Culture - New declassified info about CIA's experiments with LSD

[Expat98]

NPR had a radio report today about some pages of internal CIA reports that have been newly released by the CIA today. Among other things, they give details on experiments in the 1970s with LSD and other drugs.

Below is the text from the NPR website, and here is a link to the audio.

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From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=11417938

NPR.org, June 26, 2007 · Details of a CIA plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and of the spy agency's wiretapping campaign against U.S. journalists, civil rights activists and anti-Vietnam war protesters were among hundreds of pages of internal reports released Tuesday.


The recently declassified documents also outline the Central Intelligence Agency's experiments in the 1970s with LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unwitting subjects and its secret break-ins of the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.


The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three different investigative panels — President Ford's Rockefeller Commission, the Senate's Church committee and the House's Pike committee.


The panels spent years investigating and amplifying the documents, and their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages. The scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them.


The documents released Tuesday were one of the products of the Watergate scandal. Then-CIA Director James Schlesinger was angered to read in the newspapers that the CIA had provided support to ex-CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, who were convicted in the Watergate break-in. Hunt had worked for a secret "plumbers unit" in Richard Nixon's White House. The unit originally was tasked to investigate and end leaks of classified information, but ultimately engaged in a wide range of misconduct.


In May 1973, Schlesinger ordered "all senior operating officials of this agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency." The law establishing the CIA barred it from conducting spying inside the United States.


"These are the top CIA officers all going into the confessional and saying, `Forgive me father, for I have sinned,' " said Thomas Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive, which had requested release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.


After Schlesinger became Secretary of Defense, his successor, William Colby reported the contents to the Justice Department, referring to them as the "skeletons." But another name quickly caught on and stuck: the "family jewels."


They first spilled into public view on Dec. 22, 1974, with a story by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times on the CIA's spying against antiwar activists and other dissidents inside this country. The agency assembled files on some 10,000 people.


The "family jewels" documents followed the release in recent weeks of other CIA papers of historical interest.


According to an agency analysis labeled "top secret" that was completed four months after Josef Stalin's death in March 1953, U.S. intelligence was uncertain as to when exactly the Soviet leader had died and whether or not he had been murdered.


It said the decision in Moscow to hold a joint meeting of the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet after the leader's death was almost unprecedented, "strongly suggested that the leaders in this moment of crisis had moved swiftly to show their unity and to gird themselves for any battle that might be coming from inside or out."


The joint meeting was part of a larger reorganization that was completed before Stalin was even laid to rest. The move was apparently aimed at showing the Soviet people and the rest of the world that Moscow would not waver despite the Stalin's death.


The brutal dictator had been elevated to virtual godhood by decades of propaganda and hagiography, despite being responsible for the deaths of millions, particularly in the 1930s.
"It seems to be the consensus of most Western students of Soviet affairs and propaganda that the deification of Stalin was so all-pervasive in scope, so penetrating, as to have had a profound affect on the Russian people, particularly the uneducated," the CIA documents said.


"Stalin was portrayed as a god, who of course could do no wrong. His goodness was unbounded," it said.


Stalin led his country to victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, a conflict that claimed the lives of 20 million of his people. The Cold War with the West began almost immediately after the war's end.


The documents noted that information under the system Stalin had created was so tightly controlled that no one knew for sure the details of his death.


"It is impossible to determine whether Stalin had been dead for some time, whether he was murdered, or whether he died in the way the medical bulletins said he did," the papers said.
He was reported to have died about three days after suffering a stroke. He was succeeded by Georgy Malenkov, a party leader and close collaborator of Stalin's.


The analysis was contained in a large group of documents, some of which were released by the CIA last week. They covered the period from 1953-73 and were prepared by specialists in the communist world, including those in Russia and China.

[Expat98]

Well, unfortunately I just read another report from the Washington Post which says that the documents don't provide much detail about the LSD experiments. Sounds like it is probably not worth the time to look up the actual reports for info about those experiments.

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

[top]CIA Involved in Testing Dangerous Drugs, Documents Show

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; 6:48 PM

The CIA was eager to examine the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to modify the behavior of targeted individuals, and so it asked commercial drug manufacturers to pass along samples of medicines rejected for commercial sale "because of unfavorable side effects," according to an undated memorandum included in dozens of CIA documents released today.

CIA scientists tested some of the drugs on monkeys and mice, the memo said. Drugs that showed promise, it said, "were then tested at Edgewood, using volunteer members of the Armed Forces." This appears to be a reference to the Army's laboratory north of Baltimore now called the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. It doesn't discuss the reactions of those human subjects.

The three-paragraph memo reports that Carl Duckett, a senior CIA technologist, had stated the testing program was intended not to find new techniques to be used offensively, but rather was an effort to be able to detect if such drugs were employed by others.

Duckett "emphasizes that the program was considered as defensive, in the sense that we would be able to recognize certain behavior if similar materials were used against Americans," it states. Duckett, who was the CIA's deputy director for science and technology, retired from the CIA in 1977 and died in 1992.

Another document, dated May 8, 1973, mentions the existence of a 1963 account of agency scientists administering mind- or personality-altering drugs on "unwitting subjects"--that is, testing hallucinogens such as LSD on people without their knowledge. The document doesn't provide details.

One of the most notorious such cases involved the death of Frank Olson, a CIA germ warfare expert who died in a fall from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after a CIA doctor spiked Olson's after-dinner drink with LSD. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford invited Olson's family to the White House to apologize; the government also paid the family $750,000.

Stanley Gottlieb, the chief of the CIA's technical services division, who directed the mind control experiments, retired from the government in 1973 and died in 1999. The released documents shed little light on the those experiments.

[Alfa]

Originally Posted by Expat98

the testing program was intended not to find new techniques to be used offensively, but rather was an effort to be able to detect if such drugs were employed by others.

Yeah, right. That reminds me of the posts we sometimes get, where a member describes the effects he/she got from a pill and wants to know what was in it. This is hardly possible and in at least far from reliable. But that's why they where doing that project? Sure.

Originally Posted by Expat98

The released documents shed little light on the those experiments.

It's hard to imagine how 'real' documents can not contain substantial info on this.

[Expat98]

Originally Posted by Alfa

It's hard to imagine how 'real' documents can not contain substantial info on this.

I assume that they just redacted all the interesting parts. The current administration is well known for its extreme secrecy. They mentioned in the NPR audio segment that this admininstration is redacting things that in years past would have been released. And I've read elsewhere that they've been re-classifying a lot of stuff for the past few years that had previously been declassified.

[geophagus]

Does anyone know if any knew information actually was released, or is this simply a rehash of Project MK-ULTRA?

[Coconut]

Originally Posted by geophagus

Does anyone know if any knew information actually was released, or is this simply a rehash of Project MK-ULTRA?

I think it was likely part of MKULTRA.

[Nagognog2]

The best history, imo, out there on LSD and the CIA is located in this book:

ACID DREAMS - The Complete Social History of LSD: The Sixties, and Beyond

Written by: Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain

This belongs on every acidhead's bookshelf.

[Jatelka]

^^^Wonderful Book!

Should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in in LSD. Some fucker "borrowed" the flamingos copy and never returned it

EDIT: Thanks to Bajeda, it's now available in the archive here...

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/loc...2902&catid=117

[fnord]

[quote=Jatelka;279567]^^^Wonderful Book!

Should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in in LSD. Some fucker "borrowed" the flamingos copy and never returned it

EDIT: Thanks to Bajeda, it's now available in the archive here...

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/loc...2902&catid=117[/q


oops i just uploaded it too!

[Jatelka]

Nice effort anyway fnord

[Bajeda]

I just uploaded the transcript from the 1977 MKULTRA Senate Hearings for anyone who is interested in some primary source material.

[UberDouche]

Thanks for the reading material, everyone! Should make for an excellent read.