drug in clandestine operations. In an effort to bridge the gap, he and his TSS colleagues initiated a series of in-house experiments designed to find out what would happen if LSD was given to someone in a "normal" life setting without advance warning.

They approached the problem systematically, taking one step at a time, until they reached a point where outsiders were zapped with no explanation whatsoever. First everyone in Technical Services tried LSD. They tripped alone and in groups. A typical experiment involved two people pairing off in a closed room where they observed each other for hours at a time, took noted, and analyzed their experiences. As Gottlieb later explained,

"There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a first hand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program."

When they finally learned the hallucinogenic ropes, so to speak, they agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a TSS colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations -- which usually meant taking the rest of the day off. Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to TSS members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Such tests were considered necessary because foreknowledge would prejudice the results of the experiment.

Indeed, things were getting a bit raucous down at headquarters. When Security officials discovered what was going on, they began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of the TSS game plan. Moral reservations were not paramount; it was more a sense that the MK-ULTRA staff had become unhinged by the hallucinogen. The Office of Security felt that the TSS should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few TSS jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party. A security memo dated December 15, 1954, noted that acid could "produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours and possibly for longer". The writer of this memo concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did "not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties".

The purpose of these early acid tests was not to explore mystical realms or higher states of consciousness. On the contrary, the TSS was trying to figure out how to employ LSD in espionage operations. Nevertheless, there were times when CIA agents found themselves propelled into a visionary world and they were deeply moved by the experience. One MK-ULTRA veteran wept in front of his colleagues at the end of his first trip. "I didn't want it to leave," he explained. "I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty." His colleagues assumed he was having a bad trip and wrote a report stating that the drug had made him psychotic.

Adverse reactions often occurred when people were given LSD on an impromptu basis. One one occasion a CIA operative discovered he'd been dosed during his morning coffee break.

"He sort of knew he had it," a fellow-agent recalled, "but he couldn't pull himself together. Somehow, when you known you've taken it, you start the process of maintaining your composure. But this grabbed him before he was aware, and it got away from him."

Then he got away from them and fled across Washington stoned out of his mind while they searched frantically for their missing comrade.

"He reported afterwards," the TSS man continued, "that every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. It was a real horror for him. I mean, it was hours of agony... like being in a dream that never stops -- with someone chasing you."

Incidents such as these reaffirmed to the MK-ULTRA crew just how devastating a weapon LSD could be. But this only made them more enthusiastic about the drug. They kept springing it on people in a manner reminiscent of the ritual hazing of fraternity pledges.

"It was just too damned informal," a TSS officer later said. "We didn't know much. We were playing around in ignorance.... We were just naive about what we were doing."

Such pranks claimed their first victim in November 1953, when a group of CIA and army technicians fathered for a three-day work retreat at a remote hunting lodge in the backwoods of Maryland. On the second day of the meeting Dr Gottlieb spiked the after-dinner cocktails with LSD. As the drug began to take effect, Gottlieb told everyone that they had ingested a mind-altering chemical. By that time the group had become boisterous with laughter and unable to carry on a coherent conversation.

One man was not amused by the unexpected turn of events. Dr Frank Olson, an army scientist who specialized in biological warfare research, had never taken LSD before, and he slid into a deep depression. His mood did not lighten when the conference adjourned. Normally a gregarious family man, Olson returned home quiet and withdrawn. When he went to work after the weekend, he asked his boss to fire him because he had "messed up the experiment" during the retreat. Alarmed by his erratic behavior, Olson's superiors contacted the CIA, which sent him to New York to see Dr Harold Abramson. A respected physician, Abramson taught at Columbia University and was chief of the allergy clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was also one of the CIA's principal LSD researchers and a part-time consultant to the Army Chemical Corps. While these were impressive credentials, Abramson was not a trained psychiatrist, and it was this kind of counseling his patients desperately needed.

For the next weeks Olson confided his deepest fears to Abramson. He claimed the CIA was putting something in his coffee to make him stay awake at night. He said people were plotting against him and he heard voices at odd hours commanding him to throw away his wallet -- which he did, even though it contained several un-cashed checks. Dr Abramson concluded that Olson was mired in "a psychotic state... with delusions of persecution" that had been "crystallized by the LSD experience". Arrangements were made to move him to Chestnut Lodge, a sanitarium in Rockville, Maryland, staffed by CIA-cleared psychiatrists. (Apparently other CIA personnel who suffered from psychiatric disorders were enrolled in this institution.) On his last evening in New York, Olson checked into a room at the Statler Hilton along with a CIA agent assigned to watch him. And then, in the wee hours of the morning, the troubled scientist plunged headlong through a closed window to his death 10 floors below.

The Olson suicide had immediate repercussions within the CIA. An elaborate cover-up erased clues to the actual circumstances leading up to his death. Olson's widow was eventually given a government pension, and the full truth of what happened would not be revealed for another 20 years. Meanwhile CIA director Allen Dulles suspended the in-house testing program for a brief period while an internal investigation was conducted. In the end, Gottlieb and his team received only a mildly worded reprimand for exercising "bad judgment", but no records of the incident were kept in their personnel files which would harm their future careers. The importance of LSD eclipsed all other considerations, and the secret acid tests resumed.

Gottlieb was now ready to undertake the final and most daring phase of the MK-ULTRA program: LSD would be given to unwitting targets in real-life situations. But who would actually do the dirty work? While looking through some old OSS files, Gottlieb discovered that marijuana had been tested on unsuspecting subjects in an effort to develop a truth serum. These experiments had been organized by George Hunter White, a tough, old-fashioned narcotics officer who ran a training school for American spies during World War II. Perhaps White would be interested in testing drugs for the CIA. As a matter of protocol Gottlieb first approached Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. Anslinger was favorably disposed and agreed to "lend" one of his top men to the CIA on a part-time basis.

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 safe-house 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 14-year stint as a CIA operative.

In 1955 White transferred to San Francisco, where two more safe-houses 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 safe-houses 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 safe-house 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. He sat, with gun in hand, shooting wax slugs at his own reflection.

The safe-house 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 replaced 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 to 24-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 disastrous and unethical". But the harshest criticism was reserved for the safe-house experiments, which, in his words, placed "the rights and interests of US 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 and weeks at a time. Moreover, the sophomoric procedures employed during the safe-house 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 higher 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 safe-house 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 16, 1964:

"Soviet research in the pharmacological agents producing behavioral effects had 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-1" (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 president. 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.

Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History

That, in a nutshell, sums up what the CIA has accomplished over the years through its various clandestine propaganda and disinformation programs. It has unwittingly and, often, deliberately decieved itself -- and the American taxpayer. The CIA is a master at distorting history -- even creating its own version of history to suit its institutional and operational purposes. It can do this largely because of two great advantages it possesses. One is the excessively secret environment in which it operates, and the other is that it is essentially a private instrument of the presidency.

The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing -- for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy -- so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it.

As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president -- every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial."

The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so. I first became concerned about this historical distortion in 1957, when I was a young officer in the Clandestine Services of the CIA.

One night, after work, I was walking down Constitution Avenue with a fellow officer, who previously had been a reporter for United Press.

"Hhow are the American people ever going to know what the truth is? How are they going to know what the truth is about what we are doing and have done over the years?" he said. "We operate in secrecy, we deal in deception and disinformation, and then we burn our files. How will the historians ever be able to learn the complete truth about what we've done in these various operations, these operations that have had such a major impact on so many important events in history?"

I couldn't answer him, then. And I can't answer him now. I don't know how the American people will ever really know the truth about the many things that the CIA has been involved in. Or how they will ever know the truth about the great historical events of our times. The government is continually writing and rewriting history -- often with the CIA's help -- to suit its own purposes. Here is a current example.

Just last month in Moscow, there was a meeting, a very strange meeting. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met with former Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and a member of the Cuban Politburo. These three men, along with lesser former officials of their governments, has all been involved in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and they had gathered intheSoviet capital to discuss what has really occurred in that monumental crisis, which almost led to World War III.

Since I, too, had been personally involved in that crisis, I took some interest in the news reports coming out of Moscow concerning the doings of this rather odd gathering of former officials. Much to my surprise, I learned that Robert McNamara was saying that neither he nor the U.S. intelligence community realized there actually had been some 40,000 Soviet troops in Cuba in the autumn of 1962. The Former defense chief of the Kennedy administration was also saying that he and the U.S. government did not realize that the few dozen medium and intermediate range missiles the Soviets had tried to sneak into Cuba were actually armed with nuclear warheads and ready to be fired at targets in the U.S.

Furthermore, he was claiming that the U.S. did not understand that this huge military build-up by the Soviets had been carried out to protect Cuba and to prevent the U.S. from attacking the island's Communist regime. He added, for good measure, that he was surprised to learn from the talks in Moscow that the Soviets and Cubans thought the U.S. had plans to bring down the government of Fidel Castro through the use of force. According to McNamara, the entire Cuban missile crisis was a dangerous misunderstanding that came about because of the lack of communication among the governments involved in the near catastrophe.

Well, when I heard what McNamara and the band were playing in Moscow, I said to myself, "Either McNamara is getting a little dotty in his old age and doesn't remember what really happened during the Cuban missile crisis -- or there's some other reason for this." Well, it soon became apparent that McNamara was not senile. What, then, is the reason for these curious -and false -- "admissions" in Moscow? The reason is that the United States and the Soviet Union have decided to become friends again, and Washington wants to set the stage for rapprochement with Castro's Cuba.

It has evidently been decided by the powers that be in the U.S. to have a little meeting in Moscow and tell the world that we were all mixed up about Cuba and we didn't know what was going on there in 1962, because we weren't communicating well with the Soviets at the time. Thus, the American people would see how close to war we had come, how we should communicate more with the Soviets, and how they weren't really very bad guys after all. For that matter neither were Fidel and his gang. Therefore, it would follow that we should in a few months from now get on with disarmament and whatever else is necessary to bring about the new internationalism that is forming between east and west. At the same time, we should begin rebuilding the bridge to Cuba, too.

But to create the proper atmosphere for the coming rapproachement with Moscow and, later, Cuba, it was necessary to scare the American public and the world into thinking that the crisis of October 1962 was worse than it really was. To do that, McNamara, Gromyko, et al. were playing a little game -- their own distorted brand of historical revisionism. They were rewriting history to suit the present purposes of their governments.

Now, I thought, what if I were a reporter. Would I be able to see through this little charade that was going on in Moscow? Probably not. I began studying the "knowlegeable" syndicated colunmists. They were writing things like, "... My God, we never did understand what the Soviets were up to in Cuba. Yes, we better do something about this." What McNamara and friends were saying in Moscow was now becoming fact. It's becoming fact that we, the U.S. government, did not really know what was going on during the missile crisis. That is a lie.

If there was ever a time when the CIA in the United States intelligence community and the United States Armed Forces really cooperated and coordinated their efforts with each other, it was during the Cuban missile crisis. The Cuban missile crisis is probably one of the few examples -- perhaps the only one -- of when intelligence really worked the way it was supposed to work in a crisis situation.

I was there at the time, and I was deeply involved in this historical event. A colleague and friend of mine, Tack, my assistant at the time, and I were the original "crate-ologists"-which was an arcane little intelligence art that we had developed. We had learned through a variety of tricks of the trade, and some of our own making, to be able to distinguish what was in certain crates on Soviet merchant ships as they went into Cuba, into Indonesia into Egypt, Syria,and other places.We could tell if a crate contained a MIG-21,or an IL-28, or a SAM-2 missile.

We did this in such an amateurish way that we dared not tell anyone our methods. While the National Photographic and Interpretation Center employed 1,200 people in its office in downtown Washington, using state-of-the-art equipment to analyze aerial and satellite photography, Tack and I would sit in our office, feet up on the desk, using a beat-up old ruler to measure photos taken from U.S. submarines. I'd measure a crate on the deck of the Soviet freighter, say about three quarters of an inch in the photograph.

We were pretty good at this. We had other aids to identification of course. We were able to learn when the Soviets were preparing shipments and from which ports they were sailing. We knew which personnel were involved, and the ships' destinations. Thus we could alert the navy, which sometimes conducted overflights, sometimes tracked them with a submarine.

We had an attaché in Istanbul row out in the middle of the night with a Turk whom he'd hired, looking for three things in a Soviet freighter: its deck cargo, how high it was riding in the water, and its name.

By these and other sensitive we were able to learn, in the summer of 1962, that the Soviets were carrying out an unprecendented arms build-up in Cuba. While some of the other agencies, namely the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, did'nt agree with us, CIA director John McCone was able to get president John Kennedy to authorize more intelligence overflights. The overflights revealed that the Soviets were building

SAM (Surface-to-Air Missiles) launching sites to protect the build-up. Further overflights revealed the construction of launching sites for Soviet MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) capable of carrying nuclear warheads to most cities in the United States.

We know exactly how many there were. where they were, and that they had not yet been armed, because the warheads hadn't arrived yet.

Thus McNamara is lying when he claims that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were armed and ready for launch against the United States. On the contrary, we were watching the ships which caried the warheads; American ships enforcing the blockade which President Kennedy had ordered boarded a Romanian ship (which we knew carried no arms), and the Russian ships bringing the nuclear warheads turned around in mid-ocean and went home.

It is also quite untrue that there were forty thousand Soviet troops in Cuba. We knew that there were only ten thousand of them, because we had developed a simple but effective way of counting them.

The Soviets had sent their troops over on passenger liners to disguise the military buildup. Some genius back in Moscow must have then said: "But these guys need to wear civilian clothes; let's put sport shirts on them." But someone at the department store said: We've only got two kinds." So half the troops wore one kind, half of them the other. They weren't very hard to spot.

Then, too, Soviet soldiers are a lot like our own. As soon as the first group got established, the colonel sent them out to paint some rocks white and then paint the name of the unit, 44th Field Artillery Battalion or whatever, on the rocks. All we had to do was take a picture of it from one of our U-2s. So it was easy to establish a Soviet troop strength of far below 40,000. Thus, McNamara is agreeing to a second lie.

The big lie, however, is that the Soviet Union came into Cuba to protect the Cubans. That was a secondary, or bonus, consideration. The primary reason for the build-up was that the Soviets at the time were so far behind us in nuclear strike capability that Khruschev figured he could make a quantum leap by suddenly putting in 48 missiles that could strike every city in America except Seattle, Washington.

Nor did we come as close to war as many think, because Khruschev knew he was caught. His missiles weren't armed, and he hadn't the troops to protect them. Kennedy knew this, so he was able to say: "take them out." And Khruschev had to say yes.

I must admit that at the time I was a little concerned, and so was my buddy Tack. We were manning the war room around the clock, catching four hours of sleep and then going back on duty. My wife had the station wagon loaded with blankets and provisions, and Tack's wife was standing by on alert. If either of them got a phone call with a certain word in it, they were to take our children and drive to my home town in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. We figured they'd be safe there: if you've ever seen the coal region with its strip mines you would think it had already been bombed and we were hoping the Soviets would look at it that way too.

Last month's conference in Moscow is an example of how history is being rewritten. Any historian who relies on what he reads in the newspapers, on the statements from McNamara and the Russians and the Cubans will not be learning the truth. The CIA has manufactured history in a number of ways over the years not only through its propaganda and disinformation but through the cover stories it uses for their operations, and the cover-ups when an operation falls through Then there is "plausible deniability," which protects the president.

All these techniques have one thing in common, and depend on one thing: secrecy. Secrecy is maintained not to keep the opposition - the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy -- from knowing what's going on, because the enemy usually does know. Secrecy exists to keep you, the American public, from knowing what is going on, because in many ways you are the real enemy.

If the public were aware of what the CIA is doing, it might say: "We don't like what you're doing -- stop it!," or You're not doing a good job -- stop it!" The public might ask for an accounting for the money being spent and the risks being taken.

Thus secrecy is absolutely vital to the CIA. Secrecy covers not only operations in progress, but continues after the operations, particularly if the operations have been botched. Then they have to be covered up with more lies, which the public, of course, can't recognize as lies, allowing the CIA to tell the public whatever it wishes.

Presidents love this. Every president, no matter what he has said before getting into office, has been delighted to learn that the CIA is his own private tool. The presidents have leapt at the opportunity to keep Congress and the public in the dark about their employment of the agency.

This is what was at the basis of my book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. I had come to the conclusion, as a member of the CIA, that many of our policies and practices were not in the best interests of the United States. but were in fact counterproductive, and that if the American people were aware of this they would not tolerate it.

I resigned from the CIA in 1969, at a time when we were deeply involved in Vietnam. And how did we get into Vietnam on a large scale? How did President Lyndon Johnson get a blank check from Congress? It was through the Gulf of Tonkin incident The American people were told by President Johnson that North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats had come after two American destroyers on the night of August 4, 1964. This was confirmed by the intelligence community.

The fact of the matter is that while torpedo boats came out and looked at the U.S. destroyers, which were well out in international waters, they never fired on them. They made threatening maneuvers, they snarled a bit, but they never fired. It was dark and getting darker. Our sailors thought they might have seen something, but there were no hits, no reports of anything whizzing by.

That was the way it was reported back: a bit of a scrape, but no weapons fire and no attempt to fire. Our ships had not been in danger. But with the help of the intelligence community President Johnson took that report and announced that we had been attacked. He went to Congress and asked for and received his blank check, and Congress went along. Everyone knows the rest of the story: we got into Vietnam up to our eyeballs.

Every president prizes secrecy and fights for it. And so did President Nixon, in my case. When I came to the conclusion that the American people needed to know more about the CIA and what it was up to, I decided to go to Capitol Hill and talk to the senators on the intelligence oversight subcommittee. I found out that Senator John Stennis, at that time head of the subcommittee, hadn't conducted a meeting in over a year, so the other senators were completely ignorant as to what the CIA was doing. Senators William Fulbright and Stuart Symington would tell Stennis, "Let's have a meeting," but he was ignoring them. The other senators wrote Stennis a letter urging him to at least hear what I had to say in a secret executive session, but he continued to ignore them.

Then I would meet Fulbright -- at the barber shop. He was afraid to met me in his office. I would meet with Symington at his home. I would meet with senators at cocktail parties, as if by chance. But still they couldn't get Stennis to convene the intelligence subcommittee.

Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania told me he had learned more about the workings of the intelligence community in one afternoon of conversation with me than in six years of work on the intelligence subcommittee. That didn't surprise me, because I, several years before, had done the budget for CIA director Richard Helms. It was feared that the Senate appropriations subcommittee might have some hard questions about the growing cost of technical espionage programs. Director Helms had evidently been through this before, however.

As Helms put it, he and the CIA's head of science and technology, Albert (Bud) Wheelon, staged a "magic lantern show" for the committee, complete with color slides and demonstrations of the CIA's most advance spy gadgets: a camera hidden in a tobacco pouch, a radio transmitter concealed in some false teeth, a tape recorder in a cigarette case, and so on. One or two hard questions were deflected by Senator Russell of Georgia, who chaired the committee and was a strong supporter of the agency. There were, of course, no slides or hi-tech hardware to exhibit the programs the CIA wanted to conceal from Congress, and the budget sailed through the subcommittee intact.

What I learned in my dealings with Congressmen, in the CIA and after leaving, was that the men who wanted to change the situation didn't have the power, while those who had the power didn't want any change. With Congress a hopeless case, and the White House already in the know and well satisfied to let the CIA continue to operate in secrecy, I decided to talk to the press. I gave my first interview to U.S. News and World Report, and that started the ball rolling. Soon I was in touch with publishers in New York, talking about doing a book.

I soon got a telephone call from Admiral Rufus Taylor, who had been my boss in the agency, but by that time had retired. He told me to meet him at a motel in the Virginia suburbs, across the Potomac from Washington. My suspicions aroused by the remoteness of the room from the office, I was greeted by Admiral Taylor, who had thoughtfully brought along a large supply of liquor: a bottle of scotch, a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin ... "I couldn't remember what you liked," he told me, "so I brought one of everything."

I began to make noise: flushing the toilet, washing my hands, turning on the television. Admiral Taylor was right behind me, turning everything off. I kept making noise, jingling the ice in my glass and so on, until the admiral sat down. There was a table with a lamp on it between the admiral's chair and the one which he now told me to sit down on. He looked at me with a little twinkle in his eye: the lamp was bugged, of course.

We talked, and Admiral Taylor told me the CIA was worried about what I might write in my book. He proposed a deal: I was to give no more interviews, write no more articles, and to stay away from Capitol Hill. I could write my book, and then let him and other retired senior officers look it over, and they would advise me and the agency. After that the CIA and I could resolve our differences. I told him, "Fair enough." We had a drink on it, and went out to dinner. That was our deal

What I didn't know was that a few nights later John Erlichman and Richard Nixon would be sitting in the White House discussing my book. There is a tape of their discussion, "President Nixon, John Ehrlichman, 45 minutes, subject Victor Marchetti," which is still sealed: I can't get it Ehrlichman told me through contacts that if I listened to the tape I would learn exactly what happened to me and why.

Whatever the details of their conversation were, the president of the United States had decided I should not publish my book. I was to be the first writer in American history to be served with an official censorship order served by a court of the United States, because President Nixon did not want to be embarrassed, nor did he want the CIA to be investigated and reformed: that would have hampered his ability to use it for his own purposes. A few days later, on April 18, 1972, I received a federal injunction restraining me from revealing any "intelligence information." After more than a year of court battles, CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published. The courts allowed the CIA to censor it in advance, and as a result the book appeared with more than a hundred holes for CIA-ordered deletions. Later editions show previously deleted words and lines, which the court ordered the CIA to restore in boldface or italics. The book is therefore difficult to read, indeed something of a curiosity piece. And of course all the information which was ordered cut out ended up leaking to the public anyway.

All this was done to help the CIA suppress and distort history, and to enable presidents to do the same. Presidents like Harry Truman, who claimed falsely that "I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations," but who willingly employed the agency to carry out clandestine espionage and covert intervention in the affairs of other countries. Or Dwight Eisenhower, who denied that we were attempting to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia, when we were, and was embarrassed when he tried to deny the CIA's U-2 overflights and was shown up by Khruschev at Paris in 1960. John F. Kennedy, as everyone knows by now, employed the CIA in several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We used everyone from Mafia hoods to Castro's mistress, Marita Lorenz (who was supposed to poison the dictator with pills concealed in her cold cream -- the pills melted). I have no doubt that if we could have killed Castro, the U.S. would have gone in.

There was a fairly widespread belief that one reason Kennedy was assassinated was because he was going to get us out of Vietnam. Don't you believe it He was the CIA's kind of president, rough, tough, and gung-ho. Under Kennedy we became involved in Vietnam in a serious way, not so much militarily as through covert action. It is a fact that the United States engineered the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's premier, and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his powerful brother. A cable was sent out to the ambassador which said, "If Lou Conein goofs up [Lucien Conein was a key CIA operative in Saigon], it's his responsibility." So when E. Howard Hunt faked these memos and cables when he was working for the "plumbers" on behalf of President Nixon (and against the Democrats), he knew what he was doing. That was his defense, that he wasn't really forging or inventing anything. "Stuff like that really existed, but I couldn't find it," he said. Of course Hunt couldn't find it by that time the original documents were gone. But Hunt knew what he was doing.

President Nixon's obsession with secrecy led to the end of his presidency, of course. As indicated earlier, Nixon was determined to suppress my book. On several occasions after his resignation, Nixon has been asked what he meant when he said that the CIA would help him cover up the Watergate tapes, because "they owed him one." He has responded, "I was talking about Marchetti," in other words the efforts (still secret) to prevent The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence from being published.

Another instance of the Nixon administrations' attempts to suppress history is the ongoing attempt to cover up the details of the administration's "tilt" toward Pakistan in its conflict with India in the early 1970's. Although the basic facts soon emerged, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh's account of the affair in his unflattering book on Henry Kissinger revealed that Morarji Desai, an important Indian political leader who later became Prime Minister, was a CIA agent. Kissinger spurred Desai to sue Hersh, and the case is still dragging on today, seven years later. I know what the truth is; Hersh knows as well, but as a conscientious journalist refused to reveal his sources. Here historical truth is caught between official secrecy and Hersh's loyalty to his informants; nevertheless, I have a great deal of admiration for Hersh for his firm stand.

It is a fact that a good many foreign leaders, including those often seen as "neutral" or even hostile to the United States, have been secretly on the CIA's payroll. For instance, when Jimmy Carter came into office, he claimed he was going to reform the CIA. No sooner than was he in the White House, they decided to test him: the news that Jordan's King Hussein had been paid by the CIA was leaked. President Carter was outraged, because now it was his CIA. His efforts to deny the relationship were defeated by Hussein's nonchalant frankness. He told the press, "Yes, I took the money. I used it for my intelligence service. And that's all I'm going to say on that subject."

There were a lot of other national leaders in Hussein's category. As I revealed for the first time in my book, Joseph Mobutu, a corporal in the Belgian forces in the Congo before its independence, went on the CIA payroll. That is why he rules Zaire today. The CIA paid the late Jomo Kenyatta, ruler of Kenya, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a year, which he'd spend on drink and women. Therefore we ended up paying Kenyatta twice as much, telling him: "This is for you and this is for your party."

The CIA has funded individuals and movements across the political spectrum in West Germany. A prime example is Willy Brandt, former chancellor of the Federal Republic, who received much CIA support when he was mayor of West Berlin. Axel Springer, the Christian Democratic-minded press and publishing magnate, who pointed the finger at Brandt for working with CIA, was also a CIA asset, who used his publications to spread CIA propaganda and disinformation. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black: I knew his case officer quite welL

This is the way the CIA sees its mission, the job it was created to do. The CIA is supposed to be involved with everyone, not merely the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats. The agency is supposed to have its fingers in every pie, including the Communist one, so that they can all be manipulated in whichever way the U.S. government desires.

An obvious area of disinformation and deception exists in our relationship with a nation often represented as our closest ally, Israel. I have often been asked about the relationship between the CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad. The CIA maintains some kind of liaison with virtually every foreign intelligence agency, including the KGB. These relationships vary from case to case, but our relationship with the Mossad was always a peculiar one.

When I was in the agency, the Mossad was generally not trusted. There was an unwritten rule that no Jews could work on Israeli or near Eastern matters; it was felt that they could not be totally objective.. There was a split in the agency, however, and Israel was not included in the normal area division, the Near Eastern Division. Instead it was handled as a special account in counterintelligence. The man who handled that account, James Jesus Angleton, was extremely close to the Israelis. I believe that through Angleton the Israelis learned a lot more than they should have and exercised a lot more influence on our activities than they should have.

For his trouble, James Angleton, who died last year, was honored by the Israelis, in the way that the Israelis customarily honor their Gentile helpers. They decided to plant a whole forest for Angleton in the Judean hills, and they put up a handsome plaque in several languages, lionizing Angleton as a great friend of Israel, on a nearby rock. Israeli's intelligence chiefs, past and present, attended the dedication ceremony. Later on, a television reporter of my acquaintance sought out Angleton's memorial during an assignment in Israel. After some difficulty, he was able to locate it, but something seemed odd about it. On closer inspection, Angleton's plaque turned out to be made, not of bronze, but of cardboard. Nor was the setting particularly flattering to Israel's late benefactor: the trees and plaque were at the edge of a garbage dump. My friend's British cameraman put it best "This guy sold out his country for the bloody Israelis, and this is the way they pay him back!"

The CIA has distorted history in other ways than by outright coverups and suppression of the truth. One method was to produce its own books. For instance, one of its top agents in the Soviet Union was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky was eventually captured and executed. But the CIA was unwilling to let it go at that The agency decided to write a book, which it published in 1965, called The Penkovsky Papers. This was purported to be drawn from a diary that Penkovsky had kept, a diary in which Penkovsky revealed numerous espionage coups calculated to embarrass the Soviets and build up the CIA.

Spies do not keep diaries, of course, and the Soviets were not likely to believe the exaggerated claims made for Penkovsky and the CIA in The Penkovsky Papers. Who was taken in? The American public, of course. More than once people have come up to me after a lecture and shown me the book as if it were gospel. I've told them, "I know the man who wrote it." "You knew Penkovsky?" they invariably ask, and I tell them, "No, I didn't know Penkovsky but I know the man who wrote the book."

Not just ordinary citizens were taken in by the Penkovsky deception, either. Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, who served on the CIA oversight subcommittee, said in a 1971 Senate debate on cutting the inteligence budget:

Perhaps the most startling example ot the ClA's manipulation of the publishing world is the case of Khrushchev Remembers. Khrushchev is still widely believed to have been the author. He is supposed to have dashed it off one summer and then said to himself, "Where will I get this published? Ah! Time-Life!" The tapes reached Time-Life, we all read it, and we told ourselves, "Isn't that interesting."

A little thought should be sufficient to dispel the notion that the KGB would allow Khrushchev to sit in his dacha dictating tape after tape with no interference. He certainly dictated tapes, but the tapes were censored and edited by the KGB, and then a deal was struck between the U.S. and the USSR, after it was decided, at the highest level, that such a book would be mutually beneficial. Brezhnev could use against some of the resistance he was encountering from Stalinist hardliners, and Nixon could use it to increase support for detente.

The CIA and the KGB cooperated in carrying out the operation. The tapes were given to the Time bureau in Moscow. Strobe Talbot, who appears on television frequently today and is Time's bureau chief in Washington, brought the tapes back with him. I was present in an apartment in which he hid them for a couple of days. The tapes were then translated and a manuscript developed. During this period Time refused to let people who had known Khrushchev personally, including White House staff members, listen to the tapes.

Knowledgeable people began to tell me. "I don't believe this." "There's something mighty fishy here." When they read what Khrushchev was supposedly saying, they were even more incredulous. But the book came out, Khrushchev Remembers, accompanied by a massive publicity campaign. It was a great propaganda accomplishment for the CIA and the KGB.

I touched on Khrushchev Remembers in my book. I did not go into any great detail, merely devoting several tentative paragraphs to the affair. Just before my book was published Time was considering doing a two-page spread on me until they learned of my expressed reservations on the trustworthiness of Khrushchev Remembers. I began to get phone calls from Talbot and Jerry Schaechter, then Time's bureau chief in Washington, telling me I should take out the offending passages.

I had written, correctly, that before publication Strobe Talbot had taken the bound transcripts of the Khruschhev tapes back to Moscow, via Helsinki, so that the KGB could make one final review of them. I told Schaechter and Talbot that if they came to me, looked me in the eye, and told me I had the facts wrong, I would take out the section on Khruschhev Remembers. Neither of them ever came by, the paragraphs stayed in my book, and in any event Time went ahead with the two-page spread anyway.

As I pointed out in the preface to The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence in 1974, democratic governments fighting totalitarian enemies run the risk of imitating their methods and thereby destroying democracy. By suppressing historical fact, and by manufacturing historical fiction, the CIA, with its obsessive secrecy and its vast resources, has posed a particular threat to the right of Americans to be informed for the present and future by an objective knowledge of the past. As long as the CIA continues to manipulate history, historians of its activities must be Revisionist if we are to know the truth about the agency's activities, past and present.

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 305-320.

Book Notes:

All the Publisher's Men

A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham is on sale again.
by Daniel Brandt
From The National Reporter, Fall 1987.
Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. By Deborah Davis. National Press, Bethesda MD, 1987, 320 pages, ISBN 0-915765-43-8.

There's much more. According to his Who's Who entry, Alfred Friendly was a Post reporter while also serving in Air Force intelligence during World War II and as director of overseas information for the Economic Cooperation Administration from 1948-49. Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold Warrior) reports that the ECA routinely provided cover for the CIA. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were set up by the CIA and John S. Hayes was their chairman by 1974. Years earlier when Hayes was vice-president for radio and television at the Post, he was appointed by Kennedy to a secret CIA propaganda task force. Friendly left the Post soon after Bradlee came on board, and Hayes left when Johnson appointed him ambassador to Switzerland in 1966.

But poor Bradlee claims he didn't know that Cord Meyer was a globetrotting CIA destabilizer in the fifties, just as he knew nothing about CIA links when he took time off from the Post to work as a propagandist for the U.S. embassy in Paris from 1951-53. Deborah Davis includes in her book a memo released under the FOIA that shows Bradlee responding to a request from the CIA station chief in Paris, Robert Thayer. His assignment was to place stories in the European press to discredit the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, and Bradlee followed orders.

Benjamin Bradlee: from Post reporter to embassy propagandist, then on to Newsweek and back to the Post as executive editor, without breaking stride. The point of Davis' book is that this pattern is repeated again and again in Post history; she calls it "mediapolitics" -- the use of information media for political purposes. Robert Thayer's status as CIA station chief in Paris is confirmed in Richard Harris Smith's book OSS. While in Paris, Bradlee already knew Thayer, having attended the preparatory school Thayer ran while Robert Jr. was his classmate. Bradlee categorically denies any CIA connection, but it's a toss-up as to which is more disturbing: Bradlee in bed with the CIA and lying about it, or Bradlee led around by the CIA and not knowing it.

Unlike Bradlee, Katharine does not seem as sophisticated or conniving; she was apparently completely sucked in by such charmers as Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and even Henry Kissinger, who took her to the movies. She supported Nixon in 1968 and 1972, changed her mind about him later, but has yet to waver from the anti-Communism that kept the Post from criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam. Her idea of an awkward situation is asking Nixon for National Guard protection during anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Washington; Lyndon never made her ask. The demonstrators had to be duped -- after all, she had taken the time to get her facts straight with a trip to Vietnam in 1965, where she shopped for blue and white china, and had access to all the assorted power brokers and opinion makers who showed up at the 1966 masked ball that Truman Capote gave for her. Between Bradlee and Katharine, with journalism such as this it's a wonder that the Vietnamese people survived.

The elitist conservatism and intelligence connections of the Post are as important today as they ever were; Katharine and Bradlee are still in control. Davis could have remarked on the current New Right editorial line in the Post, or added the fact that former editorial page editor (1968-79) Philip Geyelin joined the CIA for a year in 1950, while on leave from the Wall Street Journal, but found the work boring and went back to the Journal. And she also doesn't mention that Walter Pincus, a Post reporter who still covers intelligence issues, took two CIA-financed trips overseas to international student conferences in 1960, and waited to write about them until 1967 when reporters everywhere were exposing CIA conduits. Informed readers of Geyelin (who stills does a column) and Pincus can learn much from they way these writers filter history. This may qualify them as good journalists among their colleagues, but for the unwitting masses it simply amounts to more disinformation.

The CIA connections that Davis does mention are dynamite. The issue is relevant today because frequently the D.C. reader has to pick up the Washington Times to get information on the CIA the Post refuses to print. For example, while almost every major newspaper in the country, as well as CBS News and ABC News, use the real name of former CIA Costa Rican station chief "Tomas Castillo," the Post, as of late June, continues to gloat over their use of the pseudonym only. This is probably Bradlee's decision, not Katharine's, because Newsweek let former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry use Castillo's real name (Joseph F. Fernandez, age 50) when Parry joined the magazine earlier this year. According to Davis, Katharine doesn't make editorial decisions these days unless they threaten the health of the company.

The question, then, becomes one of myth-management, and attempting to discern why the Post enjoys such a liberal reputation in spite of its record. Once you redefine liberalism as something slightly closer to the center than the New Right, it means that "genuine" liberalism (if such a thing was ever important) is stranded and soon becomes extinct. Add to this the fact that U.S. liberalism since World War II, whether "genuine" or contemporary, has a record on foreign policy that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. That leaves two media events to explain the Post puzzle: the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Forget the first event, because the Post was merely trying to keep up with the New York Times so as not to lose face. Besides, they didn't make a movie about it.

Watergate and the Post, the stuff of great drama. Much has been written already about the probability that Nixon was set up. McCord as a double agent has been covered neatly in Carl Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy War, Bob Woodward's previous employment with a Pentagon intelligence unit was mentioned in Jim Hougan's Secret Agenda, and the motive -- that Nixon was losing perspective and becoming a threat to those who were still able to see their long-range interests clearly -- is evident after reading Seymour Hersh's The Politics of Power.

If you put it all together and summarize it in the context of Deep Throat and the Post, along with Bradlee's CIA sympathies, you must agree with Davis that Nixon wasn't the only one set up; Deep Throat led the Post by the nose. Whether they knew it or not, whether they cared or not assuming that they knew, and whether or not a noble end can justify shabby means -- all this pales next to Davis' main point. That point is this: the Post, whose history of journalism by manipulation helped create the conditions that led to Vietnam, the demonstrations, and the psychosis of Nixon, ended up using or responding to these same manipulative methods to avoid political obsolescence, and somehow it worked.

Davis identifies Deep Throat as Richard Ober, the chief of the CIA's domestic spying program called Operation CHAOS. The evidence is circumstantial and her sources remain anonymous. According to Davis, Kissinger moved Angleton into the White House and set him up with his own Israeli intelligence desk in 1969. This sounds like vintage Kissinger as he acts swiftly to capture the foreign policy apparatus, but it's the first I've heard that Angleton, who thought the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse designed to catch the West napping, was on any sort of terms with the China-hopping, detente-talking Kissinger.

Davis writes that Angleton's deputy Ober was also given a White House office, and after the Pentagon Papers were published Ober had privileged access to Nixon and was able to observe his deterioration. Again, this is news to me. If Davis is correct, it means Angleton and Ober were running Operation CHAOS out of the White House, Nixon knew about it while Kissinger didn't, but both Kissinger and Nixon were deeply suspicious of the CIA and felt it necessary to start up the Huston Plan to cover the CIA's shortcomings in domestic intelligence. At least the book includes a photograph of Ober -- the first one I've seen. Davis makes more sense than some of the Watergate theories that have kicked around in past years, but this is still the most speculative portion of her book.

Part of the Post success story has to do with sheer wealth. As one of the world's richest women, Graham has the empire backed up with many millions, which guarantees continued access to privilege and power. Another part is an ability to play dirty. Katharine Graham, who became one of Washington's most notorious union-busters in the name of a free press, used her "soft cop" with Bradlee's "hard cop" to insure that William Jovanovich, who published the first edition of this book in 1979, was bullied into recalling 20,000 copies because of minor inaccuracies alleged by Bradlee. Jovanovich made no effort to check Bradlee's allegations. Deborah Davis filed a breach-of- contract and damage-to-reputation suit against Jovanovich, who settled out of court with her in 1983.

The entire saga of Katharine the Great is a sobering antidote to the intoxication I felt when All the President's Men first played. A myth has been more than punctured; Davis bludgeons it mercilessly -- yet in a manner that shows far more journalistic integrity than one can expect from the Post or from Jovanovich. This bludgeoning was overdue for eight years, delayed by exactly the sort of Washington hardball that Davis exposes. Indeed, there can be no more eloquent testimony to the substantive nature of Davis' material than the sound that those 20,000 copies must have made as they, at the behest of Post power, went through a shredding machine.

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

by Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich From NameBase NewsLine, No. 16, January-March 1997

Like some Russian high official come to treat with Chechen rebels, CIA Director John Deutch arrived in force -- by heavily-armed motorcade, and with helicopter cover. SWAT teams swarmed over the building that was Deutch's destination.

But on November 15, 1996, Deutch's destination was in fact only the auditorium of Locke High School in the beleaguered South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles: for a U.S. public servant, not officially enemy territory at all. Still, the citizens who showed up to hear and question Deutch were searched with a metal detector in return for the privilege.

And privilege it was. The post-Cold-War world had become so threatening to the CIA that Deutch was taking the unprecedented step of showing up in public -- of walking, in fact, directly into a popular firestorm. That evening, Deutch emphatically claimed that the CIA had no involvement whatsoever with the crack-cocaine epidemic that is battering South Central. It was a message Deutch's audience wasn't buying.

This event and its aftermath are well worth reflecting upon. Unfortunately, the defense of Deutch and his agency by major U.S. media has proved far less illuminating than the narrow and ahistorical way these same media have defined and framed the relevant issues. The ability of well-paid media people to vaporize the known history of the CIA, to turn this history into a non-issue, is scary -- scarier, almost, than the long, lamentable, but extremely well-documented story of CIA involvement with drug traffickers on four continents.

This essay will attempt to say something, yet again, both about the major media and about some of the many mind-bending episodes, already on the public record, of CIA-drug-trafficker complicity.

The CIA's latest trials on this issue began in August 1996 with the now-notorious series on crack cocaine in the San Jose Mercury News. In this series, reporter Gary Webb made the case that the CIA, through the actions of several drug-dealing Nicaraguan contras it had funded, was involved in the introduction of crack into Los Angeles during the 1980s.

Parallel stories have appeared in provincial papers before, and been ignored. But San Jose isn't in Silicon Valley for nothing; the Mercury News boosted Webb's stories with its state-of-the-art website, and a popular firestorm ensued. Soon Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus was calling for an investigation, and the Senate Intelligence Committee had scheduled hearings.

Belatedly, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all recognized that, this time around, they couldn't ignore the story. But instead of investigating the CIA, they investigated their fellow journalists at the Mercury News. Quoting each other's stories to strengthen their common case, editorialists, reporters, and columnists from all three papers attacked Webb's reporting -- or what they claimed Webb had reported -- as well as his ethics, his talk-show appearances, his book proposal, his movie deal, his editors, and even a graphic on his newspaper's website. Gary Webb, after all, is neither a Washingtonian nor a New Yorker.

There was nothing casual or accidental about this bashing. The L.A. Times had 25 reporters on the story. The Post refused to print a reasoned letter from Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos defending the series, even after Ceppos provided a requested revision. Perhaps the low point of this campaign was a story by Tim Golden of the New York Times, which explained that African-Americans are more susceptible than their fellow citizens to conspiracy theories and paranoia.

But it's not necessarily paranoid to note what crack has done to our cities, or that the U.S. prison population has tripled over the past 14 years, or that California now spends more on prisons than it does on colleges and universities. And as the Mercury News noted: in 1993, snorters of powdered cocaine drew an average sentence of three months, whereas crack smokers got an average of three years. And 83 percent of those sent to prison for crack trafficking were African-American. If present trends were to continue for another 14 years, a majority of African-American males between the ages of 18 and 40 would be locked up.

Deutch's audience at Locke High, furthermore, had a more appropriate response than the Washington Post did to Deutch's promise that the CIA would investigate itself: hoots and howls. After all, the last internal CIA report on contras and drugs, completed in 1988, is still secret. "I don't know why [Rep. Julian] Dixon is saluting Deutch's courage for coming here today," someone from the audience complained at the floor microphone, "when everybody knows this building's got hundreds of pigs in it. There's pigs behind those curtains, there's pigs on top of the roof. We're not going to get no justice here today -- we're going to need a revolution."

And it's the major media, rather than the folks who turned out at Locke High, that are guilty of what amounts to suppression of evidence on this issue. Consider media treatment of Jack Blum, former special counsel to John Kerry's Senate subcommittee that investigated the CIA-contra-drug connection. If senators will listen to anyone who can speak authoritatively on this issue, it's Blum. On October 23, 1996, Blum told the Senate Intelligence Committee that although the CIA had not itself sold crack in the inner city, it had "ignored the drug problem and subverted law enforcement to prevent embarrassment and to reward our allies in the contra war.... A careful review of covert operations in the Caribbean and South and Central America shows a forty-year connection between crime and covert operations that has repeatedly blown back on the United States.... I would hope that this inquiry goes beyond the narrow questions posed in the San Jose Mercury News story."

Blum's statement reviewed the same history of CIA complicity with drug traffickers that will be touched on in this essay: CIA ties to the Mafia during World War II; its role in Burma in the 1950s; in Laos in the 1960s; in Argentina and Bolivia in the 1970s; and in Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But Blum's 3,700 words of historical perspective raised the specter of exactly the kind of inquiry that the major media don't want. ABC's Peter Jennings crunched Blum's reflections down to a single sound bite, perversely out of context, in which Blum absolved the CIA of directly selling drugs in Los Angeles. The two sentences on CNN's U.S. News Story Page on their website were equally shameless: "Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator who looked into the matter during the 1980s, defended the CIA. 'No members of the staff of the CIA ... (were) in the cocaine business,' he said."

In fairness we may note that the media were only following the government's lead on this issue. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz lacks subpoena power and must produce a declassified report; for additional powers, he must petition Congress. But Congressional "oversight" over the CIA is unfortunately just that. The House Intelligence Committee is now chaired by Porter Goss (R-FL), a former CIA operations officer who still hangs out with Agency friends. Its Senate counterpart is under Arlen Specter (R-PA), whose major contribution to investigative history to date is the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory.

Put simply, neither the major media nor Congress has the will, perhaps not even the power, to pursue the real history of CIA activity. Maxine Waters (D-CA) fears that the investigations now in train will fade away unless public pressure is maintained. To this end, Waters plans teach-ins on California campuses this spring. A fourth contra-crack investigation is being conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, a former narcotics prosecutor. But even though Bromwich's intentions seem good, he can subpoena only Justice Department documents, and cannot compel witnesses to testify.

Jack Blum is surely right to want to pursue all CIA-drugs investigations within the framework of the larger history of the CIA -- even though one must surely question Blum's assumption that established agencies are capable of doing this. Since the 1960s, evidence of corruption and official lies has periodically made it onto the public record, but the worse the news, the more intense official resistance has become.

What follows, nevertheless, is a quick sketch of what all such investigators -- and the public -- ought to have firmly in mind. A variety of sources have been assembled here into a rough chronological narrative. But the scope of this narrative is so great that only major chapters in the CIA's long association with drugs can be mentioned. Still, as a big picture, it's better than nothing -- which is what official sources and investigations, and well-heeled publishers and producers, threaten to give us.

Back in 1936, Lucky Luciano, the boss of Mafia drug and prostitution rackets in New York City, was finally convicted as a result of Thomas Dewey's prosecution, and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. But in 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence asked Meyer Lansky to seek Luciano's assistance in getting New York waterfront workers to watch out for enemy agents and activity. Soon Luciano's friends in Sicily, who had been severely repressed by Mussolini, were helping with the American invasion there. In 1946 the ONI appealed to Luciano's parole board. He was released from prison and deported to Italy -- where he built up a heroin syndicate.

The immediate postwar problem in places like Italy and France, from the point of view of both the CIA and entrenched interests such as the Mafia, was that many Communists had been anti-fascist Resistance fighters, and as such were attractive to voters. The Marshall Plan aimed not merely to rebuild a war-torn Europe; it aimed to rebuild Europe in such a way that no Communists could ever win an election. To this end, the CIA played a major role in administering Marshall Plan aid.

In Italy the CIA spent money to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs in Marseilles, which together exported nearly five tons of heroin to the U.S. during that year.[1]

Heroin trafficking shifted in the 1960s and 1970s from the Turkey-Marseilles connection to the Asian connection. For decades until the 1950s, the opium trade was sanctioned by colonial administrations in Asia. By the early 1960s, the mountain areas of Southeast Asia -- the Golden Triangle region -- produced most of the world's opium. Northeastern Burma was particularly productive.

In the case of Burma, production before 1945 was insignificant -- as a province of India under the British, most of the opium traded in Burma was produced in India. But in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Forces retreated from Mao's army to the mountains of northeast Burma. The CIA helped maintain these troops, and sponsored two invasions of China. During their stay in Burma, the Nationalist Chinese exacted opium quotas from Burma's peasants; failure to pay was punished by the cutting off of fingers, hands, and feet. By the time the Nationalists fled in 1961, Burma had gone from producing about seven tons of opium per year to producing as much as a thousand tons, or about sixty percent of the world's production.[2]

In French-occupied Indochina, meanwhile, the Corsican syndicates were operating the opium trade out of Saigon under the protection of French military intelligence. When France withdrew in 1955, the U.S. inherited France's colonial politics and infrastructure. The U.S. worked with the same peoples -- the Hmong in Laos -- that the French had used. And again, the American Mafia was involved through their Corsican contacts. From Tampa, Florida, Santo Trafficante ran the Marseilles connection in Cuba during the 1950s. In 1968 he visited Saigon to meet with Corsican syndicate leaders. After 1970, Asian heroin began showing up in the U.S.

After the Cuban revolution, Trafficante's Mafia foot soldiers were mainly Cuban exiles.[3] In a 1982 interview, former CIA commando leader Grayston Lynch described what had once been the largest CIA station in the world, located south of Miami from 1961-1964. This station issued orders to 400 case officers and 2,000 exiles, dispersed in "safe houses" from Miami to Tampa. Lynch concedes that after the CIA cut off support, many of these exiles, trained in covert operations and smuggling, turned to narcotics trafficking.[4] Given that the CIA had worked with Trafficante to assassinate Castro in 1961,[5] the agency lacked sufficient ethical intelligence to worry that these Trafficante-associated exiles might pose a criminal problem. They were considered merely a "disposal problem," an institutional nuisance.

At the time all of these events were unfolding, they were secret history, unavailable in books and newspapers. Then one day in 1970, the poet Allen Ginsberg stumbled onto the CIA-heroin connection while sorting his files of clippings. He noticed that when sorted chronologically, U.S. advances into the opium-producing areas of the Golden Triangle were followed, a few months later, by clippings that reported a rise in heroin overdose deaths in American cities. The alternative press fleshed out Ginsberg's insight, and the May 1971 Ramparts magazine featured a cover story on South Vietnam's "Marshal Ky: The Biggest Pusher in the World." The major media ignored everything until Sen. Ernest Gruening, a maverick from Alaska, opened hearings. At that point the Washington Post and NBC News "discovered" this story, but soon buried it. Only the alternative press kept it alive.[6]

South Vietnam was completely corrupted by a heroin trade whose immediate origin was in Laos. The Hmong culture in Laos provided 30,000 men for the CIA's secret Laotian army under General Vang Pao. But in the process, opium production took over Hmong culture; the Hmong grew only enough rice for subsistence. To support the Hmong economy, the CIA's Air America transported raw opium out of the Laotian hills to the labs. At this point the CIA begged off, and let the syndicates and South Vietnamese officials take care of distribution. Double UOGlobe no.4 heroin, produced at a Laotian lab owned by Gen. Ouane Rattikone, became particularly famous. By mid-1971, Army medical officers estimated that fifteen percent of American GIs were addicted.

Veterans of Vietnam and Laos with intelligence connections, men such as Theodore Shackley (former chief of the Miami station), his deputy Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Oliver North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney.

A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and U.S. military intelligence were associated with this bank; William Colby served as its attorney. Nugan Hand collapsed spectacularly in 1980. After three major investigations, Australian officials concluded that the bank had been primarily involved in laundering money for arms and drug traffickers.[7] Apparently the CIA's infamous "disposal problem" -- what to do with those nasty, well-trained former assets -- extends to its top-level former executives and administrators.

Then there is the horrible tale of Afghanistan. Heroin there was also a well-kept secret, at least until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Then the Washington Post was free to "discover" that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA's favorite guerrilla leader, had commanders under him who worked with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency to run heroin labs in southwest Pakistan. "Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.... In 1989, Afghanistan was second only to Burma as a producer of opium, growing 650 tons, nearly all of which was intended for heroin manufacturing, a State Department report said."[8]

When Allen Ginsberg was sorting his clippings about heroin, his discovery of a correlation with CIA activity in the Golden Triangle must have seemed dismaying enough, almost unbelievable. Fortunately for Ginsberg, a proponent of LSD, he had no evidence that the CIA may have also been behind the expansion of LSD distribution within the counterculture. But such evidence later came to light.

Ginsberg, like most of the counterculture, saw LSD as a liberating experience. The drug was nonaddictive, although it could be dangerous in the case of an overdose. A safe dosage, however, was entirely an individual phenomenon, and could not even be objectively established. And it soon became clear that LSD dramatically amplified tendencies that were already present in the individual and the immediate environment. The exact dosage that might have seemed liberating in 1967 might have been debilitating when ingested by the same individual in 1969, a banner year for agents provocateurs and bad vibes.

In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission reported that the CIA had been testing LSD since the 1950s -- only to discover that the drug's effects were too unpredictable to make it a reliable tool for mind control. Still, given what the CIA knew about LSD at this early date, it doesn't seem inconceivable that the CIA may have hoped that greater availability of the powerful drug would undermine the political effectiveness of the student movement and counterculture.

Evidence of the possible strategic use of LSD emerged in 1979, when Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia issued a report on the case of Ronald Stark, who had been arrested in Bologna for drug trafficking in 1975. The magistrate ordered Stark's release on the grounds that he had been working for U.S. intelligence since 1960. From 1969-1974, Stark was a major producer of LSD, with factories first in Paris, then in Belgium and California, and a pipeline into the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the world's largest distributor.

Floridia cited Stark's frequent prison visits from Wendy M. Hansen at the U.S. consulate in Florence, "Dear Ron" letters from Charles C. Adams at the U.S. embassy in London, addressed to Stark's LSD lab in Brussels (these were seized by Italian police after his arrest), and his links with Philip B. Taylor III at the U.S. consulate in Rome. (Taylor is now in Sao Paulo, Brazil.) According to Floridia, Stark had done secret work for the Defense Department from 1960 to 1962, and had received "periodic payments to him from Fort Lee, known to be the site of a CIA office." On his release, Stark was ordered to report in to Italian police twice a week. But within days, Stark had left the country. Bologna police believe that Stark was secretly flown from a NATO air base in Pisa or Vicenza.

In 1984 an Italian parliamentary commission issued a report on domestic terrorism that included a section on Ronald Stark. They concluded that Stark was an adventurer who was used by the CIA, but were unable to determine when the association began. In 1982, Stark was arrested in Holland. Charges were dropped the following year, and Stark was deported to a San Francisco jail, where pending federal charges were dropped by the Justice Department. When Italy requested extradition in 1984, U.S. officials sent a death certificate indicating that Stark had died of a heart attack.

Way back in 1969, Stark first approached the Brotherhood, wowing them with a kilogram of pure LSD (more than they had ever seen), and claiming that he had a new, efficient production method. Stark's lab in France was already a going concern, and the Brotherhood agreed to distribute his product. When Stark shut down this lab in 1971 and opened a better one in Brussels, he boasted that he had done so because of a timely tip from the CIA. In all, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD, enough for 50 million doses. Most of it was sold in the U.S. There's no proof that Stark was anything more than an adventurer and an opportunist. But Carl Oglesby, former national president of Students for a Democratic Society, sums up the Stark phenomenon as follows:

The 1980 cocaine coup in Bolivia was arranged by the Argentine military, which in 1976 seized power in Argentina and proceeded to "disappear" about 11,000 of the country's own citizens. Michael Levine, who was the DEA's country attache to Argentina and Uruguay in 1980, discovered that the high-level Argentine military officers he was trying to bust for trafficking were well-connected in Bolivia, and that the entire bunch were protected by the CIA. Some of the bloodiest coup-makers in Bolivia were recruited by Klaus Barbie, a fugitive Nazi war criminal and long-time CIA asset.[10]

Confirmation of the CIA's role came from testimony taken by the Kerry subcommittee in a closed hearing on July 23, 1987. Leandro Sanchez Reisse was assigned by the Argentine military to set up a money laundering front in Florida in 1977. He said that these fronts ran operations for and with the CIA, including weapons shipments to Argentine personnel in Central America. In 1980, funds from a major Bolivian trafficker were funneled to the Argentine military, which then sent ambulances loaded with weapons to Bolivia. These were used in the 1980 coup engineered by Luis Arce Gomez and Luis Garcia Meza, both of whom were connected to traffickers.[11]

The CIA, claiming that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were sending arms to guerrillas in El Salvador, paid Argentina to provide military training to contras in Central America. This arrangement ended in 1982, when the military government in Argentina lost power after the Falklands debacle. Within several years, however, the contra war developed into a major CIA operation involving Cuban exiles from Miami; former Nicaraguan guardsmen who fled during the 1979 revolution and regrouped in Honduras; and assorted CIA adventurers with drug- and arms-trafficking connections.

Celerino Castillo fought in Vietnam from 1971-1972, where he saw the effects of drugs on U.S. troops. By 1975 he was a Texas cop, later a detective working drug cases. In 1980, Castillo joined the DEA and worked the streets of New York. He worked in Peru in 1984-1985, and Guatemala from 1985-1990. While stationed in Guatemala, Castillo was the DEA agent in charge of anti-drug operations in El Salvador from 1985-1987. During this period, he discovered that Oliver North's contras were running cocaine from El Salvador's Ilopango airport.

Castillo did his best to bust them, but soon learned that the traffickers were protected by the CIA. "By the end of 1988," he writes, "I realized how hopelessly tangled DEA, the CIA, and every other U.S. entity in Central America had become with the criminals. The connections boggled my mind."[12] Feeling his life was in danger, Castillo got out in a hurry in 1990. The DEA, meanwhile, was increasing the pressure with an internal investigation of Castillo. His career was over and he resigned. Lawrence Walsh's office extensively debriefed Castillo, but when Walsh released his massive report in 1993, the narcotics connection was nowhere to be found. The combined House and Senate Iran-contra hearings in 1987 also ignored the drug issue. Instead, investigators granted immunity to Oliver North.

John Kerry's subcommittee, the "Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations," began its investigations in 1987, held hearings in 1988 and 1989, and issued a 144-page report on April 13, 1989.[13] At one point, the subcommittee took testimony from the head of the Honduran DEA office, who described how it was closed down in June 1983, at a time when the CIA station was doubling in size. Honduras was a major transit station for cocaine, thanks to their corrupt military. It was clear to the CIA and Pentagon that the contra effort required the support of Honduras, and that the price for this support was to overlook the cocaine traffic.

"I watched the CIA protect drug traffickers throughout my career as a DEA agent," says Michael Levine. "I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people."[14] Tom Cash, a former top DEA official in Miami, agrees: "When you have those types of political upheavals and foreign policy considerations of the President to start with, and at the same time have a drug prosecution to contend with, drugs are going to be second. It is something we grappled with on a daily basis."[15]

One could, arguably, defend the mainstream press for refusing to follow up on stories as improbable, and characters as fringey, as some of those we've considered here: an iconoclast poet like Ginsberg, a shapeshifter like Stark, a low-level Serpico like Castillo. But the real indictment of the major media on the CIA-drugs question is their inability to follow up on obvious leads occurring in major stories taking place under floodlights in their own backyard.

Consider the case of Oliver North, known associate of drug traffickers. Oliver North's conviction for three felonies (lying, cheating, and stealing) was reversed in 1990 because his case was muddied by the Congressional grant of immunity. This meant that he could run for office, and in 1994 he was nearly elected to the U.S. Senate. North's infamous notebooks, however, may yet return to haunt him.

Ten months after the Kerry subcommittee subpoenaed these notebooks, they still lacked clean, unexpurgated copies. Nevertheless, these notebooks contain dozens of references to contra drug trafficking. In an e-mail message about General Jose Bueso Rosa from Honduras, who was involved in a conspiracy to import 345 kilos of cocaine into Florida, North noted that U.S. officials would "cabal quietly to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence." Even after Panama's Manuel Noriega was exposed in the U.S. press as a drug runner, North met with him because Noriega wanted help to "clean up his image." In exchange, Noriega offered North some helpful anti-Sandinista sabotage.

Or consider the decision by the Post and other major media to throw away a truly sensational story: the official declaration by Costa Rica, Central America's one shining light of democracy, that it considered a number of major U.S. officials to be drug traffickers, and as such was barring them from entering the country. The list here is nothing short of amazing: Oliver North himself, retired air-force major general Richard Secord, Reagan's former national security advisor John Poindexter, former U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, and former CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez.

On July 22, 1989, the Associated Press ran this story, but they were virtually alone; some major media buried this story, and the rest resolutely ignored it. When asked why, Post reporter Walter Pincus gave a revealing response: "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true."[16] (Before he joined the Post in the 1960s, Pincus traveled abroad on a CIA subsidy to spy on student leaders from other countries.[17] Unsurprisingly, Pincus was out in front of the pack of reporters that attacked the recent Mercury News story.)

When the major media turn aside from stories so sensational, and so easy to pursue, it's unlikely to be an accident. And given that stories so high-profile go nowhere, it's not surprising that the same thing happens to countless lower-profile stories that lack immediately-recognizable American names. Space prevents giving even a "bullet" version of many stories that could be adduced here, but consider the following items, at least:

But Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, wrote to the Post and complained, "Your headline says we drew one conclusion, while in fact we reached quite a different one." Rangel's letter ended up buried in the Congressional Record (August 6, 1987), because the Post refused to publish it. Two years later, when the Kerry subcommittee report was released, the Post buried it on a back page, and devoted most of the short article to Republican criticisms of Kerry. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

When our major media behave more irresponsibly than Congress, and frequently only a few members of Congress deserve our support, it's easy to see that we have a problem. The 1980s were a repeat performance of the 1970s, when the stakes were larger. At that time it was a question of organized assassinations and secret wars of aggression. Both Congress and the media were interested, at least initially. But our media establishment took one look into the abyss and decided that investigative journalism was not so profitable after all. Without the support of the media, Congress quickly lost interest.[18]

Is it even necessary to write a conclusion to this tragic but also farcical story? Confronting his outraged fellow citizens in South Central, CIA Director John Deutch thought he was offering a reasonable extenuation when he remarked at one point: "Our case officers deal with bad people, very bad people." But a moment's thought reveals the utter vacuity of this remark. The Cold War is over. For the young, even its memory is fading away. What should fade away now are the rationalizations that once led men like Deutch to justify cutting deals with tinhorn dictators and smack dealers.

Unfortunately, as Deutch's audience knew, the evil these men did lives after them -- on the streets of South Central, and all over our unhappy global village. It's still going on. Why can't our press report it?

1. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), pp. 29-63. This book is an expanded edition of Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

2. David Barsamian, "The Politics of Drugs: An Interview with Alfred McCoy," Z Magazine, January 1991, pp. 64-74.

3. Henrik Krueger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 142-43.

4. Gary Moore, "The exiles who turned to drugs," St. Petersburg Times, 30 May 1982, pp. 1-A, 14-A.

5. Central Intelligence Agency, Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 25 April 1967, pp. 19-20, 25-31.

6. Chip Berlet, "How the Muckrakers Saved America," Alternative Media, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1979), pp. 5-7.

7. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 424 pages; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, pp. 461-78.

8. James Rupert and Steve Coll, "U.S. Declines to Probe Afghan Drug Trade," Washington Post, 13 May 1990, pp. A1, A29.

9. Carl Oglesby, "The Acid Test and How It Failed," The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p. 10. The information on Ronald Stark comes from three sources: Jonathan Marshall, "The Strange Career of Ronald Hadley Stark," Intelligence/Parapolitics, November 1984, pp. 15-18; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 248-51, 279-82, 286-87; Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable and Company, 1991), pp. 308-16.

10. Michael Levine, The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), 472 pages.

11. David Corn, "The CIA and the Cocaine Coup," The Nation, 7 October 1991, p. 404-6.

12. Celerino Castillo III and Dave Harmon, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press -- Sundial, 1994), p. 208.

13. The most comprehensive discussion of the details in this report can be found in Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 279 pages.

14. Geraldo Rivera Show, CNBC-TV, 9 October 1996, with guests Jack Blum, Michael Levine, and Maxine Waters.

15. Warren Richey, "CIA Under Pressure to Divulge Info on Contras," Christian Science Monitor, 20 September 1996, p. 3.

16. "Censored News: Oliver North & Co. Banned from Costa Rica," Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Extra!, October/November 1989, pp. 1, 5. See FAIR's website < http://www.fair.org/fair > for more about major media and the CIA-cocaine story.

17. Walter Pincus, "How I Traveled Abroad On CIA Subsidy," San Jose Mercury, 18 February 1967, p. 14.

18. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 255 pages.

The CIA has always denied it used drug traffickers to raise cash for Ronald Reagan's 1980s war against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. But FBI documents recently released to the OC Weekly show that a former top agency official met throughout that period with Ronald J. Lister, an ex-Laguna Beach cop who claimed to be the CIA's link between the South American cocaine trade, the Nicaraguan contras and LA's most notorious drug trafficker.

The FBI documents, five heavily censored pages released in response to the Weekly's 1997 Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) request to the CIA, concern Lister and William Earl Nelson, a vice president for security with the Irvine-based construction giant Fluor Corp. Nelson's previous job: deputy director of operations for the CIA. Nelson retired from the CIA in 1976 amid heated controversy over its ill-fated forays into Chile and Angola--clandestine operations that Nelson supervised from his office at the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters.

Lister's relationship with the Fluor executive began in 1978. How they met isn't clear, thanks to government censors. But the documents do show that Nelson told FBI agents he met with Lister three to four times per year until 1985 and discussed various business ventures, including one in Central America.

It's unclear from the documents what became of that project--FBI censors blocked out the details, arguing that revealing them might compromise U.S. national security. But independent sources suggest the deal probably involved Lister's mysteriously well-connected security company, Newport Beach-based Pyramid International Security Consultants Inc.

'A BIG CIA CONTACT'

Lister's jump from police work in Laguna Beach--the Mayberry of Orange County--to life as a security advisor in war-torn Central America is just as strange as it sounds. In 1969, he served as a military policeman, interrogating captured North Vietnamese soldiers. Then, after a few years with the Maywood Police Department, Lister joined the Laguna Beach PD, where he worked as a burglary detective.

In 1979, a year before Lister quit the Laguna Beach force and just months after he first met Nelson, he launched Pyramid to carry out private security work.

There's no question that Pyramid was involved in some highly unusual business in Central America. According to a 1998 U.S. Justice Department Inspector General report, the company was investigated by the FBI at least five times between 1983 and 1986. "In September 1983, Lister's company, Pyramid International Security Consultants, was listed as the subject of a neutrality violation investigation involving the sale of weapons to El Salvador and the loan of money from Saudi Arabia to the Salvadoran government," the report states. "Lister was also alleged to be attempting to sell arms to several other countries."

El Salvador circa the early 1980s was not open for business to just anybody. The entire region was wracked by civil wars and coups d'etat; El Salvador's military-led government was engaged in a systematic campaign of torture and murder against anyone branded a communist or subversive. But in a 1996 interview with San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, former Pyramid employee Christopher Moore ( another ex-Laguna Beach cop ) claimed Lister shrugged off the dangers of doing business there. Lister reportedly told Moore he had "a big CIA contact" at an Orange County company and both Pyramid and its employees would be protected while in El Salvador.

"I can't remember his name, but Ron was always running off to meetings with him, supposedly," Moore told Webb. "Ron said the guy was the former deputy director of operations or something, real high up there. All I know is that this supposed contact of his was working at the Fluor Corp. because I had to call Ron out there a couple of times."

Moore said he traveled to El Salvador on Lister's behalf, accompanied by a Spanish-speaking man who said he worked at the Salvadoran consulate in Los Angeles. Once in the capital city of San Salvador, Moore says, he met face to face with Roberto D'Aubuisson, a former Salvadoran army intelligence officer, drug and weapons dealer, and leader of the right-wing ARENA party. But D'Aubuisson's legacy is darker still: he was the architect of El Salvador's paramilitary death squads, a Hitler admirer, and a sociopath reputed to have personally authorized the 1980 murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

"That was probably the highlight of my life at that point," Moore told Webb. "There I was, a reserve police officer who'd only been in the country for a couple of days, and I was sitting in this office in downtown San Salvador across the desk from the man who ran the death squads. He had a gun lying on top of his desk and had these filing cabinets pushed up against the windows of the office so nobody could shoot through them."

The timing of Moore's trip to El Salvador coincides with a 1982 Pyramid contract proposal to provide security to the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense; narcotics detectives found the paperwork in a 1986 raid on Lister's home. The contract, written in Spanish and running more than 30 pages, shows Pyramid boasted the services of numerous ( but unnamed ) former CIA physical security officers and surveillance experts.

Intriguingly, the document suggests that Lister was negotiating directly with Defense Minister General José Guillermo García, linked by El Salvador's Truth Commission to the 1981 massacre of more than 800 villagers in El Mozote. A close ally of D'Aubuisson, García was one of the most powerful members of the right-wing military junta that took control of El Salvador in 1979.

One of Lister's partners in the venture, San Diego SWAT team weapons maker and government supplier Tim Lafrance, told the Weekly in 1997 that Pyramid was a "favored corporation" used by the CIA to help smuggle weapons to the Nicaraguan contras. Lafrance said he traveled to El Salvador with "two giant boxes full of machine guns and ammunition"--goods Lafrance said returned with him at the end of the trip.

"The whole idea was to set up an operation in El Salvador that would allow us to get around U.S. laws and supply the contras with guns," he explained. "The smart way to do this was to find a military base. It's much easier to just build the weapons down there."

While in El Salvador, Lafrance claimed, he manufactured weapons for Nicaragua's CIA-backed rebels known as the contras inside a mass- transit center run by the military. The weapons were airlifted by helicopter to contra training bases in Honduras, on Nicaragua's northern border. Lafrance also asserted that Pyramid's employees were guests at the well-appointed barracks of the elite, U.S.-trained Atlcatl battalion, the unit that carried out the massacre in El Mozote.

The Pyramid security contract offers further evidence of Lister's CIA connections. On its cover page, the contract lists Richard E. Wilker as the firm's "technical director." Wilker is identified in corporate papers as an employee of another Newport Beach company, Intersect Inc. Wilker's current whereabouts are unknown, but two founding members of Intersect--both former CIA agents--told the Weekly they knew Lister.

Although both nervously denied the CIA ever employed Wilker or Lister, the firm's vice president, John Vandewerker, said Wilker once traveled to El Salvador on business and mysteriously had to flee the country. "It was kind of touchy . . . as far as getting out of the country and all that kind of stuff," he said. Vandewerker also said that either Lister or Wilker had once helped him apply for a job with Nelson at Fluor Corp. "For a while, I tried to get a job at Fluor when I stopped working, and I know Rich [Wilker] was trying to sell something to Fluor," he said.

Nelson seemed to be a potential source of employment for many former CIA agents--an irony, given that one of his final acts as a deputy director at the CIA was to recommend the agency terminate full-time jobs for CIA agents who were "marginal performers."

"We owe these people a lot," Nelson wrote then-CIA director George Bush in a 1976 memo. "But not a lifetime job."

Hundreds of CIA agents left the agency's payroll that year, including Vandewerker and Nelson himself, who said he was retiring for personal reasons.

During his FBI interrogation, Nelson claimed Lister had applied for a job with Fluor. "He was never offered a job," states the FBI memo. The next sentence was censored by the FBI, but the memo continues, "Nelson thought Fluor might be able to use his [Lister's] company"--an apparent reference to Pyramid. "Nelson said [Lister] started traveling overseas, Lebanon and Central America, and he always had some scheme that never materialized."

'A DUMB THING'

The Lister-Nelson-D'Aubuisson connection is only one strand of Lister's life story. But the FBI documents also appear to allude to another: Lister's claim that he was simultaneously running cocaine with the support of the CIA.

Nelson told his FBI interrogators that during a March 1985 meeting with Lister, the former Laguna cop begged Nelson for help. "I did a dumb thing because of greed," Lister reportedly told Nelson. What Lister meant is unclear--the next seven lines of the FBI memo are blacked out. But Nelson's response is intact: he told the FBI he informed Lister there was no way the Agency could help him.

Perhaps Lister was talking about the activity that earned him the most money--and ultimately the most trouble--in the 1980s.

In 1982--the same year Lister first traveled to El Salvador for Pyramid--and while meeting regularly with Nelson, Lister hit upon a lucrative business scheme: running cocaine to raise cash to support rebels in neighboring Nicaragua. Despite their close ties to the CIA, the rebels had a problem: their reputation on Capitol Hill. Among many U.S. lawmakers, they were known as terrorists, more likely to murder Nicaraguans than liberate them. The U.S. Congress fought the Reagan administration's requests to fund the contras and then, in 1984, banned any U.S. military aid for the rebels. Two years later, a federal investigation known as Iran-contra revealed that the Reagan administration had illegally sneaked around the ban, selling weapons to Iran for cash it transferred to the Nicaraguan contras.

There was also evidence the contras were selling drugs in the U.S. to finance their operations. Among others, Lister would later claim that he helped in the fund-raising. He hooked up with Danilo Blandon, a drug-dealing Nicaraguan exile then living in Los Angeles. According to voluminous law-enforcement documents, Blandon and Lister established a vast cocaine network throughout California. The network was especially strong in South Central. Blandon would later testify that Lister's job was money laundering and security. Lister kept Blandon well-stocked with surveillance gear and high-tech weapons: Mack 10s, police scanners, Uzis, even grenade launchers. Blandon said he passed the equipment on to his South-Central LA connection, "Freeway" Ricky Ross. Using Lister's gear to avoid police detection, Ross emerged as the region's most notorious cocaine trafficker. He would later recall that one of his favorite entertainments was to use his police scanners to eavesdrop on cops raiding rival drug rings--while he and his buddies counted the cash from their latest deal.

Even as the FBI investigated Lister on weapons export charges, narcotics agents were zeroing in on the Blandon-Lister-Ross network. A separate FBI report from the same period shows that while its agents were interviewing Nelson, they were also investigating Lister's purchase of a Mission Viejo home for $374,000 in cash.

The FBI memo also shows that while the bureau was investigating Lister, Nelson had been coaching him on his upcoming grand-jury testimony. "He [Lister] then told of his meeting with the FBI and that he had been subpoenaed before the grand jury in San Francisco," the FBI memo states. "He told Nelson he was terrified. Nelson said go. . . . [Lister] admitted being stupid and that he had done a dumb thing. Nelson said [Lister] left and then called back after his grand-jury appearance and said he really did well."

Whatever else Lister told Nelson about his testimony is a mystery because the FBI censored the next three lines, again citing national security considerations.

The FBI memo reveals that, seeking to help Lister in his trouble with the FBI, Nelson made telephone calls to at least one other former CIA agent, a strange action assuming the CIA never had any relationship to Lister. "Nelson told [Lister] no one could help him, including the CIA," the memo states. "Nelson told [Lister] he had discussed his problem with another retired CIA agent and that no one could help him until he cleared himself with the FBI. Nelson said he told [Lister] he no longer cared to continue their relationship and he has not heard from him since."

Nelson described Lister as a "blowhard" and a "name dropper who always had a get-rich scheme." He added that Lister "did have some good ideas, such as a laser-sighting device, but could never get it off the ground. [Nelson] knew of no intelligence activities by [Lister]."

That last claim was--and is--clearly disingenuous. First, the source of the claim is a retired CIA official who admitted he spoke with other former agents on Lister's behalf while the latter was being investigated by the FBI. Second, whatever Lister and Nelson were up to in the 1980s, it is important enough to remain classified as "vital to U.S. national security" today, nearly two decades later.

'A MAJOR CENTRAL AMERICAN CARTEL'

Nelson retired from Fluor in 1985. Within a year, Lister was in deep trouble. Although the FBI never prosecuted him for his international arms sales, his drug dealing finally caught up with him in October 1986. After spending months on the case, a multi-agency narcotics unit led by LA County sheriff's detectives raided dozens of houses and apartments belonging to various members of the Blandon-Lister- Ross drug ring--including Lister's mountain retreat in Crestline, which police suspected was a drug warehouse.

Police also raided Lister's Mission Viejo home. They found him there, unshaven, still drinking his morning coffee. Because both of Lister's properties were clean, police suspected he had been tipped off about the raid. Clad only in a bathrobe and looking wild-eyed, Lister boasted that he knew he was being watched by police and claimed that he did business in South America and worked for the CIA.

Inside his house, detectives found what might have seemed evidence to support that assertion: military training films, photos of Lister posing with Nicaraguan contras, an array of sophisticated surveillance gear, a copy of the 1982 Pyramid contract--even his notes listing Nelson and D'Aubuisson as business contacts. All that, but no drugs. Lister wasn't arrested. Just days later, most of the paperwork seized from Lister's home mysteriously disappeared from the LA Sheriff's Department evidence room.

Unperturbed, Lister continued to deal drugs. In 1988, he tried to sell two kilos of cocaine to a prostitute he met at a Newport Beach boat party. The woman turned out to be a Costa Mesa police informant, and Lister ended up behind bars for the first time since he began dealing drugs with the contras. Two kilos was enough to land Lister in prison for years; instead, he walked out of jail after only two days. Having signed a deal with the Orange County district attorney's office, Lister had become a narc.

But his new career as an informant was short-lived. The following year, DEA agents arrested Lister again, this time in connection with a San Diego-area cocaine distribution ring. Two years later, a jury convicted Lister on drug-trafficking charges; he was sentenced to 97 months in prison and 60 months of probation. Lister appealed, asserting that while an informant, he had testified before two federal grand juries about a "major Central American cartel" and his "activities in Central America concerning certain key figures from Nicaragua alleged to have been involved in the Iran-contra scandal."

In establishing grounds for a softer sentence, Lister told the court he had certainly run drugs, but he had also cooperated with the government. He claimed he gave prosecutors thousands of pages of documents and notes regarding his work for the CIA "from 1982 to 1986 and beyond, and I did it in detail, location, activity," he said. "I gave them physical evidence, phone bills, travel tickets, everything possible back from those days--which most people don't keep, but I do keep good records--to assist them in this investigation. They were excited about it."

It's not clear what happened to the notes Lister says he gave investigators or to his testimony about his work with a "major Central American cartel." What is clear is that he put on quite a show. In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department noted, "An FBI special agent was convinced that Lister [and] Blandon . . . were connected to the CIA."

Lister's appeal was successful in erasing a conviction on tax evasion charges. After completing a drug-treatment program, he walked out of prison in 1996, three years early. His whereabouts are unknown, and he has refused repeated offers to share his story with the press. Nelson, Lister's "big CIA contact" at Fluor Corp. in Irvine, died six years ago in Corona del Mar.

Fluor officials refused to comment for this story but have previously told the Weekly the company had no business in El Salvador in the 1980s. That would suggest that Nelson's "Central America" meetings with Lister had nothing to do with Fluor and everything to do with Pyramid--and perhaps Nelson's former employer, the CIA.

Tom Crispell of the CIA's public-affairs office said the agency has already denied any involvement with Lister. "This individual [Nelson] had been retired from the agency for a number of years, and we're not in a position to comment on his private life or conversations he had in his private life," Crispell remarked.

But Crispell's claim runs headfirst into the facts, chief among them: the CIA refused for years to release any documents on Lister and, when it finally did so, released them in heavily redacted form citing national security concerns.

"Now we know that Lister was meeting with Nelson and that the grand- jury investigation was somehow tied into this," responded Gary Webb, who left the Mercury News shortly after his editors backed away from his Dark Alliance series focusing on the CIA-contra-crack connection in May 1997. "What we don't know is how Lister even knew Nelson, why Nelson would continue to meet with [a man dismissed as] a bullshit artist, and why anyone would even consider helping Lister once he cleared himself with the FBI."

The documents are mute on one other, particularly chilling mystery: What kind of top-secret "business" relationship could Nelson, a retired CIA deputy director, possibly have with Lister, a drug- dealing, gun-running "security consultant" and D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads? MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk

MINDFIELD
The CIA and Its Secret Experiments
with Germ Warfare.
America's Great State Secret
by
Gordon Thomas
(Author of Seeds of Fire: China And The Story Behind The Attack On America)

Now published for the first time as an original e-book and for a limited time and quantity, exclusively available to GLOBE-INTEL subscribers at an amazingly low price -
download the free preview and prologue at www.gordonthomas.ie/mindfield.pdf - right-click and choose "Save Target as"
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The CIA & LSD

All the Publisher's Men A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham is on sale again. By Daniel Brandt

Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History

Book Notes:

All the Publisher's Men

A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham is on sale again.
by Daniel Brandt
From The National Reporter, Fall 1987.
Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. By Deborah Davis. National Press, Bethesda MD, 1987, 320 pages, ISBN 0-915765-43-8.

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

by Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich From NameBase NewsLine, No. 16, January-March 1997

The CIA & LSD

All the Publisher's Men A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is on sale again. By Daniel Brandt

Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History

Book Notes:

All the Publisher's Men

A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is on sale again. by Daniel Brandt From The National Reporter, Fall 1987. Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. By Deborah Davis. National Press, Bethesda MD, 1987, 320 pages, ISBN 0-915765-43-8.

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

by Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich From NameBase NewsLine, No. 16, January-March 1997

All the Publisher's Men A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham is on sale again. By Daniel Brandt

A suppressed book about Washington Post publisher
Katharine Graham is on sale again.
by Daniel Brandt
From The National Reporter, Fall 1987.
Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. By Deborah Davis. National Press, Bethesda MD, 1987, 320 pages, ISBN 0-915765-43-8.