The Cold War Experiments
Source: U.S News and World Report The Cold War Experiments Radiation tests were only one small part of a vast
research program that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs.
On June 1, 1951, top military and intelligence officials
of the United States, Canada and Great Britain, alarmed by the
frightening reports of communist success at ``intervention
in the individual mind,'' summoned a small group of eminent
psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in
Montreal. The Soviets had gotten Hungary's Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty,
an outspoken anti-communist, to confess to espionage, and they also
seemed to be able to indoctrinate political enemies and even control
the thoughts of entire populations. The researchers were convinced
that the communists' success must be the fruit of some mysterious
breakthroughs. By the following September, U.S. government scientists,
spurred on by reports that
American prisoners of war were being brainwashed in North Korea, were
proposing an urgent, top-secret research program on behavior
modification. Drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, lobotomy -- all were to
be studied as part of a vast U.S. effort to close the mind-control
gap.
New revelations that government cold war experiments
exposed thousands of Americans to radiation have prompted fresh
congressional inquiries, including a hearing last
week on tests conducted on retarded children in Massachusetts. a
Department of Energy hot line set to to handle calls from possible
subjects of the tests has been swamped. But the radiation experiments
are only one facet of a vast cold war research program that used
thousands of Americans as guinea pigs.
From the end of world War II well in to the 1970s, the
Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department, the
military services, the CIA and other agencies used prisoners, drug
addicts, mental patients, college students, soldiers, even bar
patrons, in a vast range of government-run experiments to test the
effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense
electric shocks and prolonged ``sensory deprivation.'' Some of the
human guinea pigs knew what they were getting into;
many others did not even know they were being experimented on. But in
the life-and-death struggle with communism, America could not afford
to leave any scientific avenue unexplored.
With the cold war safely over, energy Secretary Hazel
O'Leary has ordered the declassification of millions of
pages of documents on the radiation experiments, and the
administration is now considering compensating the hundreds of
subjects of these odd and sometimes gruesome atomic tests. But the
government has long ignored thousands of other cold war victims,
rebuffing their requests for compensation and refusing to admit its
responsibility for injuries they suffered. And the Clinton
administration shows no sign of softening that hard line. ``We're not
looking for drugs,'' says cabinet secretary Christine
Varney. ``At least initially, we need to keep our focus limited to
human radiation.''
In Clinton's court. Now, the only hope for thousands who
were injured or who were experimented on without their informed
consent is that President Clinton or Congress will
take action to compensate the forgotten casualties of the cold war.
Continued secrecy and legal roadblocks erected by the government have
made it virtually impossible for victims of these cold war human
experiments to sue the government successfully, legal experts say.
Despite the administration's reluctance, Congress may be
moving to seek justice for all the government's cold war
victims. ``It's not just radiation we're talking about,'' says
Democratic Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, a former Marine and astronaut who
is holding hearings on the subject this week. ``Any place government
experimenting caused a problem we should make every effort to notify
the people and follow up. We ought to set up some sort of review and
compensation for those who were really hurt.''
Many of the stories of people whose lives were destroyed
by mind-altering drugs, electroshock ``treatments'' and other military
and CIA experiments involving toxic chemicals or
behavior modification have been known for almost 20 years. But U.S.
News has discovered that only a handful were ever compensated -- or
even told what was done to them. ``There has essentially been no
legitimate followup, despite the CIA's promise to track down the
victims and see what happened to them,'' says Alan Scheflin, a
professor at Santa Clara University Law School and an authority on
cold war mind control research. ``It's just one of the many broken
promises.'' A CIA spokesman last week said the agency is searching its
files for radiation tests but has no plans to revisit other human
experimentation.
MKULTRA. Most victims have never been informed by the
government of the nature of the experiments they were
subjected to or, in some cases, even fact that they were subjects. In
a 1977 hearing, then CIA director Stansfield Turner said he found the
experiments ``abhorrent'' and promised that the CIA would find and
notify the people used in the tests. Turner last week insisted that
``they found everyone they possibly could find.'' But internal memos
and depositions taken from CIA officials in a lawsuit against the
agency in the 1980s reveal that of the hundreds of experimental
subjects used in the CIA's mind-control program, code-named MKULTRA,
only 14 were ever notified and only one was compensated -- for
$15,000.
The 14 had all been given LSD surreptitiously by CIA
agents in San Francisco in an attempt to test the drug in an
``operationally realistic'' setting. One of the victims, U.S. News
discovered, was a San Francisco nightclub singer, Ruth Kelley, now
deceased. In the early 1960s, according to a deposition from a CIA
official who was assigned in the 1980s to track down MKULTRA victims,
LSD was slipped into Kelley's drink just before her act at a club
called The Black Sheep. The agents who had drugged her ``felt the LSD
definitely took some effect during her act,'' testified Frank
Laubinger, the official in charge of the notification program. One
agent went to the bar the next day and reported that she was fine,
though another recalled that she had to be hospitalized.
Most of the MKULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 on
orders of then CIA Director Richard Helms, and the records that remain
do not contain the names of human subjects used in most of the tests.
But they do clearly suggest that
hundreds of people were subjected to experiments funded by the CIA and
carried out at universities, prisons, mental hospitals, and drug
rehabilitation centers. Even so, according to Laubinger's 1983
deposition, ``it was decided that there were no subjects that required
notification other than those in the [San Francisco] project,'' and
the CIA made no effort to search university records or conduct
personal interviews to find other victims. Admiral Turner, in his 1983
deposition, conceded that ``a disappointingly small number'' were
notified but defended the agency's continuing refusal to declassify
the names of the
researchers and universities involved. ``I don't think that would have
been necessarily the best way,'' Turner said. ``Not in the litigious
society we live in.'' In 1985, the agency successfully appealed to the
Supreme court to block release of that information.
One of the grisliest CIA-funded experiments -- and one
of only a few suits that have led to successful lawsuits --
involved the work of a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron. In the
1950s, Cameron developed a method to treat psychotics using what he
called ``depatterning'' and ``psychic driving.'' According to a grant
application he submitted in 1957 to the Society for the Investigation
of Human Ecology, a CIA-funded front set up to support
behavior-control research, the procedure consisted of ``breaking down
of ongoing patterns of the patient's
behavior by means of a particularly intensive electroshocks
(depatterning)'' -- and in some cases, with repeated doses of LSD.
This was followed with ``intensive repetition (16 hours a day for six
or seven days)'' of a tape-recorded message, during which time ``the
patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.'' Cameron's application
proposed trying a variety of drugs, including the paralytic curare, as
part of a new technique of ``inactivating the patient.''
The 56-day sleep. The analogy to brainwashing was
obvious to the CIA, which provided a $60,000 grant through the
human ecology society. Nine of Cameron's former patients, who had
sought treatment for depression, alcoholism and other problems at the
Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University, where Cameron was a
director, filed a lawsuit against the CIA in 1979. One patient, Rita
Zimmerman, was ``depatterned'' with 30 electroshock sessions followed
by 56 days of drug-induced sleep. It left her incontinent; others
suffered permanent brain damage, lost their jobs or otherwise
deteriorated. The case, Orlikow v. U.S., was
settled in 1988 for $750,000. (Cameron died in 1967.)
A more typical experience of those seeking recompense is
that of Air Force officer Lloyd Gamble, who volunteered in 1957 to
take part in a test at the Army Chemical Warfare Laboratories in
Edgewood, Md. He told U.S. News that he was informed he would be
testing gas masks and protective gear.
Instead, he learned in 1975, he and 1,000 other soldiers were given
LSD. ``If they had told me of the risks, I never would have done it,''
he says now. ``It was outrageous.'' He says after the test he was
simply ``turned loose to drive from Aberdeen to Delaware'' while under
the influence of LSD. ``I didn't even remember having been there.''
Gamble began suffering blackouts, periods of deep
depression, acute anxiety and violent behavior. He attempted suicide
in 1960, lost his top-secret security clearance and finally took early
retirement in 1968. When he belatedly learned he had been given LSD,
he sought recompense. The Justice Department rejected his request
because the statute of limitations had expired; the Veterans'
Administration denied disability payments, saying there was no
evidence of permanent injury.
The Defense Department says Gamble signed a
``volunteer's participation agreement'' and that he received two LSD
doses. Gamble and others were told that ``they would receive a
chemical compound, the effects of which would be similar to those of
being intoxicated by alcoholic beverages.'' Democratic Rep. Leslie
Byrne of Virginia is sponsoring a bill that seeks $253,488 for Gamble;
DOD opposes the bill, saying there is ``insufficient factual basis''
for compensation. Such ``private bills'' usually are difficult to pass
in the face of executive branch opposition.
Unreasonable men? Other cases filed by prisoners or
soldiers who were given a variety of drugs have been dismissed by
judges who have ruled that although the subjects did not learn until
the 1970s exactly what had been done to them, the side effects and
flashbacks they experienced immediately after the tests should have
prompted ``a reasonable man to seek legal advice'' at the time.
``The failure to notify and promptly compensate the
people who were victimized by these cold war excesses is
inexcusable,'' argues James Turner, one of the lawyers in the Orlikow
case. But he says the courts and the agencies now have made it
virtually impossible for a victim to succeed in a legal claim.
``Records are gone, key witnesses have died, people have moved; in the
drug-testing cases, people are damaged in other ways, which undermines
their credibility.''
The justifications offered for these tests cover
everything from cloak-and-dagger schemes to discredit foreign
politicians to training military personnel. The Army exposed as many
as 3,000 soldiers to BZ, a powerful hallucinogen then under
development as a chemical weapon. The drug attacks the nervous system,
causing dizziness, vomiting, and immobility. Thousands more also
participated in the Army's Medical Volunteer Program, testing nerve
gas, vaccines and antidotes.
Talkative. The earliest behavior-control experiments
were part of a 1947 Navy project called Operation CHATTER, which was
seeking ``speech-inducing drugs'' for use in
interrogating ``enemy or subversive personnel.'' The project was
eventually abandoned because the drugs ``had such a bitter taste it
was not possible to keep the human subjects from knowing'' they had
been drugged.
But by 1952, undaunted by such setbacks, secret
psychological research was booming. ``One of the problems we had all
the way along was the ingrained belief on the part of [CIA] agents
that the Soviets were 10 feet tall, that there were huge programs
going on in the Soviet Union to influence behavior,'' John Gittinger,
a CIA psychologist who oversaw the Human Ecology society's operations,
told U.S. News.
A classified 1952 study by the U.S. government's
Psychological Strategy Board laid out an entire agenda for
behavior-control research. Calling communist brainwashing ``a serious
threat to mankind,'' scientists urged that drugs, electric shock and
other techniques be examined in ``clinical studies ... done in a
remote situation.'' The report even mused about the potential of
lobotomy, arguing that ``if it were possible to perform such a
procedure on members of the Politburo, the U.S.S.R. would no longer be
a problem to us,'' though it also noted that the ``detectability'' of
the surgical operation made its use problematic.
Although there is no evidence that lobotomy experiments
were ever performed, many other bizarre and intrusive
procedures were. In 1955, the Army supported research at Tulane
University in which mental patients had electrodes implanted in their
brains to measure the LSD and other drugs. In other experiments,
volunteers were kept in sensory-deprivation chambers for as long as
131 hours and bombarded with white noise and taped messages until they
began hallucinating. The goal: to see if they could be ``converted''
to new beliefs.
As recently as 1972, U.S. News found, the Air Force was
supporting research by Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, who is now dead, in which
psychiatric patients at the University of Missouri Institute of
Psychiatry and the University of Minnesota Hospital -- including an
18-year-old girl who subsequently went into a catatonic state for
three days -- were given LSD to study ``ego strength.''
Gittinger concedes that some of the research was quite
naive. ``We were trying to learn about subliminal perception and all
the silly things people were believing in at that time,'' he says. One
study even tried to see if extrasensory perception could be developed
by ``training'' subjects with electric shocks when they got the wrong
answer. But ``most of it was exciting and interesting and stimulating,
and quite necessary as it happens, during that period of time,''
Gittinger insists.
Another former CIA official, Sidney Gottlieb, who
directed the MKULTRA behavior-control program almost from its
inception, refused to discuss his work when a U.S. News reporter
visited him last week at his home. He said the CIA was only trying to
encourage basic work in behavioral science. But he added that after
his retirement in 1973, he went back to school, practiced for 19 years
as a speech pathologist and now works with AIDS and cancer patients at
a hospice. He said he has devoted the years since he left the CIA
``trying to get on the side of the angels instead of the devils.''
January 24, 1994.
By Stephen Budiansky, Erica E. Goode and Ted Gest