The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
John Marks
7. Mushrooms to
Counterculture
The MKULTRA scientists reaped little but disaster, mischief,
and disappointment from their efforts to use LSD as a miracle weapon against the
minds of their opponents. Nevertheless, their insatiable need to try every
possibility led them to test hundreds of other substances, including all the
drugs that would later be called psychedelic. These drugs were known to have
great potency. They were derived from natural botanical products, and the men
from MKULTRA believed from the beginning that rare organic materials might
somehow have the greatest effect on the human mind. The most amazing of the
psychedelics came from odd corners of the natural world. A1bert Hofmann created
LSD largely out of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye; mescaline is nothing more
than the synthetic essence of peyote cactus. Psilocybin, the drug that Timothy
Leary preferred to LSD for his Harvard experiments, was synthesized from exotic
Mexican mushrooms that occupy a special place in CIA history.
When the MKULTRA team first embarked on its mind-control
explorations, the "magic mushroom" was only a rumor or fable in the
linear history of the Western world. On nothing more than the possibility that
the legend was based on fact, the Agency's scientists tracked the mushroom to
the most remote parts of Mexico and then spent lavishly to test and develop its
mind-altering properties. The results, like the LSD legacy, were as startling as
they were unintended.
Among the botanicals that mankind has always turned to for
intoxicants and poisons, mushrooms stand out. There is something enchantingly
odd about the damp little buttons that can thrill a gourmet or kill one,
depending on the subtle differences among the countless varieties. These fungi
have a long record in unorthodox warfare. Two thousand years before the CIA
looked to unleash powerful mushrooms in covert operations, the Roman Empress
Agrippina eliminated her husband Claudius with a dish of poisonous mushrooms.
According to Roman history, Agrippina wanted the emperor dead so that her son
Nero could take the throne. She planned to take advantage of Claudius' love for
the delicious Amanita caesarea mushroom, but she had to choose carefully
among its deadly look-alikes. The poison could not be "sudden and
instantaneous in its operation, lest the desperate achievement should be
discovered," wrote Gordon and Valentina Wasson in their monumental and
definitive work, Mushrooms, Russia and History. The Empress settled on
the lethal Amanita phalloides, a fungus the Wassons considered well
suited to the crime: "The victim would not give away the game by abnormal
indispositions at the meal, but when the seizure came he would be so severely
stricken that thereafter he would no longer be in command of his own
affairs." Agrippina knew her mushrooms, and Nero became Emperor.
CIA mind-control specialists sought to emulate and surpass
that kind of sophistication, as it might apply to any conceivable drug. Their
fixation on the "magic mushroom" grew indirectly out of a meeting
between drug experts and Morse Allen, head of the Agency's ARTICHOKE program, in
October 1952. One expert told Allen about a shrub called piule, whose seeds had
long been used as an intoxicant by Mexican Indians at religious ceremonies.
Allen, who wanted to know about anything that distorted reality, immediately
arranged for a young CIA scientist to take a Mexican field trip and gather
samples of piule as well as other plants of "high narcotic and toxic value
of interest to ARTICHOKE."
That young scientist arrived in Mexico City early in 1953. He
could not advertise the true purpose of his trip because of ARTICHOKE's extreme
secrecy, so he assumed cover as a researcher interested in finding native plants
which were anesthetics. Fluent in Spanish and familiar with Mexico, he had no
trouble moving around the country, meeting with leading experts on botanicals.
Then he was off into the mountains south of the capital with his own
field-testing equipment, gathering specimens and testing them crudely on the
spot. By February, he had collected sacks full of material, including 10 pounds
of piule. Before leaving Mexico to look for more samples around the Caribbean,
the young scientist heard amazing tales about special mushrooms that grew only
in the hot and rainy summer months. Such stories had circulated among Europeans
in Mexico since Cortez had conquered the country early in the sixteenth century.
Spanish friars had reported that the Aztecs used strange mushrooms in their
religious ceremonies, which these converters of the heathens described as
"demonic holy communions." Aztec priests called the special mushrooms teonanactl,
"God's flesh." But Cortez's plunderers soon lost track of the rite, as
did the traders and anthropologists who followed in their wake. Only the legend
survived.
Back in Washington, the young scientist's samples went
straight to the labs, and Agency officials scoured the historical record for
accounts of the strange mushrooms. Morse Allen himself, though responsible in
ARTICHOKE research for everything from the polygraph to hypnosis, took the
trouble to go through the Indian lore. "Very early accounts of the
ceremonies of some tribes of Mexican Indians show that mushrooms are used to
produce hallucinations and to create intoxication in connection with religious
festivals," he wrote. "In addition, this literature shows that witch
doctors or 'divinators' used some types of mushrooms to produce confessions or
to locate stolen objects or to predict the future." Here was a possible
truth drug, Morse Allen reasoned. "Since it had been determined that no
area of human knowledge is to be left unexplored in connection with the
ARTICHOKE program, it was therefore regarded as essential that the peculiar
qualities of the mushroom be explored...." Allen declared. "Full
consideration," he concluded, should be given to sending an Agency man back
to Mexico during the summer. The CIA had begun its quest for "God's
flesh."
Characteristically, Morse Allen was planning ahead in case
the CIA's searchers came up with a mushroom worth having in large quantities. He
knew that the supply from the tropics varied by season, and, anyway, it would be
impractical to go to Mexico for fungi each time an operational need popped up.
So Allen decided to see if it were possible to grow the mushrooms at home,
either outdoors or in hothouses. On June 24, 1953, he and an associate drove
from Washington to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania, in the heart of "the largest
mushroom-growing area in the world." At a three-hour session with the
captains of the mushroom industry, Allen explained the government's interest in
poisonous and narcotic fungi. Allen reported that the meeting "was
primarily designed to obtain a 'foothold' in the center of the mushroom-growing
industry where, if requirements for mushroom growing were demanded, it would be
done by professionals in the trade." The mushroom executives were quite
reluctant to grow toxic products because they knew that any accidental publicity
would scare their customers. In the end, however, their patriotism won out, and
they agreed to grow any kind of fungus the government desired. Allen considered
the trip a great success.
As useful as this commitment might be, an element of chance
remained as long as the CIA had to depend on the natural process. But if the
Agency could find synthetic equivalents for the active ingredients, it could
manufacture rather than grow its own supply. Toward this goal of bypassing
nature, Morse Allen had little choice but to turn for help to the man who the
following year would wrest most of the ARTICHOKE functions from his grasp: Sid
Gottlieb. Gottlieb, himself a Ph.D. in chemistry, had scientists working for him
who knew what to do on the level of test tubes and beakers. Allen ran ARTICHOKE
out of the Office of Security, which was not equipped for work on the frontiers
of science.
Gottlieb and his colleagues moved quickly into the mysteries
of the Mexican hallucinogens. They went to work on the chemical structures of
the piule and other plants that Morse Allen's emissary brought back from his
field trip, but they neglected to report their findings to the bureaucratically
outflanked Allen. Gottlieb and the MKULTRA crew soon got caught up in the search
for the magic mushroom. While TSS had its own limited laboratory facilities, it
depended on secret contractors for most research and development. Working with
an associate, a cadaverously thin chemistry Ph.D. named Henry Bortner, Gottlieb
passed the tropical plants to a string of corporate and academic researchers.
One of them, Dr. James Moore, a 29-yearold chemist at Parke, Davis & Company
in Detroit, was destined to be the first man in the CIA camp to taste the magic
mushroom. Moore's career was typical of the specialists in the CIA's vast
network of private contractors. His path to the mushroom led through several
jobs and offbeat assignments, always with Agency funds and direction behind him.
A precise, meticulous man of scientific habits, Moore was hardly the sort one
would expect to find chasing psychedelic drugs. Such pursuits began for him in
March 1953, when he had returned to his lab at Parke, Davis after a year of
postdoctoral research at the University of Basel. His supervisor had called him
in with an intriguing proposal: How would he like to work inside the company on
a CIA contract? "Those were not particularly prosperous times, and the
company was glad to get someone else to pay my salary [$8,000 a year],"
notes Moore 25 years later. "If I had thought I was participating in a
scheme run by a small band of mad individuals, I would have demurred."
He accepted the job.
The Agency contracted with Parke, Davis, as it did with
numerous other drug companies, universities, and government agencies to develop
behavioral products and poisons from botanicals. CIA-funded chemists extracted
deadly substances like the arrow-poison curare from natural products, while
others worked on ways to deliver these poisons most effectively, like the "nondiscernible
microbioinoculator" (or dart gun) that the Army Chemical Corps invented.
CIA-connected botanists collected—and then chemists analyzed—botanicals from
all over the tropics: a leaf that killed cattle, several plants deadly to fish,
another leaf that caused hair to fall out, sap that caused temporary blindness,
and a host of other natural products that could alter moods, dull or stimulate
nerves, or generally disorient people. Among the plants Moore investigated was
Jamaica dogwood, a plant used by Caribbean natives to stun fish so they could be
easily captured for food. This work resulted in the isolation of several new
substances, one of which Moore named "lisetin," in honor of his
daughter.
Moore had no trouble adjusting to the secrecy demanded by his
CIA sponsors, having worked on the Manhattan Project as a graduate student. He
dealt only with his own case officer, Henry Bortner, and two or three other CIA
men in TSS. Once Moore completed his chemical work on a particular substance, he
turned the results over to Bortner and apparently never learned of the
follow-up. Moore worked in his own little isolated compartment, and he soon
recognized that the Agency preferred contractors who did not ask questions about
what was going on in the next box.
In 1955 Moore left private industry for academia, moving from
Detroit to the relatively placid setting of the University of Delaware in
Newark. The school made him an assistant professor, and he moved into a lab in
the Georgian red-brick building that housed the chemistry department. Along with
his family, Moore brought his CIA contract—then worth $16,000 a year, of which
he received $650 per month, with the rest going to pay research assistants and
overhead. Although the Agency allowed a few top university officials to be
briefed on his secret connection, Moore appeared to his colleagues and students
to be a normal professor who had a healthy research grant from the Geschickter
Fund for Medical Research in Washington.
In the world of natural products—particularly
mushrooms—the CIA soon made Moore a full-service agent. With some help from
his CIA friends, he made contact with the leading lights in mycology (the study
of mushrooms), attended professional meetings, and arranged for others to send
him samples. From the CIA's point of view, he could not have had better cover.
As Sid Gottlieb wrote, Moore "maintains the fiction that the botanical
specimens he collects are for his own use since his field interest is
natural-product chemistry." Under this pretext, Moore had a perfect excuse
to make and purchase for the CIA chemicals that the Agency did not want traced.
Over the years, Moore billed the Agency for hundreds of purchases, including 50
cents for an unidentified pamphlet, $433.13 for a particular shipment of
mescaline, $1147.60 for a large quantity of mushrooms, and $12,000 for a
quarter-ton of fluothane, an inhalation anesthetic. He shipped his purchases on
as Bortner directed.
Moore eventually became a kind of short-order cook for what
CIA documents call "offensive CW, BW" weapons at "very low cost
and in a few days' time . . ." If there were an operational need, Bortner
had only to call in the order, and Moore would whip up a batch of a
"reputed depilatory" or hallucinogens like DMT or the incredibly
potent BZ. On one occasion in 1963, Moore prepared a small dose of a very lethal
carbamate poison—the same substance that OSS used two decades earlier to try
to kill Adolf Hitler. Moore charged the Agency his regular consulting fee, $100,
for this service.
"Did I ever consider what would have happened if this
stuff were given to unwitting people?" Moore asks, reflecting on his CIA
days. "No. Particularly no. Had I been given that information, I think I
would have been prepared to accept that. If I had been knee-jerk about testing
on unwitting subjects, I wouldn't have been the type of person they would have
used. There was nothing that I did that struck me as being so sinister and
deadly.... It was all investigative."
James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists on the
lookout for the magic mushroom. For three years after Morse Allen's man returned
from Mexico with his tales of wonder, Moore and the others in the Agency's
network pushed their lines of inquiry among contacts and travelers into Mexican
villages so remote that Spanish had barely penetrated. Yet they found no magic
mushrooms. Given their efforts, it was ironic that the man who beat them to
"God's flesh" was neither a spy nor a scientist, but a banker. It was
R. Gordon Wasson, vice-president of J. P. Morgan & Company, amateur
mycologist, and co-author with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms, Russia and
History. Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian-born wife had
become fascinated by the different ways that societies deal with the mushroom,
and they followed their lifelong obsession with these fungi, in all their glory,
all over the globe.[1]
They found whole nationalities, such as the Russians and the Catalans, were
mycophiles, while others like the Spaniards and the Anglo-Saxons were not. They
learned that in ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of
mushrooms were brought into being by lightning bolts. They discovered that
widely scattered peoples, including desert Arabs, Siberians, Chinese, and Maoris
of New Zealand, have shared the idea that mushrooms have supernatural
connections. Their book appeared in limited edition, selling new in 1957 for
$125. It contains facts and legends, lovingly told, as well as beautiful
photographs of nearly every known species of mushroom.
Inevitably, the Wassons heard tell of "God's
flesh," and in 1953 they started spending their vacations pursuing it. They
took their first unsuccessful trek to Mexico about the time James Moore got
connected to the CIA and Morse Allen met with the Pennsylvania mushroom
executives. They had no luck until their third expedition, when Gordon Wasson
and his traveling companion, Allan Richardson, found their holy grail high in
the mountains above Oaxaca. On June 29, 1955, they entered the town hall in a
village called Huautla de Jimenez. There, they found a young Indian about 35,
sitting by a large table in an upstairs room. Unlike most people in the village,
he spoke Spanish. "He had a friendly manner," Wasson later wrote,
"and I took a chance. Leaning over the table, I asked him earnestly and in
a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence. Instantly curious, he
encouraged me. 'Will you,' I went on, 'help me learn the secrets of the divine
mushroom?' and I used the Indian name nti sheeto, correctly pronouncing
it with glottal stop and tonal differentiation of the syllables. When [he]
recovered from his surprise he said warmly that nothing could be easier."
Shortly thereafter, the Indian led Wasson and Richardson down
into a deep ravine where mushrooms were growing in abundance. The white men
snapped picture after picture of the fungi and picked a cardboard box-full.
Then, in the heavy humid heat of the afternoon, the Indian led them up the
mountain to a woman who performed the ancient mushroom rite. Her name was Maria
Sabina. She was not only a curandera, or shaman, of "the highest
quality," wrote Wasson, but a "señora sin mancha, a woman
without stain." Wasson described her as middle-aged and short, "with a
spirituality in her expression that struck us at once. She had a presence. We
showed our mushrooms to the woman and her daughter. They cried out in rapture
over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our young specimens.
Through the interpreter we asked if they would serve us that night. They said
yes."
That night, Wasson, Richardson, and about 20 Indians gathered
in one of the village's adobe houses. The natives wore their best clothes and
were friendly to the white strangers. The host provided chocolate drinks, which
evoked for Wasson accounts of similar beverages being served early Spanish
writers. Maria Sabina sat on a mat before a simple altar table that was adorned
with the images of the Child Jesus and the Baptism in Jordan. After cleaning the
mushrooms, she handed them out to all the adults present, keeping 26 for herself
and giving Wasson and Richardson 12 each.
Maria Sabina put out the last candle about midnight, and she
chanted haunting, tightly measured melodies. The Indian celebrants responded
with deep feeling. Both Wasson and Richardson began to experience intense
hallucinations that did not diminish until about 4:00 A.M. "We were never
more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were open or
closed," Wasson wrote:
They emerged from the center of the field of our vision, opening up as they
came, now rushing, now slowly at the pace that our will chose. They were vivid
in color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, such as might
decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an
architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades,
gardens—resplendent palaces with semiprecious stones.... Could the
miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying
witches that played some important part in the folklore and fairy tales of
northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time
that I was seeing the vision, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring
about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia,
with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that
the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached by an elastic cord to the
vagrant senses.
Thus Gordon Wasson described the first known mushroom trip by
"outsiders" in recorded history. The CIA's men missed the event, but
they quickly learned of it, even though Wasson's visit was a private
noninstitutional one to a place where material civilization had not reached.
Such swiftness was assured by the breadth of the Agency's informant network,
which included formal liaison arrangements with agencies like the Agriculture
Department and the FDA and informal contacts all over the world. A botanist in
Mexico City sent the report that reached both CIA headquarters and then James
Moore. In the best bureaucratic form, the CIA description of Wasson's visions
stated sparsely that the New York banker thought he saw "a multitude of
architectural forms." Still, "God's flesh" had been located, and
the MKULTRA leaders snatched up information that Wasson planned to return the
following summer and bring back some mushrooms.
During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote
Wasson—"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls—and expressed a desire
to look into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore eventually
suggested that he would like to accompany Wasson's party, and, to sweeten the
proposition, he mentioned that he knew a foundation that might be willing to
help underwrite the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter
Fund, made a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for the divine
mushroom became Subproject 58.
Joining Moore and Wasson on the 1956 trip were the
world-renowned French mycologist Roger Heim and a colleague from the Sorbonne.
The party made the final leg of the trip, one at a time, in a tiny Cessna, but
when it was Moore's turn, the load proved too much for the plane. The pilot
suddenly took a dramatic right angle turn through a narrow canyon and made an
unscheduled stop on the side of a hill. Immediately on landing, an Indian girl
ran out and slid blocks under the wheels, so the plane would not roll back into
a ravine. The pilot decided to lighten the load by leaving Moore among the local
Indians, who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Later in the day, the plane
returned and picked up the shaken Moore.
Finally in Huautla, sleeping on a dirt floor and eating local
food, everyone reveled in the primitiveness of the adventure except Moore, who
suffered. In addition to diarrhea, he recalls, "I had a terribly bad cold,
we damned near starved to death, and I itched all over." Beyond his
physical woes, Moore became more and more alienated from the others, who got on
famously. Moore was a "complainer," according to Wasson. "He had
no empathy for what was going on," recalls Wasson. "He was like a
landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all." Moore
states, "Our relationship deteriorated during the course of the trip."
Wasson returned to the same Maria Sabina who had led him to
the high ground the year before. Again the ritual started well after dark and,
for everyone but Moore, it was an enchanted evening. Sings Wasson: "I had
the most superb feeling—a feeling of ecstasy. You're raised to a height where
you have not been in everyday life—not ever." Moore, on the other hand,
never left the lowlands. His description: "There was all this chanting in
the dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms around, and we chewed them up. I did
feel the hallucinogenic effect, although 'disoriented' would be a better word to
describe my reaction."
Soon thereafter, Moore returned to Delaware with a bag of
mushrooms—just in time to take his pregnant wife to the hospital for delivery.
After dropping her off with the obstetrician, he continued down the hall to
another doctor about his digestion. Already a thin man, Moore had lost 15
pounds. Over the next week, he slowly nursed himself back to health. He reported
in to Bortner and started preliminary work in his lab to isolate the active
ingredient in the mushrooms. Bortner urged him on; the men from MKULTRA were
excited at the prospect that they might be able to create "a completely new
chemical agent." They wanted their own private supply of "God's
flesh." Sid Gottlieb wrote that if Moore succeeded, it was "quite
possible" that the new drugs could "remain an Agency secret."
Gottlieb's dream of a CIA monopoly on the divine mushroom
vanished quickly under the influence of unwanted competitors, and indeed, the
Agency soon faced a control problem of burgeoning proportions. While Moore
toiled in his lab, Roger Heim in Paris unexpectedly pulled off the remarkable
feat of growing the mushrooms in artificial culture from spore prints he had
made in Mexico. Heim then sent samples to none other than Albert Hofmann, the
discoverer of LSD, who quickly isolated and chemically reproduced the active
chemical ingredient. He named it psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the CIA,[2]
and the men from MKULTRA found themselves trying to obtain formulas and supplies
from overseas. Instead of locking up the world's supply of the drug in a safe
somewhere, they had to keep track of disbursements from Sandoz, as they were
doing with LSD. Defeated by the old master, Moore laid his own work aside and
sent away to Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin.
This lapse in control still did not quash the hopes of Agency
officials that the mushroom might become a powerful weapon in covert operations.
Agency scientists rushed it into the experimental stage. Within three summers of
the first trip with James Moore, the CIA's queasy professor from America, the
mushroom had journeyed through laboratories on two continents, and its chemical
essence had worked its way back to Agency conduits and a contractor who would
test it. In Kentucky, Dr. Harris Isbell ordered psilocybin injected into nine
black inmates at the narcotics prison. His staff laid the subjects out on beds
as the drug took hold and measured physical symptoms every hour: blood pressure,
knee-jerk reflexes, rectal temperature, precise diameter of eye pupils, and so
on. In addition, they recorded the inmates' various subjective feelings:
After 30 minutes, anxiety became quite definite and was expressed as
consisting of fear that something evil was going to happen, fear of insanity,
or of death.... At times patients had the sensation that they could see the
blood and bones in their own body or in that of another person. They reported
many fantasies or dreamlike states in which they seemed to be elsewhere.
Fantastic experiences, such as trips to the moon or living in gorgeous castles
were occasionally reported.... Two of the 9 patients . . . felt their
experiences were caused by the experimenters controlling their minds....
Experimental data piled up, with operational testing to
follow.
But the magic mushroom never became a good spy weapon. It
made people behave strangely but no one could predict where their trips would
take them. Agency officials craved certainty.
On the other hand, Gordon Wasson found revelation. After a
lifetime of exploring and adoring mushrooms, he had discovered the greatest
wonder of all in that remote Indian village. His experience inspired him to
write an account of his journey for the "Great Adventures" series in Life
magazine. The story, spread across 17 pages of text and color photographs, was
called "Seeking the Magic Mushroom: A New York banker goes to Mexico's
mountains to participate in the age-old rituals of Indians who chew strange
growths that produce visions." In 1957, before the Russian sputnik
shook America later that year, Life introduced its millions of readers to
the mysteries of hallucinogens, with a tone of glowing but dignified respect.
Wasson wrote movingly of his long search for mushroom lore, and he became
positively rhapsodic in reflecting on his Mexican "trip":
In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past,
there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the
hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have
been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him
worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a
different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous,
primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the
miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe
and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind
the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the
divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may
not have planted in primitive man the very idea of God.
The article caused a sensation in the United States, where
people had already been awakened to ideas like these by Aldous Huxley's The
Doors of Perception. It lured waves of respectable adults—precursors of
later hippie travelers—to Mexico in search of their own curanderas.
(Wasson came to have mixed feelings about the response to his story, after
several tiny Mexican villages were all but trampled by American tourists on the
prowl for divinity.) One person whose curiosity was stimulated by the article
was a young psychology professor named Timothy Leary. In 1959, in Mexico on
vacation, he ate his first mushrooms. He recalls he "had no idea it was
going to change my life." Leary had just been promised tenure at Harvard,
but his life of conventional prestige lost appeal for him within five hours of
swallowing the mushroom: "The revelation had come. The veil had been pulled
back.... The prophetic call. The works. God had spoken."
Having responded to a Life article about an expedition
that was partially funded by the CIA, Leary returned to a Harvard campus where
students and professors had for years served as subjects for CIA- and
military-funded LSD experiments. His career as a drug prophet lay before him.
Soon he would be quoting in his own Kamasutra from the CIA's contractor
Harold Abramson and others, brought together for scholarly drug conferences by
the sometime Agency conduit, the Macy Foundation.
With LSD, as with mushrooms, the men from MKULTRA remained
oblivious, for the most part, to the rebellious effect of the drug culture in
the United States. "I don't think we were paying any attention to it,"
recalls a TSS official. The CIA's scientists looked at drugs from a different
perspective and went on trying to fashion their spy arsenal. Through the entire
1960s and into the 1970s, the Agency would scour Latin America for poisonous and
narcotic plants.[3]
Earlier, TSS officials and contractors actually kept spreading the magic touch
of drugs by forever pressing new university researchers into the field. Boston
Psychopathic's Max Rinkel stirred up the interest of Rochester's Harold Hodge
and told him how to get a grant from the Agency conduit, the Geschickter Fund.
Hodge's group found a way to put a radioactive marker into LSD, and the MKULTRA
crew made sure that the specially treated substance found its way to still more
scientists. When a contractor like Harold Abramson spoke highly of the drug at a
new conference or seminar, tens or hundreds of scientists, health professionals,
and subjects—usually students—would wind up trying LSD.
One day in 1954, Ralph Blum, a senior at Harvard on his way
to a career as a successful author, heard from a friend that doctors at Boston
Psychopathic would pay $25 to anyone willing to spend a day as a happy
schizophrenic. Blum could not resist. He applied, passed the screening process,
took a whole battery of Wechsler psychological tests, and was told to report
back on a given morning. That day, he was shown into a room with five other
Harvard students. Project director Bob Hyde joined them and struck Blum as a
reassuring father figure. Someone brought in a tray with six little glasses full
of water and LSD. The students drank up. For Blum, the drug did not take hold
for about an hour and a half—somewhat longer than the average. While Hyde was
in the process of interviewing him, Blum felt his mind shift gears. "I
looked at the clock on the wall and thought how well behaved it was. It didn't
pay attention to itself. It just stayed on the wall and told time." Blum
felt that he was looking at everything around him from a new perspective.
"It was a very subtle thing," he says. "My ego filter had been
pretty much removed. I turned into a very accessible state —accessible to
myself. I knew when someone was lying to me, and the richness of the experience
was such that I didn't want to suffer fools gladly." Twenty-four years
later, Blum concludes: "It was undeniably a very important experience for
me. It made a difference in my life. It began to move the log jam of my old
consciousness. You can't do it with just one blast. It was the beginning of
realizing it was safe to love again. Although I wouldn't use them until much
later, it gave me a new set of optics. It let me know there was something
downstream."[4]
Many student subjects like Blum thought LSD transformed the
quality of their lives. Others had no positive feelings, and some would later
use the negative memories of their trips to invalidate the whole drug culture
and stoned thinking process of the 1960s. In a university city like Boston where
both the CIA and the Army were carrying on large testing programs at hospitals
connected to Harvard, volunteering for an LSD trip became quite popular in
academic circles. Similar reactions, although probably not as pronounced,
occurred in other intellectual centers. The intelligence agencies turned to
America's finest universities and hospitals to try LSD, which meant that the
cream of the country's students and graduate assistants became the test
subjects.
In 1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs published
a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use. The authors wrote
that the drug's "early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large
Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then
to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons
of higher status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have
influenced lower-classmen." Calling this a "trickle-down
phenomenon," the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around
the country. They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of
knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the
top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.
Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting
his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of
the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little
world where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences
that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave
Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson,
in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to
take the drug at a research program located of f the Stanford campus. No
stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what
he describes as "the closed little doctor's room full of instruments,"
where he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to records of his
choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner),
Ginsberg felt he "was being connected to Big Brother's brain." He says
that the experience resulted in "a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid
experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to
disperse that."
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at
the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo
Hollister was testing LSD at that same hospital. Hollister says he entered the
hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the "unscientific" work of
the early LSD researchers. He refers specifically to most of the people who
attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and military-funded
work, Hollister tried drugs out on student volunteers, including a certain Ken
Kesey, in 1960. Kesey said he was a jock who had only been drunk once before,
but on three successive Tuesdays, he tried different psychedelics. "Six
weeks later I'd bought my first ounce of grass," Kesey later wrote, adding,
"Six months later I had a job at that hospital as a psychiatric aide."
Out of that experience, using drugs while he wrote, Kesey turned out One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He went on to become the counterculture's second
most famous LSD visionary, spreading the creed throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe
would chronicle in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary, Kesey, and
Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men were, and they, along with many of
the lesser-known experimental subjects, like Harvard's Ralph Blum, created the
climate whereby LSD escaped the government's control and became available by the
early sixties on the black market. No one at the Agency apparently foresaw that
young Americans would voluntarily take the drug—whether for consciousness
expansion or recreational purposes. The MKULTRA experts were mainly on a control
trip, and they proved incapable of gaining insight from their own LSD
experiences of how others less fixated on making people do their bidding would
react to the drug.
It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame on—or give
all the credit to—the CIA for the spread of LSD. One cannot forget the nature
of the times, the Vietnam War, the breakdown in authority, and the wide
availability of other drugs, especially marijuana. But the fact remains that LSD
was one of the catalysts of the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s. No one could
enter the world of psychedelics without first passing, unawares, through doors
opened by the Agency. It would become a supreme irony that the CIA's enormous
search for weapons among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr.
Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would wind up helping to
create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture.
Notes
R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson's mammoth work, Mushrooms,
Russia and History, (New York: Pantheon, 1957), was the source for the
account of the Empress Agrippina's murderous use of mushrooms. Wasson told the
story of his various journeys to Mexico in a series of interviews and in a May
27, 1957 Life magazine article, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom."
Morse Allen learned of piule in a sequence described in
document #A/B,I,33/7, 14 November 1952, Subject: Piule. The sending of the young
CIA scientist to Mexico was outlined in #A/B, I,33/3,5 December 1952. Morse
Allen commented on mushroom history and covert possibilities in #A/B, I, 34/4,
26 June 1953, Subject: Mushrooms—Narcotic and Poisonous Varieties. His trip to
the American mushroom-growing capital was described in Document Number
illegible], 25 June 1953, Subject: Trip to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania. The
failure of TSS to tell Morse Allen about the results of the botanical lab work
is outlined in #A/B, I, 39/5, 10 August 1954 Subject: Reports; Request for from
TSS [deleted].
James Moore told much about himself in a long interview and
in an exchange of correspondence. MKULTRA Subproject 51 dealt with Moore's
consulting relationship with the Agency and Subproject 52 with his ties as a
procurer of chemicals. See especially Document 51-46, 8 April 1963, Subject:
MKULTRA Subproject 51; 51-24, 27 August 1956, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51-B;
52-94, 20 February 1963, Subject: (BB) Chemical and Physical Manipulants; 52-19,
20 December 1962; 52-17, 1 March 1963; 52-23, 6 December 1962; 52-64, 24 August
1959.
The CIA's arrangements with the Department of Agriculture are
detailed in #A/B, I, 34/4, 26 June, 1953, Subject: Mushrooms—Narcotic and
Poisonous varieties and Document [number illegible], 13 April 1953, Subject:
Interview with Cleared Contacts.
Dr. Harris Isbell's work with psilocybin is detailed in
Isbell document # 155, "Comparison of the Reaction Induced by Psilocybin
and LSD-25 in Man."
Information on the counterculture and its interface with CIA
drug-testing came from interviews with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg, Humphrey
Osmond, John Lilly, Sidney Cohen, Ralph Blum, Herbert Kelman, Leo Hollister,
Herbert DeShon, and numerous others. Ken Kesey described his first trip in Garage
Sale (New York: Viking Press, 1973). Timothy Leary's Kamasutra was
actually a book hand-produced in four copies and called Psychedelic Theory: Working
Papers from the Harvard IFlF Psychedelic Research Project, 1960-1963. Susan
Berns Wolf Rothchild kindly made her copy available. The material about Harold
Abramson's turning on Frank Fremont-Smith and Gregory Bateson came from the
proceedings of a conference on LSD sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation
on April 22, 23, and 24, 1959, pp. 8-22.
Footnotes
1. On their honeymoon, in the summer of
1927, the Wassons were strolling along a mountain path when suddenly Valentina
abandoned Gordon's side. "She had spied wild mushrooms in the forest,"
wrote Wasson, "and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she
knelt in poses of adoration before one cluster and then another of these
growths. In ecstasy she called each kind by an endearing Russian name. Like all
good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt the less I
knew about these putrid, treacherous excrescences the better. For her they were
things of grace infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind." In spite of
his protests, Valentina gathered up the mushrooms and brought them back to the
lodge were she cooked them for dinner. She ate them all—alone. Wasson wanted
no part of the fungi. While she mocked his horror, he predicted in the face of
her laughter he would wake up a widower the next morning. When Valentina
survived, the couple decided to find an explanation for "the strange
cultural cleavage" that had caused them to react so differently to
mushrooms. From then on, they were hooked, and the world became the richer. (back)
2. Within two years, Albert Hofmann would
scoop the CIA once again, with some help from Gordon Wasson. In 1960 Hofmann
broke down and chemically recreated the active ingredient in hallucinatory
ololiuqui seeds sent him by Wasson before the Agency's contractor, William Boyd
Cook of Montana State University, could do the job. Hofmann's and Wasson's
professional relationship soon grew into friendship, and in 1962 they traveled
together on horseback to Huautla de Jimenez to visit Maria Sabina. Hofmann
presented the curandera with some genuine Sandoz psilocybin. Wasson
recalls: "Of course, Albert Hofmann is so conservative he always gives too
little a dose, and it didn't have any effect." The crestfallen Hofmann
believed he had duplicated "God's flesh," and he doubled the dose.
Then Maria Sabina had her customary visions, and she reported, according to
Wasson, the drug was the "same" as the mushroom. States Wasson, whose
prejudice for real mushrooms over chemicals is unmistakable, "I don't think
she said it with very much enthusiasm." (back)
3. See Chapter 12. (back)
4. Lincoln Clark, a psychiatrist who
tested LSD for the Army at Massachusetts General Hospital, reflects a fairly
common view among LSD researchers when he belittles drug-induced thinking of the
sort described by Blum. "Everybody who takes LSD has an incredible
experience that you can look at as having positive characteristics. I view it as
pseudo-insight. This is part of the usual response of intellectually pretentious
people." On the other hand, psychiatrist Sidney Cohen, who has written an
important book on LSD, noted that to experience a visionary trip, "the
devotee must have faith in, or at least be open to the possibility of the 'other
state.' . . . He must 'let go,' not offer too much resistance to losing his
personal identity. The ability to surrender oneself is probably the most
important operation of all." (back)