Nightmare in San Francisco

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?

Operation Midnight Climax: 
How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD

By Troy Hooper Wednesday, Mar 14 2012

 

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.

"I remember that night very clearly, yes I do," he said in a recent interview. "I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. The whole world was against me."

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 have been other reports on the CIA's doping of civilians, but they have mostly dished about activities in New York City. Accounts of what actually occurred in San Francisco have been sparse and sporadic. But newly declassified CIA records, recent interviews, and a personal diary of an operative at Stanford Special Collections shed more light on the breadth of the San Francisco operation.

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

The main man behind the mirror was burly, balding crime-buster George H. White, a Bureau of Narcotics maverick who made headlines breaking up opium and heroin rings in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the U.S. Few knew he doubled as a CIA spook for Uncle Sam. He oversaw the San Francisco program, gleefully dubbing it Operation Midnight Climax.

"[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

How test subjects were chosen by the agents varied. In the case of the Telegraph Hill safe house, working girls would pick up johns in North Beach bars and restaurants, then bring them back for experimentation and observation. Other times, White and his wife would host dinner parties where guests might get dosed with a hallucinogenic cocktail without their knowledge. And seemingly random San Franciscans like Kelley were victimized for no other reason than their paths crossed with White and his men at the wrong time. White wrote in his diary how he slipped acid to unsuspecting civilians at local beaches, and in city bars and restaurants.

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

CIA operatives also admitted to experimenting with LSD themselves. In a 1970 letter to UC Berkeley psychiatry professor Harvey Powelson, White wrote how he "served as a guinea pig from time to time. [Note: Powelson also worked with Timothy Leary, who was the Director of the Kaiser Foundation Psychological Research from 1952 to 1958.] My personal observation was that the effect of all of these drugs was essentially the same, except for the degree or extent of the effect. THCA was more potent than marihuana [sic] and LSD more potent than THCA. So far as I was concerned, 'clear thinking' was non-existent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times I was having a 'mind-expanding' experience but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session."

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.

The Corporate State of Fascism

Pug Winokur

Part One of this saga served as an introduction to Pug Winokur, how he rose from being the son of a Jewish pawnbroker to being mentored by Harvard's "whiz kids" at the Pentagon.
 A generation after Robert McNamara and his boss, Charles Bates (Tex) Thornton at the close of WWII had impressed the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense with their ability to organize statistics in a way that made numbers understandable to the average military moron, Pug was learning the same subject at their alma mater. Of course, money--to an accountant--is just another number, one which can be organized or manipulated in the same way as kill ratios in a cold war against communism. Pug's boss at the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, was described by David Talbot in Mother Jones magazine in 1984, as:

the cost-control wizard who thought the war could be run like a Ford assembly line: body counts, kill ratios, bombing raids. And when he saw that it wasn't adding up, that it did not compute, he repeatedly lied—to Congress, to the press, to the American public.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD:

FROM HARVARD TO ENRON

by Linda Minor © 2002

PART TWO

Harvard in the Decade of the Sixties

After finishing his Ph.D at Harvard in applied mathematics (decision and control theory) in 1967 during the peak of the Vietnam draft, Pug ran out of reasons to seek deferment from the military and entered the Army while one of Harvard's own whiz kids, Robert Strange McNamara, was Secretary of Defense. It is not unfeasible to suspect that Harvard had much to gain by the ongoing war in the Vietnam region, given the fact that some of its largest donors during the previous century had acquired their first surplus capital during the days following Great Britain's Opium Wars with China to force that country to allow Indian opium to be sold to the Chinese market, in violation of China's prohibitions against the importation. The hidden history was there for all researchers to discover.


It is also not unfeasible to imagine that those running Harvard's endowment in 1960, the year alumnus John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House, anticipated that Harvard's star might be on the rise; alas, such hopes, if they in fact existed, were soon dashed by the discovery he was not anyone's pawn. While hosting these men at a black-tie White House stag dinner,

President Kennedy had made it quite clear in his speech that May of 1963--with his wry, if not cynical, wit--that he held their vaunted positions within the vestibule of power in no great esteem:

McNamara's Band

At any rate, President Kennedy was a mere memory by the time Pug exited Harvard's ivied halls and found himself ensconsed within Robert McNamara's Pentagon, as cataloged in Part One. President Kennedy was assassinated by persons unknown--definitely not by Lee Harvey Oswald--in late 1963. Only a few months before his death, JFK appointed Harvard friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., as the United States ambassador to South Vietnam, at a

"critical period in the evolution of American policy there. During the first of Lodge's two embassies in Saigon, a U.S. government-approved coup overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam and another U.S.-inspired coup brought to power a Vietnamese general trained in America.... [Anne E. Blair's book, Lodge in Vietnam], focused on Lodge's ambassadorship from 1963 to June 1964, examining the constraints and possibilities inherent in the Vietnam situation at that time and revealing the role Lodge played in shaping President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 decision to commit U.S. troops to the war."

James W. Douglass in his book, JFK and the Unspeakable, shows, according to the review by James DiEugenio, "how men like Henry Cabot Lodge ... did not just obstruct, but actually subverted President Kennedy's wishes in Saigon." Douglass gives an example of how single-minded JFK was on pursuing a neutralization policy in Laos by excerpting a phone call the president had with his point man on the 1962 Laos negotiations, Averell Harriman:

"Did you understand?  I want a negotiated settlement in Laos.  I don't want to put troops in."

Secretary McNamara

More than anyone else it was Robert McNamara who helped LBJ subvert JFK's expressed desire not to send troops to Laos, even though the Irish Catholic was trusted implicitly by the martyred President who had appointed him, according to conclusions reached by Peter Janney in Mary's Mosaic.  Janney based his conclusions on conversation set out in a 1998 book called One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali.

LBJ announced his decision not to run for reelection March 31, 1968--five days before Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated and sixty-six days before Robert F. Kennedy would be killed while campaigning in California. Befor that date McNamara had already announced his retirement in order to assume the presidency of the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), where he would remain until 1981. 

Pug Winokur remained at Defense, working for Averell Harriman's friend from Truman days, Clark Clifford, an attorney from Truman's home turf, Missouri, whom LBJ named to replace McNamara. Yale grad Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union for both FDR and Truman, also served as one of the non-Harvard elite surrounding Kennedy, who sent him a telegram, dripping with arrogant humor which only the upper class finds witty, making reference to the above-mentioned Harvard dinner hosted by the White House in May 1963:

Morgen Witzel in The Encyclopedia of the History of American Management, wrote:

Excerpts from page 365

Tex Thornton

1968 Horrors

It will be recalled from Part One that after leaving the Army Pug helped to create the Inner City Fund in 1969 with two other Defense Department analysts. This first attempt at setting up a business occurred only a few months after the horrendous last page of the 1968 calendar had been turned, and the country was still in shock from the events of that year.

In March the Kerner Commission -- President Johnson's "own carefully selected commission on racial disorder ... came out with a dire warning that we will have to spend about as much [money] at home as we are in Vietnam or else experience guerrilla fighting here as well as in Saigon, and end up another South Africa, divided, separate and unequal,"  as by columnist Drew Pearson eloquently phrased the situation the week the report was first issued.

Pearson emphasized the budget constraints of attempting to ameliorate the possibility of massive race riots in the inner cities if money was not poured into improving conditions in the ghettos, while war was at its peak in Vietnam, hinting that the Texas President was putting pressure on "his man" on the commission to convince the others to back off their dire warnings:

The only real holdout — though he also signed [the report] — was Charles B. Thorton, an old Texas friend of LBJ's. It was significant that the first cold water poured on the report came from another Texan, the President's good friend, Rep. George Mahon, of Lubbock, Tex., who also is worried about cutting domestic spending....

Thornton, as head of the far-flung Litton Industries, had a somewhat  embarrassing conflict between money for war and money for big cities. He is chairman of an industrial complex which includes Aero Service, Airtron Inc., Clifton Precision, Ingalls Shipbuilding, Kester Solder Co., Kimball Systems,
Litton Precision Products, Monroe Calculating Machine, and Protexray.

He even has a contract with the military dictatorship of Greece to bring industry to Greece on a 10 per cent commission basis. Litton's Industrial complex drew down $180,100,000 from the taxpayers in defense contracts during fiscal 1967, plus another $18,396,000 in research grants. Although voicing objections during the commission sessions, Thornton finally went along with its vigorous warning to the nation. Since publication, however, he's been talking to friends privately, including his friend LBJ.

During this time Pug was still in the Army stationed in the Pentagon. In 1969 he left to set up a "venture capital fund" to start small business operations and train minority entrepreneurs. By the time he left in 1974, the business would be transitioning into one which acted as a consultant to big business donors who wanted to get tax breaks for aiding in President Nixon's new policies with regard to curing the problems of minority businesses, into a corporation that began acquiring other corporate entities.

After his marriage to Deanne Howard (a program analyst for the National Endowment for the Humanities) in March 1971, Pug sought employment in California, where his wife grew up; he found a job there in 1974, working for Pacific Holding Corporation, a company which had recently acquired a private real estate sales and development group in Los Angeles owned by descendants of James Polk McCarthy. It too was beginning to change, strangely enough, the very year Pug Winokur arrived on the scene. We'll save that for Part Three.

Pug Winokur Is Now History

The collapse of Enron occurred in October 2001, one month after the towers fell on 9/11. It's been more than ten years now, and we still don't know where the Enron money went. But all those years ago there were many researchers attempting to find out. One of them was Linda Minor, who went about the search in a unique way--by digging into the background of one of Enron's directors, a man named Herbert Simon Winokur, Jr., who somehow had acquired the moniker "Pug."  This man who seemed to come from nowhere to become a bigwig at the Harvard Corporation was so intriguing to her because of the behind-the-scenes role he played in the life of one of the researcher's best friends, Catherine Austin Fitts. The two women set out to discover who this man was and what made him tick. Their dream of finding where the money went did not become a reality.

Nevertheless, as a result of their research, which was seen by many thousands of internet readers, Pug Winokur is now history. 


Recently a friend asked if I would republish the Linda Minor's series of articles written ten years ago.  With a new introduction and some revisions from the author, here it is:

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD:

FROM HARVARD TO ENRON

by Linda Minor © 2002

PART ONE                                    

Who is left at Enron?

In the last few months, almost all the directors of Enron have resigned with one very notable exception--Herbert Simon "Pug"Winokur, Jr.--a man in the shadows whose name may not have made an impression on most people who read only the headlines. Why is he still around, and where did he come from? If we hope to discover where the Enron money went, this man is a good place to start.

Winokur, top row, second from right, with other Enron board members in Houston, Texas

Introductory

This series of articles is dedicated to Catherine Austin Fitts, without whose encouragement I would never have attempted the task of writing for internet publication. I had met Catherine online as a member of  a “conspiracy theory research list” (CTRL) or its spinoff, “CIA Drugs” list, set up by Kris Millegan, whose other members included Daniel Hopsicker, DavidGuyatt, Mike Ruppert, Alex Constantine and many other people who were interested in doing research to discover how our government really works. By learning the truth, we hoped to change the course our country had been following for decades.

I had a hope at that time that, just as Dorothy and her companions in the Wizard of Oz had done, we too would follow a yellow brick road to its termination point, where a wizard would be revealed--pulling all the strings behind a curtain. I saw my role as helping to construct that road, constructed of many yellow bricks of information. The task was somewhat akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle, that when pieced together would show us the real world and how it worked. I hoped that other researchers would be inspired to join in the search for information, each one laying their own bricks to help us reach our destination.

As we look back, we take pride in seeing ten years' worth of construction of that yellow brick road, but the Emerald City still lies before us. There's more work yet to be done.

Linda Minor

Follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City.

 

Google Prison

Because Pug Winokur--whom Catherine believed was a key operative in the process by which her business, Hamilton Securities Group, suffered a takedown by certain Democrats in the Clinton administration--still remained at Enron to the bitter end, we determined he played an essential part in its collapse. We knew nothing of Mr. Winokur at that time, but resolved find out all about it. The truth we discovered would effectively become his “google prison.” Any internet search of his name would reveal all his good or evil deeds, making them apparent not only to us, but to anyone else who desired to know what he might be up to. Transparency was the only tool that could lead to accountability.

Catherine’s approach was what she called a “data dump.” Mine was to build a historical timeline--finding a point of beginning and working forward to the present. In this way I hoped to understand what motivated him in terms of dollars and cents by following his career through a context of where he had worked, who financed his businesses, and who he was making money for; it's how I "follow the money" in my research.

Pug Winokur’s family

Order of Cloud and Banne

Pug was born in 1943 in Columbus, Ga. (where Fort Benning is located), while his father (married to Marjorie Lipman in 1942) was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, attaining the rank of Major during his 1942-45 enlistment. He was awarded the Order of the Cloud and Banner (China), indicating his involvement in the China Burma India Theatre. The military decoration Major Winokur received was an honor presented from the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Taiwan when the Red Chinese took over China. There were more than 30 of these decorations, for example, awarded to the Flying Tigers of Clare Chennault.

The American troops in the China-Burma-India Theater were commanded by General Joseph Stilwell, who was the Deputy Allied Commander under Lord Mountbatten of Great Britain—the last viceroy of the British colonial empire in India, who was then assigned to Burma. There have been numerous books written about the involvement of these groups in opium smuggling, shown in this slideshow:

With this military background, according to information in Who's Who, Pug’s father returned to his interrupted career in consumer finance--first at Federal Loan Co. and also to Rettews Money Loan beginning in 1958, and Executive Consumer Discount in 1967--all in Philadelphia. These work relationships ended in 1974, followed by his short association with George S. May International in Park Ridge, Illinois, the same city, coincidentally, where Hillary Rodham grew up. In 1975 Winokur, Sr. began a management consulting firm in Wayne, Pa.

The family was of the Jewish religion, and Pug’s father, treasurer of a pawnbrokers’ association, belonged to B’Nai Brith as well as to an association involved with Jewish employment. B’Nai Brith, a Jewish fraternal organization, was the sponsor of the formation of the Anti-DefamationLeague, the seed money of which was put up by Burton Joseph, whose family was involved with the I.S. Joseph Company in Minnesota. Burton Joseph was very closely involved with Meshulam Riklis, whose background will be further explored below.

Meshulam Riklis

Pug has [in 2002] a sister named Lisbeth Cload, married to Nigel Cload, a Mercedes car dealer in Allendale, N.J. Lisbeth is an attorney at McElroy, Deutsch & Mulvaney, LLP in Morristown, New Jersey after spending 11 years at Orbe, Nugent and Darcy. She was a 1969 graduate of Boston University, studied at the University of Lyons (France), and received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1986.

Harvard and Clark Clifford

Pug himself went to Harvard, where he received three degrees: A.B. '65 ('64), A.M. '65, and Ph.D. '67. His doctoral degree is in applied mathematics (decision and control theory). His first job out of Harvard was with the U.S. Army, assigned to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. That was at the end of Robert S. McNamara’s seven years in that job. McNamara left the office in March 1968 to head the World Bank, with Clark Clifford filling out Lyndon Johnson’s term at Defense.

Sixteen years prior to the JFK assassination, Clark Clifford, working for President Truman, wrote the National Security Act of 1947 (creating the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department). At that time he also advised Truman to recognize the State of Israel, being created in 1948--a move violently opposed by Secretary of State George Marshall. Clifford’s advice about Israel’s recognition was allegedly influenced by Jewish contributions to Truman’s fund-raising efforts, which Clifford headed.

Nineteen years after Kennedy’s murder (1982) Clifford and his law partner (Robert Altman) would secure a banking license for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to operate through First American Bancshares of Georgia; Clifford had been representing the foreign investors in BCCI since 1978, when he was also a big fund-raiser for Jimmy Carter.

Pug's First Business--ICF

It is not known whether any contact between Winokur and Clark Clifford—his boss in the Defense Department for only 10 months—continued after 1969, when both men left the government. But when Nixon took office that January, Pug and two other Defense Department analysts did start a "private consulting firm" in Washington, D.C. called Inner City Fund with a black figurehead named Clarence D. “Lucky” Lester, a former Tuskegee airman, as president--ostensibly to promote minority entrepreneurship. Lester was a military science instructor at Howard University while still in the military, retiring as a colonel in 1969. Col. Lester was then assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the same time the Inner City Fund was created. (See Obituary 20 March 1986 Washington Post)

Col. Lucky Lester

Pug remained at ICF during Richard Nixon’s first term and into the second before Watergate's culmination. However, ICF never had any volume of work until after Pug moved on. Normally, we would expect him to have sold his interest in the business to his successors, possibly taking a promissory note secured by preferred stock in the company. It would therefore have been to his advantage to ensure that the company did well even after he left in 1974. He may have even helped to throw money its way in the form of consulting contracts, with such revenues increasing his own stock's value. But it was not a public company, so its records were not open to our perusal, but we can get a hint of how the Inner City Fund was evolving by taking a quick look at its executives.

Winokur's replacement at ICF, James O. Edwards, joined the consulting firm in 1974, when ICF had only $300,000 in annual revenue; by 1982 the revenue had increased to $14.3 million, due primarily to services to the government on energy and environmental issues. As Chairman of American Capital and Research (ACR),  Edwards had worked in the Office of Management and Budget (formerly called the Bureau of the Budget) and was a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. As we shall see, his tenure at OMB would have coincided with some of Pug's associates in California.

ICF in 1975 hired Richard Gordon Darman with degrees from Harvard in 1964 and 1967, having worked in Nixon’s administration as an adviser to Elliott Richardson until he resigned in the wake of the Saturday night massacre in 1973. He would, however, reappear in every Republican administration until his death, ascending as high as (here it is again) Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George H.W. Bush.

Just before ICF began its huge transformation from a services company to a consulting firm, Pug had married a California woman, Deanne Lynn Howard, who had come to work in Washington, D.C. as a program analyst at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NEH was set up in 1965 after President Lyndon Johnson apparently realized that his assassinated predecessor John Kennedy had appointed a close friend, William Walton, Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, to assume a covert role in making a back channel contact with Nikita Kruschev of the Soviet Union. Citing David Talbot's book, Brothers, Peter Janney reveals in his own book, Mary's Mosaic, that within days of the assassination of JFK,

Bobby and Jackie [Kennedy] asked their close friend to quickly reschedule his artistic mission to Russia. They wanted him to deliver a special, secret message to Georgi Bolshakov, formerly a KGB agent under journalistic cover in Washington, who the Kennedys had come to rely upon when they needed to communicate with Khrushchev directly during critical moments. Indeed, Bolshakov had once been referred to by Newsweek as the "Russian New Frontiersman" because he had become so close to Bobby....Bobby and Jackie knew that through Bolshakov their message to the Soviets would be directly communicated to Nikita Khrushchev. They wanted "the Russian who they felt best understood John Kennedy to know their personal opinions of the changes in the U.S. government since the assassination."

 After passage of a federal statute setting up the NEH in 1965, President Johnson named former president of Brown University, Barnaby C. Keeney, to be its first chairman. We learn from Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana:

In 1978 it was revealed that Keeney had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was president of Brown. He admitted that he had advised the CIA in matters such as “setting up covert funding operations,” adding in explanation, “I suppose nowadays it is improper to attempt to serve your country ... but then I felt I was doing what I should.”

In 1962 Keeney set up the Human Ecology Fund, which Alex Constantine describes in Virtual Government as "the financial hub of MK-ULTRA."

So we have to wonder what Deanne Howard was engaged in while employed at this ostensibly charitable agency of the government at the time she married Pug. What exactly does a program analyst do?

Pug and Deanne Howard Winokur