UNWITTING: Testing the Limits with MKULTRA

Chapter Five: Mastering Minds 

(The Secret War on William Pierce)

When Bill Pierce’s real troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being actively pursued by the federal government. For years he sounded like a crank, paranoid and possibly delusional. But once the surviving MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 – most of them were destroyed before they could be reviewed by Congress -- his descriptions and personal experiences in the 1950s and 60s began to look uncannily close to the experiments actually being pursued by the CIA at the time.
       Even prior to MKULTRA,  considerable research had been done by the government on amnesia, hypnotic couriers and efforts to create a Manchurian Candidate – a label commonly used after the release of a 1963 conspiracy thriller with that title. The CIA’s goal was to develop “brainwashing” techniques and program subjects with a hypnotically implanted trigger, thus turning them into secret agents who wouldn’t remember what they had done. In scientific terms, the objective was to deliberately and experimentally create dissociative identity disorders, with associated amnesia barriers, and use this technique in both simulated and actual covert operations.
      MKULTRA was officially launched by the Central Intelligence Agency on April 3, 1953, and continued for a decade until it was rolled into another project, MKSEARCH, in 1964. That ran for another eight years, until CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most of the MK documents shredded in June 1972. Despite this, and redactions to most documents that did survive, they revealed that there had been hundreds of separate sub-projects.

        The Agency’s goal was explained directly in a memo revealed in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigation of the project: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?” To that end, dozens of civilians and government employees were drugged without their knowedge, and at least one person died. In 1953, biological weapons specialist Frank Olson was given LSD without his knowledge. A few days later, he either jumped to his death or was pushed from a hotel window.
The most discussed aspect of MKULTRA is the CIA’s LSD work. But the program included many unusual investigations into mind control. CIA researchers also probed the potential of various parapsychological phenomena, including hypnosis, telepathy, precognition, and "remote viewing." The agency, led by Allen Dulles, was looking for weapons that would give the US the upper hand in the emerging “mind wars,” and invested millions in studies looking into dozens of ways to manipulate people. 

     A key MKULTRA document, prepared by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb in May 1955, indicates a wide range of interests, and the use of all manner of mind-altering substances. At the top of the list were any drugs or approaches that would “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.” It read like an accurate description of what was happening to Pierce.

     In an August 1963 “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA,” Deputy CIA Director Marshall Carter acknowledged a problem: “Research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical, therefore the reputations of professional participants in the MKULTRA program are on occasion in jeopardy.” Beyond that, “the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” As a result, the paper trail was being kept to a bare minimum, operational control was delegated to the Technical Services Division (TSD), and the entire project was exempted from audit.
      During the preceding ten years the “avenues to the control of human behavior” had expanded to include “radiation, electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.” Under a heading titled “Advanced testing of MKULTRA materials,” the 1963 CIA report asserted the “firm doctrine in TSD that testing of materials under accepted scientific procedure fails to disclose the full pattern of reactions and attributions that may occur in operational situations.” It added that TSD “initiated a program for covert testing of materials on unwitting U.S, citizens in 1955,” the same year Pierce said his own troubles began.
      The ultimate test for any drug, device or technique, argued the report, was “application to unwitting subjects in normal life settings. It was noted earlier that the capabilities of MKULTRA substances to produce disabling or discrediting effects or to increase the effectiveness of interrogation of hostile subjects cannot be established solely through testing on volunteer populations.”
      To keep the loop small and secure, “certain cleared and witting individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics” provided various drugs for testing on those “deemed desirable and feasible.” Some of the most “feasible” subjects were informers and criminals. But as the report added, “the effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign, is of great significance and testing has been performed on a variety of individuals within these categories.” In some cases, “the test subject has become ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case.”
      Bill Pierce was no longer teaching at Syracuse in 1962. After a year at West Virginia University, he had moved to Stillwater to teach at Oklahoma State University that September. But he was still writing letters to prominent individuals and newspapers about “right-wing extremism” and “security procedures." 
       Then suddenly, in mid-October, he was removed from his teaching duties and ordered by the university administration to undergo a psychological examination. According to Pierce, "extremists" were trying to discredit him. But some students, along with the manager of a local coffee shop, told President Oliver Willham that Pierce was the one creating disturbances. Word rapidly spread across campus that he was “psycho.” It was precisely what he feared and had been writing about. 
   On October 14, 1962, American spy planes shooting photos over Cuba had captured images of mobile Soviet-made missile launchers. Six days later, on October 20, President Kennedy called for a quarantine of Cuba, meaning that the U.S. Navy would stop ships from reaching the island’s port. It wasn’t called a blockade; that would have been an act of war. But it was obviously a national crisis.

      Being at the brink of a nuclear showdown didn’t dissuade Pierce from publicly airing his concerns about government repression of its critics. In a letter published in the Oklahoma City Times one day before the quarantine, his primary focus was the arrest and hospitalization of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, whose fiery rhetoric had helped to spark a violent riot on the University of Mississippi campus. On September 30, after hundreds of people were wounded and two were killed, Walker was arrested on charges including sedition and insurrection.
      Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered Walker held in a mental institution for 90 days of psychiatric examination. But the decision was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued that psychiatry should not be a political tool. After five days Kennedy backed down and Walker was released.
      Pierce certainly didn’t agree with Walker’s politics. But he did identify with the situation. “Admittedly, Walker’s extreme views on ‘liberals’ and his alleged defiance of the government (including alleged incitement to violence) suggest mental unbalance," he wrote,  but the presumptions of enforced mental tests and/or treatment should cause us grave concern."
      “It is only a short step from psychiatric tests for rioters to psychiatric tests for victims of crime and political persecution,” Pierce warned. “A favorite technique of the latter is clever misuse of the ‘psychopath’ label; and, even worse, revolutionary devices of psychological warfare and brainwashing capable of crippling almost any human being, and in such a manner that the victim’s factual description of the attack sounds like mental illness.”
     A few days after his letter was published a police officer and sheriff’s deputy showed up at his apartment with a warrant for his arrest, apparently at the instigation of President Willham. Sheriff Charlie Fowler had never met Pierce before, yet the detention order  claimed that Fowler had “personal knowledge” that he was violent and showed the potential to injure himself or others.
     A week later, Pierce was involuntarily committed. More ominously --  and without him realizing its significance -- he had been placed in the care of Dr. Louis J. West, one of the CIA’s leading MKULTRA doctors, a cutting-edge scientist who had once killed an elephant with an overdose of LSD.

Chapter One: Wrong Turn

Two: Naming Names

Three: Unwanted Voices

Four: Chung's Way 
Next: The Doctor from MKULTRA