The Manchurian Veterans

In his Manchurian Veterans article, Cmdr. Jeff Huber, analyzes what is known — and not known — about the G.I.s who suffered severe damage from service to their country by being used as human test subjects.

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 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 temporary 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, reports of Chinese and Russian brainwashing 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 natue of the mind control program itself.

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 reported experiment involved injecting subjects with barbiturates in one arm and amphetamines in another. That method was eventually discarded because it often killed the subjects.

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.

Read the rest of the article here.

Commander Jeff Huber, US Navy (Retired) was a flight instructor, operations officer of Carrier Air Wing 9 and the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and commanding officer of VAW-124, an E-2C Hawkeye squadron. Jeff’s satires on military and foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Military, and GlobalEar. His essays have been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where Jeff received a master’s degree in national security studies in 1995. He recently co-authored an article on command and control of naval forces for Jane’s Fighting Ships. Stop by Pen & Sword. He is an editor and citizen journalist with ePluribus Media.