The Manchurian Veterans
http://www.epluribusmedia.org/features/2006/20061115_manchurian_veterns_p1.html
by Jeff Huber
19 November 2006
Stories of American service members returning from the Middle East
wars with physical and emotional scars have focused national attention
on the plight of the country's combat veterans. But still overlooked
are G.I.s who suffered severe damage from service to their country as
human test experiments. The tale of the uniformed guinea pigs who
participated in America's Cold War mind control program is, perhaps,
one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of the country that
became the world's "sole superpower."
The Mind Control Gap
The United States Army established its chemical experimentation
facility at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland in 1917. But it wasn't
until 1954 that Edgewood became a tem****ary duty station for G.I.s who
volunteered to participate in Project MK-ULTRA and more than 150 other
projects involved in the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control
program.
In the early 1950s, re****ts of Chinese and Russian brainwa****ng
techniques used on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean Conflict
had reached American intelligence operatives. In 1953, eager to close
the perceived gap in mind control capabilities during the heart of the
"red scare" era, then CIA director Allen Dulles launched a mind
control program of his own.
To head the project, Dulles named Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, a shadowy
figure whose personality reflected the bizarre and horrifying nature
of the mind control program itself.
The Sorcerer
Born in 1918, Sidney Gottlieb was a clubfoot and a stutterer who
earned a PhD in chemistry from the Chicago Institute of Technology. He
became chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's experimental
interrogation programs in 1953.
By some accounts, Gottlieb often took LSD, locking himself in his
office and taking extensive notes of his psychedelic
experiences. Gottlieb is also alleged to have been behind plots to
disable or assassinate foreign heads of state, including Fidel Castro,
by covertly exposing them to deadly or psychoactive drugs.
Much of what is "known" about MK-ULTRA is anecdotal. In 1972, Gottlieb
destroyed most of his clinical records by order of Richard Nixon's CIA
director Richard Helms. Before he died, Gottlieb testified before
Congress that the CIA had administered LSD to at least 40 unwitting
subjects who included prison inmates and brothel patrons. Other
sources suggest that the real number of unwitting subjects was
exponentially higher. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, authors of Acid
Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, state that CIA
operatives tested LSD by agreeing among themselves to:
...slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his
turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a ... colleague
would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which
usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders
of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members,
but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other
Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was
fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational
hazard among CIA operatives.... The Office of Security felt that
[MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such
a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's
back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few
[MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA
Christmas office party ... a Security memo writer... concluded
indignantly and unequivocally that he did "not recommend testing in
the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office
parties."
Experiments with consenting subjects were, if anything, even more
sadistic. One group of volunteers was given LSD for 77 consecutive
days. Other volunteers were given LSD and locked in deprivation
chambers. Some were recorded in therapy sessions while under the
influence of LSD, then forced to listen to tape loops of their most
degrading moments while confined in straight jackets and again dosed
with the psychedelic drug.
Another re****ted experiment involved injecting subjects with
barbiturates in one arm and amphetamines in another. That method was
eventually discarded because it often killed the subjects.
The Sorcery Unveiled
MK-ULTRA first came to public attention in a 1974 New York Times
article. That launched two government investigations into CIA
activities, the congressional Church Committee and presidential
Rockefeller Commission probes. In an address to the Church Committee,
Senator Edward Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and
institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and
experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting
citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and
foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to
"unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of
Doctor Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself
acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents
doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Doctor Frank Olson was an Army scientist who worked for Sidney
Gottlieb on the MK-ULTRA project. In 1953, he was given a dose of LSD
without his knowledge, and shortly afterwards committed "suicide" by
throwing himself out of a thirteenth floor hotel window. As a result
of the '75 Rockefeller Commission hearings, Congress awarded $750,000
in compensation to Olson's widow. President Gerald Ford invited
Mrs. Olson and her eldest son Eric to the White House and made a
personal apology to them.
Years later, 54 year old clinical psychologist Eric Olson questioned
the government's version of his father's death, and managed to get a
court order to have Frank Olson's body exhumed and re-examined.
Afterwards, Eric told interviewers that when his father was buried
"... the coffin had been sealed. They said he had been so badly
mutilated in the fall that it wouldn't be right for the family to see
him. But when we opened the casket a lifetime later, I knew Daddy at
once. He had been embalmed and his face was unmarked and
untroubled. He hadn't been hurt the way they said he had."
The new autopsy confirmed Eric's initial impressions. Conducted by
James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at George
Wa****ngton University, it found no evidence of the facial cuts that
the original autopsy stated had been caused by Frank Olson's cra****ng
through the window glass. Starr's investigation did find, however, a
blood clot on the left side of Olson's skull that had not been noted
in the original forensic investigation. Starr believed that the clot
had been caused by a heavy blow, probably from a hammer, before
Olson's fall from the window. Starr concluded that his forensic
discoveries were "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide."
They Were Expendable
In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense Charles
E. Wilson authorized scientific experimentation on active duty
military members in a do***ent now infamously known as the Wilson
Memo. Between 1954 and 1975, more than seven thousand Army and Air
Force personnel are thought to have participated in Sidney Gottlieb's
mind control program. Many of these veterans have sought compensation
for the physical and psychological damage they suffered at the hands
of Gottlieb and his assistants, but to date the government has balked
at honoring their claims.
James B. Stanley [subscription required] joined the Army at age 15. By
the age of 20, he was one of the Army's youngest master sergeants. In
1958, while a volunteer at Edgewood, Stanley was given a clear liquid
to drink. No one told him the liquid contained a psychoactive drug,
nor did anyone explain to him the hallucinations he experienced, or
the nature of the emotional problems he consequently suffered that
disrupted his life, leading to a demotion two years after his Edgewood
service and to his divorce in 1970. ''I couldn't get along with my
family or co-workers or anyone else,'' Stanley later said in an
interview with the New York Times [subscription required]. "Even my
children were afraid of me, and I'd always been close to my kids. I
was afraid to go see the Army doctors for fear I would be thrown out
of the Army."
Only in 1975 -- the year of the Church and Rockefeller Commission
hearings -- did Stanley figure out what had happened to him when he
received a letter from the Army asking him to participate in a
follow-up study of former LSD experiment subjects.
Unlike other MK-ULTRA veterans who tried to seek redress through the
judicial system, Stanley managed to push his case all the way to the
Supreme Court, largely because of his attorney's argument that his
covert LSD dosing violated protocols of the 1947 Nuremberg Trials that
condemned human medical experiments conducted by Nazi scientists.
Unfortunately for Stanley, a five to four decision ruled that he was
barred from suing the government for injuries incurred "incident to
service." Nonetheless, two justices delivered scathing condemnations
of MK-ULTRA practices. Justice William Brennan wrote:
The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as
a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented
with human subjects.... In defiance of this principle, military
intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and
biological materials, including LSD.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor added:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the
involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have
occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United
States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi
officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World
War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed
to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the voluntary
consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
They Are Expendable Still
Many of Sidney Gottlieb's test subjects have gone the way of Gottlieb
himself -- he died in 1999. Many of them still survive, though, and
like Master Sergeant Stanley, they are struggling to gain veterans'
benefits for themselves and their dependents.
Subsequent to the 1975 Church and Rockefeller commissions' findings,
President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order that prohibited
"experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the
informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party,
of each such human subject." Not until 1985, however, did the
Department of Defense commission the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to do
a comprehensive health study of veterans who had been subjected to
chemical tests related to MK-ULTRA and other human experiment
programs. The re****t was titled Possible Long-Term Health Effects of
Short-Term Exposure To Chemical Agents, Volume 3: Final Re****t:
Current Health Status of Test Subjects (1985). The study objectives,
as stated in the re****t, seemed sufficiently straightforward and
comprehensive.
Long-term health effects of interest were excess cancer and adverse
mental, neurological, hepatic [liver related], and reproductive
effects that might have resulted from experimental exposure of test
subjects to chemicals administered at Edgewood. (Page viii.)
But the re****t also contained a compendium of apathetic disclaimers:
Considerable discussion and controversy attended the design and
analysis problems. Of particular concern [was] the use of a specially
constructed but untested questionnaire ...
... Several subjects of concern were not included in the final
questionnaire, such as probes for specific symptoms, suicide attempts,
diseases, treatments, detailed history of later job-related exposure,
accidents ...
... Briefly stated, it was felt at the outset by the panel reviewing
psychochemicals that data obtainable from a survey might add little to
our understanding of the long-term health effects of chemicals
tested. (Page 83.)
In other words, the research team admitted from the outset that the
study was too flawed to achieve its stated objectives.
The plight of MK-ULTRA veterans went back off the radar until 1991
when DAV, the magazine of the Disabled American Veterans, ran a story
on them and other test veterans.1
Since the tests were conducted under a veil of secrecy, records of
many participants are unaccounted for, destroyed or lost. Since the
burden of proof in making a compensation claim is on the veteran, many
of those who participated in chemical tests find themselves trapped in
a "Catch 22" corner, unable to obtain from the government the files
the government is requesting of them.
The DAV article also stated that while the Veterans Administration had
created files on radiation and Agent Orange test victims, no such file
had been created for the MK-ULTRA mind control subjects.
In 1993, yet another IOM re****t titled "Veterans at Risk" concluded
that the chemical mind control experiments conducted on active duty
members "demonstrated a well-ingrained pattern of abuse and neglect."
Upon release of the re****t, the Department of Defense pledged to help
the Veterans Administration locate the MK-ULTRA veterans and other
former military personnel who had been subjected to human
experimentation.
Time Passed
In 2001, President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen
awarded yet another contract to the IOM to locate the Edgewood
veterans and other subjects of DoD chemical testing. In a 2003 article
published in Military Medicine2, the IOM re****ted that it had
conducted a survey of 4,022 Edgewood veterans. But this re****t focused
on subjects of Sarin and other chemical weapon experiments, not
specifically on the MK-ULTRA mind control program subjects.
Further confusing the issue was a 2004 Government Accounting Office
(GAO) re****t titled Chemical and Biological Defense: DOD Needs to
Continue to Collect and Provide Information on Tests and Potentially
Exposed Personnel. The re****t covered veteran test subjects in a
chemical and biological test program known as "Project 112," but also
addressed a Department of Defense mandate to investigate all other
human test projects conducted since World War II. The re****t stated
that Army do***ents identified over seven thousand Army and Air Force
personnel who participated in these "other tests" conducted at
Edgewood and elsewhere, but didn't specifically break out which of
these test veterans were involved in Gottlieb's mind control
experiments. It also said the GAO had concluded that, "the scope and
the magnitude of tests involving human subjects was not available, and
the exact number of human subjects might never be known." (Page 20.)
The re****t also said, "DOD anticipates that it might take up to 5
years to complete the investigation of tests outside Project 112."
(Page 19.) That means it will be 2009 at best before the DOD can
determine which Edgewood veterans were involved in Gottlieb's mind
control experiments, what damage they suffered as a result of their
participation in those tests, and what veterans' benefits they're
entitled to.
News of mind control experiments on the troops is the kind of news
that military recruiters, under pressure to fill uniforms during a
time of an unpopular and seemingly unending war, don't likely want
their potential enlistees to hear about.
1 DAV Magazine, "Two Decades of Deception," October, 1991, pp. 8-13.
2 William F. Page, "Long Term Health Effects of Exposure to Sarin and
other Anticholinesterase Chemical Warfare Agents," Military Medicine,
168, 3:239, 2003, pp. 239-245.
About the Author
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) was operations officer of a
naval air wing and an aircraft carrier, and he commanded an E-2C
Hawkeye aircraft squadron. His satires and analyses of military and
foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Jane's
Fighting ****ps, and other print periodicals. Some of his essays have
been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where he
received a master's degree in national security studies in 1995. Jeff
is a contributing editor with ePluribus Media and his commentaries on
the current strategic situation are featured at Daily Kos, Booman
Tribune, My Left Wing and Pen and Sword.
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