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George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, ...
Link:
books.google.com › booksNelson W. Aldrich · 2008
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/758989641"The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'
September 9, 2019This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross...My guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MK-Ultra. LSD was just one of the mind-altering drugs that were tested in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture...
KINZER...So MK-Ultra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind. They wanted to be able to have a truth serum that would make prisoners say everything they knew, also an amnesiac that would make people forget what they had done and, most important, a technique or a drug
that would allow the CIA to direct agents to carry out acts like sabotage or assassination and then forget who had ordered them to do it, or even that they'd carried out the actions at all. So MK-Ultra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.
"...GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. How did the CIA find out about LSD?
KINZER: As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-Ultra. Actually, the MK-Ultra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.
Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MK-Ultra, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead,......
GROSS: Now, there's a much darker side to this program because a lot of people who were being experimented on, they were prisoners. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. One of those prisoners was the famous gangster
Whitey Bulger, who was serving time then for hijacking a truck, and he was in the Atlanta Penitentiary. So he actually wrote something describing his experience. Can you give us a summary of what he said?
KINZER: Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia, and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was; essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?
Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. Now, that doctor later died a natural death, so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish. But Bulger was one of many prisoners across America who unwittingly were fed huge doses of LSD, and the reason for this was very simple.
Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. Well, he didn't get too far on No. 2, but he did a lot of work on No. 1 - trying to find out how to destroy the mind of a human being, and that was the purpose of experiments that he carried out in prisons in the United States and at secret detention centers in Europe and East Asia.
GROSS: And he worked with some pretty high-class torturers, too, from one of the Nazi doctors and the chief poisoner from Japan during World War II. How did they end up in his program?
KINZER: One of the most remarkable discoveries that I made in the research for this book is that the CIA mind control project, MK-Ultra, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control. That was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used.
Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Dietrich in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin and was there a difference in how long it took to die if you were a small child or an infant, whether you were an elderly person or whether you were a healthy middle-aged person. The only way to know this would be to have killed all those people. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information.
And actually, one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish, and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century. If they had not emigrated, Sidney Gottlieb might well himself have been brought up in Central Europe, forced into a ghetto, brought to a concentration camp and become the subject of one of these grotesque Nazi medical experiments. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments.
GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. And the Nuremberg Code established that if you are conducting experiments, that the person you are experimenting on needs to give informed consent. And of course, MK-Ultra totally violated the Nuremberg Code, but apparently the U.S. never signed on to that, never adapted that.
KINZER: If the United States had used the Nuremberg Code domestically, Sidney Gottlieb would never have been able to do what he did; there couldn't have been MK-Ultra. What Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the Second World War for doing in concentration camps.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR."
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