The history of the Central Intelligence Agency's role with man-made drugs is long and ugly. One of the most revolting aspects as been the manner in which so-called professionals armed with the cloak of government secrecy have dallied and dabbled with innocent people's lives, all under the lame cover of national security.What a joke it would be, had they not destroyed so many people. Now, another shooting makes us wonder whether the same thing continues unabated. Is there a hidden connection between James E. Holmes and some secret research project funded by the CIA?
A Spiked Drink in 1957
It's been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid. He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office
Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and
swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and
green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly.
Ritchie's body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors
around him.
The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his
office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to
compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other
marshals didn't want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the
probation officers across the hall and how they didn't like him, either.
Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.
He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in
girlfriend. It didn't go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an
argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco
and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn't handle the
situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar
where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few
more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to
Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his
life.
Victim of MK-ULTRA
Tries to Rob Bank?
Now in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency
operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on
unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to
1964.
After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned
to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service
revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue.
"I decided if they want to get rid of me, I'll help them. I'll just
go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar," Ritchie
recalls. "I thought, 'I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an
airline ticket back to New York, and I'll turn myself in.' But I was
unsuccessful."
Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into
the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon
and soda. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver
at the bartender and demanded money. Before joining the marshals,
Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. But the cop had suddenly become the robber.
It was over in a flash. A waitress came up behind him and asked
Ritchie what he was doing. When Ritchie turned around, a patron hit him
over the head and knocked him unconscious. He awoke to a pair of police
officers standing over him. Ritchie says he had expected to get caught or killed.
The judge went easy on him and Ritchie avoided prison. He resigned
from the Marshals Service, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery,
paid a $500 fine, and was sentenced to five years' probation.
Ritchie's story is certainly peculiar, but not unique. Other San
Franciscans were unsuspecting participants in a strange research program
in which the government effectively broke the law in an effort to fight
the Cold War.
George White's Personal Diary
Seymour Hersh first exposed MK-ULTRA in a New York Times
article in 1974 that documented CIA illegalities, including the use of
its own citizens as guinea pigs in games of war and espionage. John Marks expertly chronicled more of the operation in his 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. |
| View from 225 Chestnut |
There were at least three CIA safe houses in the Bay Area where
experiments went on. Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph
Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965. The L-shaped apartment boasted
sweeping waterfront views, and was just a short trip up the hill from
North Beach's rowdy saloons. Inside, prostitutes paid by the government
to lure clients to the apartment served up acid-laced cocktails to
unsuspecting johns, while martini-swilling secret agents observed their
every move from behind a two-way mirror. Recording devices were
installed, some disguised as electrical outlets.
To get the guys in the mood, the walls were adorned with photographs
of tortured women in bondage and provocative posters from French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The agents grew fascinated with the kinky sex games that played out
between the johns and the hookers. The two-way mirror in the bedroom
gave the agents a close-up view of all the action.
 |
| George White |
"[White] was a real hard head," said Ritchie, who regularly ran into
him in courtrooms and law enforcement offices in downtown San Francisco.
"All of his agents were pretty much afraid to do anything without his
full approval. White would turn on them, physically. He was a big tough
guy."
American chemist Sidney Gottlieb
was the brains behind White's brawn. It was the height of McCarthyism
in the early '50s, and government intelligence leaders, claiming fear of
communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from
prisoners of war held in Korea, and brainwash spies into changing
allegiances. What better way to examine the effects of LSD than to dose
unsuspecting citizens in New York City and San Francisco?
The mind-bending laboratory on Telegraph Hill was called "the pad" in
White's leather- bound journals. White's widow donated 10 boxes of his personal effects to Foothill College in Los Altos Hills after he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975. Now warehoused at Stanford, the journals, letters, and photographs provide a window into the mischievous life of a secret agent during the Cold War.
 |
| 1955 S.F. directory; White at 2454 Vallejo, 2 miles from safehouse |
Truth Serums in the OSS
Before White joined the narcotics bureau, he worked in the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), a World War II-era intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. In
a quest for truth serums, White and other OSS agents slipped
concentrated tetrahydro-cannabinol acetate (THCA) into the food and
cigarettes of suspected communists, conscientious objectors, and
mobsters in the 1940s. The experience wasn't a prerequisite for working
in MK-ULTRA, but it helped.
Dr. James Hamilton, a Stanford Medical School
psychiatrist, knew White from their OSS days. He was among the small
group of researchers who had clearance to the pad. Gottlieb visited,
too, but Operation Midnight Climax had no regular medical supervision.
And that became problematic. The first CIA brothel that White and
Gottlieb ran in New York City had already gone awry. U.S. biological
warfare specialist Frank Olson
either jumped or was pushed from a 10th-floor hotel window in 1953,
nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. When a CIA chemist, who was
sharing the hotel room with Olson, met with police, they found White's
initials and the address of a Greenwich Village
safe house on a piece of paper in his pocket. The New York City
operation was temporarily suspended when police investigated Olson's
death, and restarted later.
 |
| Dr. Sidney Gottlieb |
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb in Charge
White, a native Californian and former San Francisco newspaper reporter, yearned to return home. In 1955, Gottlieb let him. Aside from Gottlieb's scattershot visits, White, now a "CIA
consultant," had free rein over the S.F. safe houses. Ritchie says that
White's right-hand man, Ike Feldman, ran around dressed like "a hot-shot
drug dealer." Ritchie adds: "He tried to act like Al Capone."
The pad quickly became something akin to a frat house for spies.
"Eight-martini lunches" were enjoyed regularly, White noted in his
journal. And on some occasions he watched the dubious research unfold
while sitting on a portable toilet a friend donated to him. It was his
"observational post."
What went on in the pad, apparently stayed in the pad.
 |
| 1955 San Francisco directory |
Dr. John Erskine
has lived next door [at 233 Chestnut] to the location since 1954. "I had a feeling that
things went on there that were none of my business. It wasn't overt.
People weren't screaming out the windows," says Erskine, standing
outside the acid house.
The property is undergoing renovation. Just a few months ago, a
construction crew pulled microphones, wires, and recording instruments
out of the walls.
Ruth Kelley was a singer at a San Francisco club called The Black Sheep. Her
unexpected trip into another dimension happened to her onstage. Young, attractive Kelley caught White's eye, though she rejected his
advances. White or one of his men eventually dosed her with LSD just
before she went onstage, according to a deposition of Frank Laubinger,
a CIA official who led a program in the 1980s that made contact with
victims of MK-ULTRA.
"The LSD definitely took some effect during her
act." Kelley reportedly went to the hospital, but was fine ... once the
effects of the drug, that she didn't know she was on, wore off.
 |
| North Beach |
Fun, Fun, Fun...until
There were two other Bay Area safe houses where the CIA researched
LSD and other chemicals: Room 49 of the Plantation Inn at Lombard and
Webster streets [only .6 of a mile from White's home], and 261 Green [Greene?] St. in Mill Valley [north of San Francisco in Marin County], not far from Sausalito.
***
 |
| Dr. Timothy Leary |
By all accounts, White enjoyed the undercover work he was doing.
Perhaps a little too much. He would write in a 1971 letter to Gottlieb,
"Of course 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 and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!"
Few inside the CIA even knew about MK-ULTRA and its sub-projects. The domestic experiments escaped scrutiny for a decade, until President John F. Kennedy, smarting from the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, forced CIA director Allen Dulles,
who first signed off on MK-ULTRA, to resign. The agency's activities in
San Francisco were so secret that not even the CIA's new director, John McCone, was informed of them when he took over in 1963.
But incoming CIA Inspector General John Earman
didn't sugarcoat what he learned.
"The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical," he wrote, questioning whether the clandestine activities were even legal. "Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion, as well as stimulate offensive and defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services."
Earman noted numerous civilians grew ill from the effects of the
psychoactive drugs they were secretly slipped, and it would be
embarrassing if doctors were to discover what the government had been
doing. He recommended closing the safe houses. Yet high-ranking
intelligence officers called for the continuance of Midnight Climax.
"While I share your uneasiness and distaste for any program which tends
to intrude upon an individual's private and legal prerogatives, I
believe it is necessary that the Agency maintain a central role in this
activity," wrote Richard Helms, then the CIA's deputy director of plans.
Testing of unwitting individuals was suspended in 1964, at least
officially. Still, the CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York
City continued to operate for a year and a half longer. Scrutiny of the
program intensified at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and subsequently
the Bay Area safe houses shut down in 1965. New York City's operation
stopped in 1966. Intelligence officers conceded that the drug-testing
exposed the agency to a serious "moral problem."
Fire Marshal at Stinson Beach
The fun was over. White retired from law enforcement in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach [near Mill Valley]. He wrote a swashbuckling autobiography titled A Diet of Danger
that crowed about his Bureau of Narcotics adventures. It conspicuously
left out Operation Midnight Climax. Publishers rejected the book in
1971.
Lawmakers were incredulous when they learned of the CIA's secret plots. But specifics at the time were scant.
Helms, one of MK-ULTRA's original architects, succeeded McCone as CIA
director in 1966. Before Helms and Gottlieb resigned in the early
1970s, they ordered all of the project's paperwork destroyed. A massive
paper purge occurred in 1973, just as Washington found itself in the
throes of the Watergate scandal. In an attempt to clean house, that same year new CIA Director James Schlesinger
ordered agency employees to inform him of illegal government
activities. That's when he learned of Olson's fatal plunge in New York
City, and the acid tests.
It didn't take long before details leaked to Hersh. The investigative journalist's groundbreaking article in the New York Times
exposed the CIA's vast illegal domestic surveillance programs. The
government had been screening U.S. mail, wiretapping journalists'
phones, and plotting assassinations. And, oh yeah, it had also been
dosing hundreds of civilians with LSD, as well as significant military
populations, in the name of defense. Americans demanded answers.
Donald Rumsfeld, then chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, and Rumsfeld's deputy, Dick Cheney,
wanted Hersh prosecuted for revealing government secrets. But Ford
didn't heed their advice. He appointed a committee chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller
to investigate the intelligence improprieties. U.S. Sen. Frank Church
also headed a congressional investigation of CIA malfeasance in 1974,
and Sen. Edward Kennedy held hearings on MK-ULTRA in the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.
While most of the CIA's records detailing the top-secret programs
were destroyed, bureaucratic bumbling spared a cache of 20,000 documents
from the shredder. In 1977, Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which provided him with many redacted versions of the surviving MK-ULTRA records.
Then, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Gottlieb answered
questions before the Senate. To gain "firsthand knowledge," he said,
agents "extensively" experimented with LSD on themselves before giving
it to the public.
Kennedy tried to put it in perspective. "There is a light side to it,
but there is also an enormously serious side," he said. "There are
perhaps any number of Americans who are walking around today on the East
Coast or West Coast who were given drugs, with all the kinds of
physical and psychological damage that can be caused."
CIA Grants to Universities, Etc.
CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner testified that 44 colleges and universities, 15 research foundations and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals and clinics, and three penal institutions across the country were used for MK-ULTRA research that included LSD, painkillers, and other drugs.
Using a front organization, Gottlieb distributed millions of dollars
in drug research grants to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other
institutions, which only later learned the money's source. Stanford
acknowledged its faculty received close to $40,000 over eight years from
the CIA's secret program. It had hosted several studies on the effects
of drugs on interrogations, and also spent money developing miniature
lie detectors and other spy equipment.
Lawmakers denounced the CIA's covert domestic activities, but
ultimately no disciplinary action was taken. Gottlieb and the others
behind the acid experiments were not prosecuted or punished. But the innocent victims of these programs had to be notified, the
Senate subcommittee concluded. Tracking down victims proved difficult,
since so little of that data survived the CIA's paper-shredding.
A victim's taskforce was established, but despite estimates of
hundreds, maybe thousands of people exposed to the CIA's mind-control
program, records show only 14 of them were notified.
Dr. Olson's family sued the government, claiming the scientist's
death was not actually connected to the LSD he took. They claimed a
government operative pushed him out of the window so he wouldn't divulge
information about a classified CIA interrogation program concerning the
use of biological weapons in the Korean War. Olson's family ultimately
accepted an out-of-court settlement from the U.S. government for
$750,000. There have been other lawsuits, including a class-action from
alleged victims of the CIA's programs in Canada, and other reparations
have been paid.
The Vietnam
Veterans of America filed suit in San Francisco federal court in 2009,
claiming at least 7,800 soldiers were, without their knowledge, given as
many as 400 types of drugs and chemicals, including sarin,
amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, and LSD by the Army and CIA.
Just last month, the group filed a petition in San Francisco seeking
class-action status. The suit does not ask for money but instead seeks
to overturn a 1950 Supreme Court decision that effectively insulates the
government from liability under the Federal Torts Claims Act. The vets
also want to discover the substances and doses they received, and get
care for any resulting health conditions.
George White at Same Christmas Party!
In spring 1999, Ritchie opened a copy of the San Jose Mercury News and read Gottlieb's obituary. Then it hit him."I didn't know that name at all. I'd never heard of him," Ritchie said. "But what caught my eye were LSD and George White. George White was a supervising narcotics officer in 1957 in San Francisco and I knew him. When I read the article, it said he was working with the CIA testing mind-control drugs with the help of drug-addicted prostitutes. I put it together. He was drugging people without their knowledge. I thought, 'My God, how could he have done that to me?'"
Ritchie began his own research into the CIA's drugging activity, and
grew convinced the CIA dosed him. Ritchie brought a lawsuit against the
United States and its agents, claiming his attempted armed robbery at
the bar was set in motion when agents slipped LSD into his drink at the
Christmas party. White's journal puts him in the same place as Ritchie the day the
dosing and robbery occurred. An entry in White's leather-bound book for
Dec. 20, 1957, reads: "Xmas party Fed bldg Press Room."
Ritchie's complaint leaned heavily on the deposition of Feldman, the
former agent under White. Feldman's testimony was at times
incriminating, contradictory, and combative. "I didn't do any follow-up,
period, because it wasn't a very good thing to go and say 'How do you
feel today?' You don't give them a tip. You just back away and let them
worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie," Feldman said in a deposition.
A district court ruled in 2005 that Ritchie failed to prove that an
LSD-induced psychotic disorder triggered his failed robbery attempt. The
judge called it "a troubling case and that if indeed true [Ritchie] has
paid a terrible price in the name of national security." Noting that
federal agents in San Francisco were doing "things that were
reprehensible," the judge concluded "it was not clear by a preponderance
of the evidence that Mr. Ritchie was administered LSD. It may be what
happened. But we don't operate on hunches." To this day, Ritchie says he
is "absolutely shocked" he lost the case.
Now house-bound and suffering from emphysema and other ailments — all
of which he attributes to old age — Ritchie isn't bitter about his
long, strange trip. He simply chalks it up to the government doing the
best it could during difficult times.
"They thought they were helping the country," Ritchie said.
No comments:
Post a Comment