THE SEARCH FOR THE "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" THE CIA AND MIND CONTROL John Marks Allen Lane Allen Lane Penguin Books Ltd 17 Grosvenor Gardens London SW1 OBD First published in the U.S.A. by Times Books, a division of Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., and simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd, 1979 First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1979 Copyright <£> John Marks, 1979 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner ISBN 07139 12790 jj Printed in Great Britain by f Thomson Litho Ltd, East Kilbride, Scotland J For Barbara and Daniel AUTHOR'S NOTE This book has grown out of the 16,000 pages of documents that the CIA released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. Without these documents, the best investigative reporting in the world could not have produced a book, and the secrets of CIA mind-control work would have remained buried forever, as the men who knew them had always intended. From the documentary base, I was able to expand my knowledge through interviews and readings in the behavioral sciences. Neverthe- less, the final result is not the whole story of the CIA's attack on the mind. Only a few insiders could have written that, and they choose to remain silent. I have done the best I can to make the book as accurate as possible, but I have been hampered by the refusal of most of the principal characters to be interviewed and by the CIA's destruction in 1973 of many of the key docu- ments. I want to extend special thanks to the congressional sponsors of the Freedom of Information Act. I would like to think that they had my kind of research in mind when they passed into law the idea that information about the government belongs to the people, not to the bureaucrats. I am also grateful to the CIA officials who made what must have been a rather unpleasant decision to release the documents and to those in the Agency who worked on the actual mechanics of release. From my point of view, the system has worked extremely well. I must acknowledge that the system worked almost not at all during the first six months of my three-year Freedom of Infor- matlon Struggle. Then in late 1975, Joseph Petrilloand Timothy Sullivan, two skilled and energetic lawyers with the firm of Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and Kampelman, entered the case. I had the distinct impression that the government attor- neys took me much more seriously when my requests for docu- ments started arriving on stationery with all those prominent partners at the top. An author should not need lawyers to write a book, but I would have had great difficulty without mine. I greatly appreciate their assistance. What an author does need is editors, a publisher, researchers, consultants, and friends, and I have been particularly blessed with good ones. My very dear friend Taylor Branch edited the book, and I continue to be impressed with his great skill in making my ideas and language coherent. Taylor has also served as my agent, and in this capacity, too, he has done me great service. I had a wonderful research team, without which I never could have sifted through the masses of material and run down leads in so many places. I thank them all, and I want to ac- knowledge their contributions. Diane St. Clair was the main- stay of the group. She put together a system for filing and cross- indexing that worked beyond all expectations. (Special thanks to Newsday's Bob Greene, whose suggestions for organizing a large investigation came to us through the auspices of Investi- gative Reporters and Editors, Inc.) Not until a week before the book was finally finished did I fail to find a document which I needed; naturally, it was something I had misfiled myself. Diane also contributed greatly to the Cold War chapter. Rich- ard Sokolow made similar contributions to the Mushroom and Safehouse chapters. His work was solid, and his energy bound- less. Jay Peterzell delved deeply into Dr. Cameron's "depattern- ing" work in Montreal and stayed with it when others might have quit. Jay also did first-rate studies of brainwashing and sensory deprivation. Jim Mintz and Ken Cummins provided excellent assistance in the early research stage. The Center for National Security Studies, under my good friend Robert Borosage, provided physical support and re- search aid, and I would like to express my appreciation. My thanks also to Morton Halperin who continued the support when he became director of the Center. I also appreciated the help of Penny Bevis, Hannah Delaney, Florence Oliver, Aldora Whitman, Nick Fiore, and Monica Andres. AUTHOR'S NOTE My sister, Dr. Patricia Greenfield, did excellent work on (he CIA's interface with academia and on the Personality Assess- ment System. I want to acknowledge her contribution to the book and express my thanks and love. There has been a whole galaxy of people who have provided specialized help, and I would like to thank them all. Jeff Kohan, Eddie Becker, Sam Zuckerman, Matthew Messelson, Julian Robinson, Milton Kline, Marty Lee, M. J. Conklin, Alan Sche- flin, Bonnie Goldstein, Paul Avery, Bill Mills, John Lilly, Hum- phrey Osmond, Julie Haggerty, Patrick Oster, Norman Kempster, Bill Richards, Paul Magnusson, Andy Sommer, Mark Cheshire, Sidney Cohen, Paul Altmeyer, Fred and Elsa Kleiner, Dr. John Cavanagh, and Senator James Abourezk and his staff. I sent drafts of the first ten chapters to many of the people I interviewed (and several who refused to be interviewed). My aim was to have them correct any inaccuracies or point out material taken out of context. The comments of those who re- sponded aided me considerably in preparing the final book. My thanks for their assistance to Albert Hofmann, Telford Taylor, Leo Alexander, Walter Langer, John Stockwell, William Hood, Samuel Thompson, Sidney Cohen, Milton Greenblatt, Gordon Wasson, James Moore, Laurence Hinkle, Charles Osgood, John Gittinger (for Chapter 10 only), and all the others who asked not to be identified. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my pub- lisher, Times Books, and especially to my editor John J. Simon. John, Tom Lipscomb, Roger Jellinek, Gyorgyi Voros, and John Gallagher all believed in this book from the beginning and provided outstanding support. Thanks also go to Judith H. McQuown, who copyedited the manuscript, and Rosalyn T. Badalamenti, Times Books' Production Editor, who oversaw the whole production process. John Marks Washington, D.C. October 26, 1978 CONTENTS PART I ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH 1. WORLD WAR II 3 2. COLD WAR ON THE MIND 21 3. THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A" TREATMENT 34 PART II INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS" 4. LSD 53 5. CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON 73 6. THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES 87 7. MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE 105 PART III SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS 8. BRAINWASHING 125 9. HUMAN ECOLOGY 147 10. THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM 164 11. HYPNOSIS 182 xi xii CONTENTS PART IV CONCLUSIONS 12. THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH 195 NOTES 215 INDEX 231 THE SEARCH FOR THE "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" PART ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. —WILLIAM BLAKE. It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence. —SIR JAMES STEPHENS, 1883. If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind it- self is controllable—what then? —GEORGE ORWELL IN 1984. CHAPTER 1 WORLD WAR II On the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, overlooking the Rhine, lies the worldwide headquarters of the Sandoz drug and chemi- cal empire. There, on the afternoon of April 16, 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann made an extraordinary discovery—by accident. At 37, with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses, Hofmann headed the company's research program to develop marketa- ble drugs out of natural products. He was hard at work in his laboratory that warm April day when a wave of dizziness sud- denly overcame him. The strange sensation was not unpleas- ant, and Hofmann felt almost as though he were drunk. But he became quite restless. His nerves seemed to run off in different directions. The inebriation was unlike anything he had ever known before. Leaving work early, Hofmann managed a wobbly bicycle-ride home. He lay down and closed his eyes, still unable to shake the dizziness. Now the light of day was disagreeably bright. With the external world shut out, his mind raced along. He experienced what he would later de- scribe as "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of ex- traordinary plasticity and vividness. . . . accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors." These visions subsided after a few hours, and Hofmann, ever the inquiring scientist, set out to find what caused them. He presumed he had somehow ingested one of the drugs with which he had been working that day, and his prime suspect was d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, a substance that he himself had first produced in the same lab five years earlier. As 4 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH part of his search for a circulation stimulant, Hofmann had been examining derivatives of ergot, a fungus that attacks rye. Ergot had a mysterious, contradictory reputation. In China and some Arab countries, it was thought to have medicinal powers, but in Europe it was associated with the horrible mal- ady from the Middle Ages called St. Anthony's Fire, which struck periodically like the plague. The disease turned fingers and toes into blackened stumps and led to madness and death. Hofmann guessed that he had absorbed some ergot deriva- tive through his skin, perhaps while changing the filter paper in a suction bottle. To test his theory, he spent three days mak- ing up a fresh batch of LSD. Cautiously he swallowed 250 mi- crograms (less than 1/100,000 of an ounce). Hofmann planned to take more gradually through the day to obtain a result, since no known drug had any effect on the human body in such infinitesimal amounts. He had no way of knowing that because of LSD's potency, he had already taken several times what would later be termed an ordinary dose. Unexpectedly, this first speck of LSD took hold after about 40 minutes, and Hofmann was off on the first self-induced "trip" of modern times.* Hofmann recalls he felt "horrific ... I was afraid. I feared I was becoming crazy. I had the idea I was out of my body. I thought I had died. I did not know how it would finish. If you know you will come back from this very strange world, only then can you enjoy it." Of course, Hofmann had no way of knowing that he would return. While he had quickly recovered from his accidental trip three days earlier, he did not know how much LSD had caused it or whether the present dose was more than his body could detoxify. His mind kept veering off into an unknown dimension, but he was unable to appreciate much beyond his own terror. Less than 200 miles from Hofmann's laboratory, doctors con- nected to the S.S. and Gestapo were doing experiments that led to the testing of mescaline (a drug which has many of the mind-changing qualities of LSD) on prisoners at Dachau. Ger- many's secret policemen had the notion, completely alien to Hofmann, that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring unwilling people under their control. According to research 'While Hofmann specifically used the word "trip" in a 1977 interview to de- scribe his consciousness-altering experience, the word obviously had no such meaning in 1943 and is used here anachronistically.