| Again, from Marks book, Manchurian Candidate, concerning the use of LSD for mind control, Marks writes: “LSD had an incredibly powerful effect on people, but not in ways the CIA could predict or control,” which is to say that it was unpredictable and therefore not very useful for control for the purposes the CIA wanted to use it for. Just giving the population LSD was never going to accomplish some super-secret aim for mind control. The problem lie in the fact that this “weapon” could be used to free minds just as easily as could be used to control them.” For instance, Marks writes about Sidney Gottlieb, one of the main MK-Ultra directors: “Sid Gottlieb was ready for the operational experiments. He considered LSD to be such a secret substance that he gave it a private code name ("serunim") by which he and his colleagues often referred to the drug, even behind the CIA's heavily guarded doors. In retrospect, it seems more than bizarre that CIA officials—men responsible for the nation's intelligence and alertness when the hot and cold wars against the communists were at their peak—would be sneaking LSD into each other's coffee cups and thereby subjecting themselves to the unknown frontiers of experimental drugs. But these side trips did not seem to change the sense of reality of Gottlieb or of high CIA officials, who took LSD on several occasions. The drug did not transform Gottlieb out of the mind-set of a master scientist-spy, a protégé of Richard Helms in the CIA's inner circle. He never stopped milking his goats at 5:30 every morning.” (59) People like Gottlieb were in it for learning how the US was going to win a psychological war with an enemy. Marks writes: “Sid Gottlieb later testified that the purpose of these programs was "to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means.” Marks writes about Dr. Isbell: “Filled with intense curiosity, Isbell tried out a wide variety of unproven drugs on his subjects. Just as soon as a new batch of scopolamine, rivea seeds, or bufotenine arrived from the CIA or NIMH, he would start testing. His relish for the task occasionally shone through the dull scientific reports. ‘I will write you a letter as soon as I can get the stuff into a man or two," he informed his Agency contact’.” (60) The drugs used or tools prescribed did not matter, and in fact many of them were tested out in MK-Ultra. But we don’t read about the inner circle use of any of these other drugs, only LSD, because LSD was not a bad drug, in the minds of these people. It was not a useful “weapon.” Walter Bowart, the East Village Other Walter Bowart is a counterculture icon. He was founder and editor of the underground newspaper the East Village Other. Through Timothy Leary, Bowart met his second wife, was Peggy Hitchcock, Billy Hitchcock’s sister and heir to the Mellon fortune. These were the financiers of “Millbrook.” As reported in Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of |
LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond: “Peggy Hitchcock was director of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF)'s New York branch, and her brother Billy rented the estate to IFIF (later re-named the Castalia Foundation.” (61) Timothy Leary has long maintained a nonchalant attitude about the CIA’s involvement in the sponsoring of LSD use. In Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control (1978), Bowart maintains Leary stated to him in an interview, “Who would you work for, the Yankees or the Dodgers? I mean, who was I supposed to work for, the KGB?” (62) Leary obviously felt, as many others do, that this was not a harmful act he was engaged in. The CIA is not all bad, furthermore, this act was not “sanctioned” at any high up level, it was a rogue act within the agency, and the release of LSD was not in their interest, as a “bad thing” for society. Continuing from Operation Mind Control: “Leary told ABC Newshack Paul Altmeyer: “The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with this drug (LSD). The fallout from that was that young psychologists (like himself) began taking it themselves and discovering it was an intelligence enhancing consciousness raising experience…” “I give the CIA total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement, counter culture events of the 1960’s,” Leary said. Very insightful are some of Bowert’s own words: “Four months after the first nuclear reaction was created in a pile of uranium ore in Chicago, the psychotropic effects of LSD-25 were discovered by a 37-year old Swiss chemist working at the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel, Switzerland.” Bowert also wrote: “If the government didn’t actually “begin” the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down. It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs.” (63) From Manchurian Candidate again, we read: “CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary, Kesey, and Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men were, and they, along with many of the lesser-known experimental subjects, like Harvard's Ralph Blum, created the climate whereby LSD escaped the government's control and became available by the early sixties on the black market. No one at the Agency apparently foresaw that young Americans would voluntarily take the drug—whether for consciousness expansion or recreational purposes. The MK-Ultra experts were mainly on a control trip, and they proved incapable of gaining insight from their own LSD experiences of how others less fixated on making people do their bidding would react to the drug.” (64) (59) Manchurian, p. 51 (60) Manchurian, p. 45 (61) Operation Mind Control, Walter Bowart, Revised 1994, p. 97-98 (62) Mind Control, p. 76 (63) Mind Control, p. 84 (64) Manchurian, p. 110 |