High Crimes: From Covert Ops to Cyber Warfare

Essays and Stories: 1978-2022

Political rights are so easily taken for granted – until they’re threatened or curtailed by repressive laws and covert crimes. In the United States, they are usually most vulnerable when people are anxious about some imagined threat. After World War II, for instance, dissent became risky as relations with Russia hardened into the paranoia of Cold War I. Hysteria about subversion led quickly to state and congressional investigations of “Un-American activities.” In 1951, a Supreme Court decision led to the imprisonment of eleven Communist leaders. It wasn’t for any overt acts threatening national security, but instead just for trying to organize a political party and teach Marxism. 

Today the threats to liberty are no less imminent.

Freedom on the Rocks

Repressing Un-American Activities

Conspiracies Unlimited

The FBI-Census Pipeline

Blowback: When Secret Plans Go Bad

Invisible War: William Pierce and MKULTRA

Part 1: Unwitting

Part 2: Naming Names

Part 3: Unwanted Voices

Part 4: Chung’s War

Part 5: Mastering Minds

Part 6: The Doctor from Mk-Ultra

Part 7: Bad Medicine

Part 8: End Games

Scare Tactics: The Berster Case

Part 1: Counter Terror and Law Enforcement

 Part 2: Surveillance Lies 

Part 3: When Dissent Becomes a Crime 

Part 4: Legalized Repression 

Part 5: Fear Factors 

Part 6: Seeing Through Perception Management

Fire Sale Earth

Secret Wars

Secrets R US 

Contras, Drugs and Money

Outsourcing Defense

Truth Decay

Total Exposure

Messing with Our Minds

Deadly Experiments

Blurring Reality

How Perception Management Wrecked Reality 

(or, Rendezvous with Uncertainty)

Battling Truth Decay

Cyber War

UNWITTING: Finding Truth in an Invisible War

When Vermonter William Pierce’s troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being pursued by the government. But once MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 his personal experiences —from the McCarthy era to the Cuban missile crisis — began to look uncannily close to the CIA’s experiments. And when he was involuntarily committed in 1962, he found himself in the care of Louis “Jolly” West. One of the leading MKULTRA doctors, West had just killed an elephant with LSD. 

Chapter Eight: End Games

(The Secret War on William Pierce)

After hours of interviews and a careful review of Pierce’s writing and documents, I concluded that he was certainly paranoid and in need of psychiatric help. And yet, his underlying complaint — that he had been the unwitting victim of a psychological attack — was supported by strong circumstantial evidence and a series of inexplicable coincidences. Something or someone did get him. 

Beginning in the mid-1950s, government agencies had indeed conducted top secret research on how to manipulate behavior, including the use of disorienting drugs and micro-transmitters. And Pierce had been harassed at various times for his liberal leanings and outbursts. But it was impossible to determine whether he was purposely drugged or harassed with a tiny transmitter. During the Cuban Missile crisis, however, he was involuntarily committed with a flimsy excuse, held for months under the supervision of an MKULTRA pioneer, and released despite an unchanged diagnosis, possibly because he was annoyingly rational and continued to make trouble. The entire experience had shattered him, and possibly induced psychosis.

Sure, he came across as unstable and defensive, and sometimes thought unnamed forces were still harassing him. But his story didn’t vary, the dates and most of the people checked out, and he had kept receipts in the form of documents and detailed accounts. Plus, his analysis of the threat, the thing that had driven him from the start, was on the mark. And chilling. One report, dated August 9, 1964, written while he was living at home in Lyndonville after his Oklahoma ordeal, was presciently titled “New Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties.” It began:

“Modern science poses unusual new threats to the traditional privacy and freedom of Americans. Bugging and other snooping devices have come into widespread misuse… Psychological conditioning and organized scientific sociology have been used for political purposes in the academic establishment. In particular, ambitious opportunists have exploited the public concern about Communism to organize attacks on alleged Reds, subversives, and other “undesirables.” One of the most alarming developments had been the underground alliance between right-wing extremists and security personnel.”

He even had a basic action program: expose the facts, protect the rights of individuals, and develop legal safeguards to keep “Brave New Science” honest and safe. Armed with his sources, my research, and the available facts, it no longer sounded so delusional to me.

   

Hoping to discover more in government files, in early 1980 I composed letters for Pierce to eight federal agencies, requesting documents under the Freedom of Information Act. These notarized requests asked for anything related to his time on the faculty at four universities, as well as his work for the NSA in 1953. Not surprisingly, all the agencies claimed to have nothing in their files. But a brief reply from NSA was unintentionally revealing. Even though Pierce had worked there, Information Policy Chief Charles Sullivan claimed that they were “unable to locate any files listed under your name in this Agency’s systems or records or files.” It was less than convincing.

In 2013, when I conducted a follow up online search, one piece of correspondence between Pierce and the CIA did turn up. Dated August 1, 1960 and addressed to him at the Syracuse Math Department, it included this statement: “Mr. Dulles (CIA Director at the time) asked me to acknowledge and thank you for your letter of 9 July 1960 enclosing a message to Dr. Glennan of NASA and Mr. D.H. Lewis. The thoughtfulness in bringing our attention to your proposal is indeed appreciated.”

What was his proposal? Electronic mental telepathy, Pierce called it. “Though the technical requirements have already been met, the process and application are new,” he explained. It was really a fishing expedition, an attempt to discover whether his suspicions were true. In the referenced letter to NASA, he pointed to the work being done at the Aviation Medicine School in Texas, where tiny transmitters were being used for research, as well as cybernetic work underway to assist with space exploration, and “extensive use of various voice analyzers and signal separators.” 

Every agency we contacted in 1980, including NASA, NSA and CIA, denied ever hearing from Pierce or knowing anything about him. Nevertheless, he had clearly gotten their attention.

While studying the first amendment that summer in southern California under a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, I was able to verify most of Louis West’s career highlights. After his early assignments at Lackland AFB and posts in Oklahoma during the 1960s, he had moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and established himself as a leading figure in neuropsychiatry. He was also connected with the Brain Research Institute, Israeli Center for Psychobiology, National Academy of Religion and Mental Health, California Alcoholism Council, Pavlovian Society, and White House Conference on Civil Rights.  

But before I could share the new information and insights, along with some FOIA documents I obtained on Subproject 43, word arrived that Pierce was dead. At 59 years old, he passed away around October 12, 1980. His body wasn’t discovered until almost a week later. According to the medical examiner, the specific cause of death wasn’t clear. But he confirmed that Pierce had suffered from advanced cirrhosis of the liver and inflammation of the pancreas, both related to alcoholism, and coronary arteriosclerosis.

A few weeks earlier, Pierce had shared a final truth about himself, one that may help explain why he was targeted in the first place. He was gay and in the closet. His 1962 medical records revealed only hints about “predisposing factors.” The most obvious clue was this brief description: “Obese child who lived with widowed mother and who has functioned in a passive dependent manner.” During the 1950s discovery of such a secret, combined with his incessant letter-writing, could have placed an invisible target on his back.

His doctor lived another 18 years. But in late 1998, Jolly

Louis “Jolly” West, MKULTRA’s
LSD mind games doctor, was
in control until the end.   

West learned that he was dying of cancer and told his son. At 75 years old, hip pain had led to an X-ray. “It took me about ten seconds to register what I saw. There were metastases throughout my skeleteon. Cancer everywhere. I realized I was looking at a death sentence.”

As usual, he wanted to stay in control. And he had a plan. “If I knock off a little ahead of schedule, nobody’s going to know the difference,” he told his son, “and I’ll have saved myself a hell of a lot of pain.” Then he added, “But I’ll need you on board, to help me.” John West agreed.

On January 2, 1999, the two men followed through. After the younger West picked up a prescription for enough Seconal to do the job, the elder West combined them with assorted pills he had on hand — a bathroom pharmacy that included methadone, heptabarbital, Ambien, and morphine. From falling asleep to respiratory/cardiac arrest, it took only twenty minutes to die. “Mr. Totally in Control,” as his loving son sometimes called him, had done it again.

Less than six months later, on the same day Jolly West’s portrait was hung in the foyer of the Louis Joylon West Auditorium at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, John West’s mother Kathryn asked him to do her the same favor, assist with her suicide. Again he complied. 
As West explained in his bittersweet book about their final days, “I believe, as they did, in freedom of choice, the right to personal privacy and self-determination.” Unfortunately, the same rights were denied to William Pierce.

Previous chapters

One: Wrong Turn

Two: Naming Names

Three: Unwanted Voices

Four: Chung's Way

Five: Mastering Minds

Six: The Doctor from MKULTRA

Seven: Bad Medicine

This and previous chapters will appear in the forthcoming book, Informed Dissent

UNWITTING: When the Cure is Worse

When Vermonter William Pierce’s troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being pursued by the government. But once MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 his personal experiences —from the McCarthy era to the Cuban missile crisis — began to look uncannily close to the CIA’s experiments. And when he was involuntarily committed in 1962, he found himself in the care of one of the leading MKULTRA doctors. 

Chapter Seven: Bad Medicine

(The Secret War on William Pierce)

     “For two weeks, I was a ‘patient’ at Coyne Hospital — denied telephone privileges and heavily doped,” Pierce recalled in 1964. “On November 14, 1962, I was admitted to the V.A. Hospital in Oklahoma City. My court record arrived there, enlarged from the original ‘delusions of persecution’ to include paranoia, schizophrenia, tendencies to suicide and violence, and moderate drinking. Another week elapsed before I was permitted to contact a lawyer.

     “The first reactions of the V.A. psychiatrists was that I probably had a persecution complex: ‘We can’t believe this stuff about extremists and their electrical gadgets. We feel you have an illness and we foresee long-term confinement’.”
     When Pierce brought up his Constitutional rights and “enforced commitment,” he claims that West replied, “We’re experts in psychiatry, not politics.” Yet a report on his intake examination confirms that West already had decided that the case “might represent a state of true paranoia.”

Pierce kept his hospital records in
hope of uncovering what happened.

     Based on what evidence? An examination summary filed one month after his admission noted that Pierce “felt that there was a ‘right-wing underground’ operating there (at Oklahoma State) among a few people including some of his students. He states that a type of ‘heckle’ was noted...Also he noted that at restaurants and cafes people would walk and stand near him and swing their arms back and forth. He states that when this occurred 5 or 6 times in a community it was more than just an incident and was part of an organized heckle.”

     In a sub-section on “Previous Personality Disorders or Psychiatric Illness,” the V.A. doctors acknowledged that Pierce had consistently asserted “he is not mentally ill,” but rather the victim of a “substantive situation.” It was not merely a feeling, he claimed, “I actually am a victim.” And he still remembered the original 1955 incident. “I have a political experience and not a mental illness,” he insisted. 

     For the next six week Pierce was confined in a closed ward, his phone calls monitored and mail censored. Among the drugs prescribed during this period were Chloral Hydrate “for bedtime sedation,” then Deriden as a replacement, plus Stelazine, Cogentin, Meprobamate and Thorazine. But then “an abrupt transformation occurred,” Pierce wrote, “not in me but in the psychiatrists. I was moved to an open ward, and was soon ‘very well’ — well enough to attend a mathematics conference in California, and to be almost completely unrestricted. A doctor alluded nervously to my ‘preoccupation’ with ‘telling the truth’.”

      What changed? To start, West allowed Pierce to play an electric organ on the 7th floor. “This was enjoyed by both patients and personnel, as this patient was quite capable,” according to his file. In December, Pierce began to talk about a transfer to the New York area “at his own expense for continued care.” A few weeks later West allowed him to attend an organ recital in town and attend a related meeting of musicians.

     He was still discussing potential legal moves, however, while pursuing “contacts with people about what has gone on.” In court, Pierce warned his doctors, “we might emphasize I was committed in a way that involved my political expression. Also we might go into the substantive things the extremists did.” 

     Asked whether he still believed a tiny tooth transmitter had been used to harass him, he responded cautiously. “My lawyer has recommended that I not expound on things for which I don’t have readily available evidence.”  

     On January 9, 1963, just a week after his transfer to the hospital’s open ward, Pierce was elected ward chairman. “He was in charge with other patients of writing a constitution for ward 7EW,” his records note, “handled this very well and also handled the ward meeting in a very proper and formal manner.” In February, the doctors let him begin day trips to the library, then allowed him to attend a math convention in California. After that, discussions proceeded quickly on “restoration of competency.”

     Oddly enough, his diagnosis was unchanged: “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type, characterized by inappropriate affect, seven-year history of delusions, deeply fixed...history of auditory hallucinations and grandiose thinking... External Precipitating Stress: Unknown.” But confined for months he never acted out. Instead, he organized other patients when he had the chance. He also entertained many patients and even some staff.

     But even though Pierce was released from the hospital and judged to be competent again, his academic career was over. “On March 20, I left the hospital with a certificate of my ability to work. I so wrote President Willham and mathematics Chairman Johnson; but neither replied, thus further violating their promises.”
      It felt like another betrayal, since Willham had earlier agreed to let Pierce return. “Without delay,” he wrote, “I drove to the Missouri border and headed east.”
     The next 15 years were marked by frustration, marginal employment, incessant letter writing — in many cases to defend his theories, and a downward spiral into alcoholism. In the late 1960s he mailed more than 1000 letters to US leaders, mainly about the war in Vietnam. Most responses were polite but noncommittal.  

     While Pierce struggled with depression, failure and disorientation, his doctor thrived. Turning from hypnosis and hallucinations to group behavior, West began to study the psychodynamics of sit-ins and revolutions. In 1973, he proposed the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. The goal was to “alter undesirable behavior,” at first through inhibiting drugs but eventually with implanted electrodes that could control behavior by remote control. 

     Although not publicly embraced, the latter idea did inspire a Michael Crichton novel and film, The Terminal Man, in which the cure is worse than the violent tendencies it is supposed to short-circuit.

NEXT: End Games

Previous Chapters

One: Wrong Turn

Two: Naming Names

Three: Unwanted Voices

Four: Chung's Way

Five: Mastering Minds

Six: The Doctor from MKULTRA

UNWITTING: Turning Drugs into Weapons

When Vermonter William Pierce’s troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being pursued by the government. But once MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 his personal experiences —from the McCarthy era to the Cuban missile crisis — began to look uncannily close to the CIA’s experiments. And when he was involuntarily committed in 1962, he found himself in the care of one of the leading MKULTRA doctors. 

Chapter Six: The Doctor from MKULTRA

(The Secret War on William Pierce)

Louis J. West was already a respected psychiatrist when he became William Pierce’s doctor in November 1962. Chairman of the Behavioral Sciences Department at the University of Oklahoma and supervisor of the psych ward at the V.A. Hospital in Tulsa, he was three years younger and almost a foot taller than his patient, an attractive alpha male who resembled Orson Welles, a man of science, always in control and ostensibly above reproach.

     “An activist for integration and civil rights since his college days,” according to his son, West was also “probably the only white person from Oklahoma to attend Dr. Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, DC.” That was less than a year after he and Pierce met. 

     John West’s portrait of his dad in The Last Goodnights, published as an homage after the death of both parents, was a prime example of biographical whitewashing. “He had examined Jack Ruby after Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald,” the younger West wrote, “he had served as the chief psychiatrist for Patricia Hearst’s defense… he was the first white psychiatrist to testify on behalf of black South African prisoners who had been tortured by their white guards…”

      And it didn’t end there. “His accidental friendship with actor Charlton Heston in New York in the late 1940s — well before either man had any professional fame — led to other friendships at the highest levels of Hollywood, especially after Jolly left the University of Oklahoma and took the top job in psychiatry at UCLA,” wrote his son. “He was a big man and he’d led a big life.”

     But the sunny rundown conveniently left out his work as an aggressive cult deprogrammer, his promotion of controversial ideas like chemical castration, psychosurgery and control of women’s menstrual cycles, his persistent philandering, or his plan, backed by Gov. Ronald Reagan, to create a top secret psi-war center in a former NIKE Missile base. He also didn’t mention the fact that West, who argued that Jack Ruby was being unnecessarily paranoid about his safety, was also one of the last people to interview Oswald’s killer before he became terminally ill. And nothing was said about his father’s top secret research.

     By the late 1970s, Pierce could recall little about his one-time psychiatrist beyond his nickname, Jolly, and not much more about his role during five months of involuntary commitment. As department chief the job definitely included prescribing drugs and dosages, along with the authority to recommend continued commitment or release. Yet he insisted vaguely there was even more. It took me years to untangle the web of connections. By then it was too late to make a difference.

     When Pierce first suspected that he was the target of covert harassment in 1955, West had already launched MKULTRA’s Subproject 43. Prior to that, he had worked with the Army on drinking and emotional problems among soldiers, studied the long-term impacts on prisoners of war, served as chief of psychiatry at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and pushed for clinical research on the effects of tranquilizers at the University of Oklahoma.

     But the focus of Subproject 43 was different — the “psychobiology of the dissociated states and of hypnosis.” To that end, West worked with drugs that could speed hypnosis, or else provide an immunity from it. He also conducted sensory deprivation experiments that “yielded promising leads in terms of suggestibility and the production of trance-like states.” Those early experiments, he noted, suggested “that more control can be exerted over the autonomic nervous system than has been previously supposed.”

     West wanted to take his research further, however. “A psycho-physiological research team is being developed,” noted a status report. But “a unique lab must be constructed,” including a “special chamber in which all psychologically significant aspects of the environment can be controlled...In this setting the various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.”

     Was the lab established in Oklahoma? And could Pierce have been one of West’s unwitting subjects? It was impossible to prove, since thousands of MKULTRA files had been destroyed. But the research was consistent with Pierce’s descriptions and symptoms. Inspired by the interrogation techniques of the Chinese during the Korean War, West had learned that sleep deprivation, combined with hallucinogens like LSD, could be a “political weapon.” This wasn’t an explicit admission that he had conducted experiments in the field, but it came close. 
      Around the same time West ran his notorious, fatal LSD test with a 7,000 pound elephant.  It took that unwitting victim about two hours to die. The point of the experiment was to “enrage” the elephant into a charge purely by chemical means, apparently to determine if LSD would induce “musth,” a naturally occurring condition in which elephants become violent and uncontrollable.

     By 1962, he had been managing Subproject 43 with covert CIA funding for more than five years. It now included advanced LSD research, some of which confirmed ominously that “repeated large doses of LSD may lead to apparently irreversible personality changes.” The research also described how a psychosis might purposely be provoked. “Progressive sleep loss appears to cause a decreased capacity for integrating perceptions,” he explained. “The disorganizing effect of excessive wakefulness has been exploited in extorting false confessions from prisoners...Other experiences with sleep-deprived subjects suggest that fleeting hallucinations begin after two or three days without sleep.”

     

Jolly West around the time he treated Pierce
and accidentally killed an elephant with LSD
to see if he could chemically induce rage.

West’s seminal paper, “A Clinical and Theoretical Overview of Hallucinatory Phenomena,” reads like the culmination of a decade’s research. Drugs can be used as adjuncts to manipulation or assault, he concluded, in ways ranging from blackmail, addiction and kidnapping (where the drug renders a victim helpless) to “Manson-ism” (when a strong-willed psychopath manipulates followers made suggestible by drugs), law enforcement, and intelligence operations in which agents surreptitiously put LSD in a drink to obtain secrets, provoke a defection, or discredit an opponent.

     “The role of drugs in the exercise of internal political control is also coming under increased scrutiny,” West wrote. “Control can be imposed either through prohibition or supply.” While prohibition gives government considerable  power, he suggested that “a more affluent nation can afford to tolerate a large number of drug users in various circumstances.” Sometimes it is “more convenient and perhaps even more economical” to let people use hallucinogens, he advised, “if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent…. 

     “When tensions or hostilities arise, marijuana or hashish is quickly produced and passed around; the anger literally goes up in smoke.”
     His predictions proved to be off the mark, especially when applied to LSD. In 1960, as part of an LSD experiment at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, the drug was given to novelist Ken Kesey. Big mistake. As Michael Pollan recounts in How to Change Your Mind, his book on the evolution of psychedelic science, Kesey subsequently launched his own experiments, a series of “Acid Tests” conducted with thousands of Bay Area young people. 
“To the extent that Ken Kesey and his Pranksters helped shape the new zeitgeist,” concludes Pollan, “a case can be made that the cultural upheaval we call the 1960s began with a CIA mind control experiment gone awry.”

     By late 1962, West was also refining his “perceptual release” theory of hallucinations. Life experiences leave permanent neural traces, he believed, but released perceptions do not become conscious hallucinations without a “general level of arousal” and some outside stimulation. To stimulate such perceptual release, reduce the sensory input while arousal remains high. The result is that “images originating within the rooms of our brains may be perceived as though they came from outside the windows of our senses.” 

     Pierce had no idea, then or ever, that his supervising doctor was a mind control expert, or that he had been a CIA-funded researcher for years, conducting precisely the kind of invasive experiments Pierce wrote and worried about. But he was determined to keep his medical records and detailed notes on what had happened to him. 

Next: Bad Medicine

Previous chapters

One: Wrong Turn

Two: Naming Names

Three: Unwanted Voices

Four: Chung's Way

Five: Mastering Minds

UNWITTING: The Secret War on William Pierce

When Vermonter William Pierce’s troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being pursued by the government. But once MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 his personal experiences —from the McCarthy era to the Cuban missile crisis — began to look uncannily close to the CIA’s experiments. And when he was involuntarily committed in 1962, he found himself in the care of one of the leading MKULTRA doctors. 

By Greg Guma

Chapter One: Wrong Turn

He had nightmares when he was wide awake. Nervous and garrulous, he couldn’t resist running over the accomplishments in his past – prestigious places he had taught, famous scientists and intellectuals he had known, mathematical breakthroughs that had brought him early acclaim. 
     The words came fast and urgently as William Pierce struggled to sound confident about what he was saying. But at times he let out a small laugh that betrayed his underlying fears, mostly that he might come across as crazy.

     He was 57 when we first met. Once a gifted mathematician, a university professor with a Harvard Ph.D., and valedictorian of the 1943 University of Vermont graduating class, Pierce no longer looked very collegiate or professorial. Five foot three, out of shape and overweight, he shambled into the editorial office in a frayed, rumbled suit and had clearly been drinking.
     He had tracked me down at the Vermont Vanguard Press, the weekly paper I edited, after attending a talk about intelligence community abuses. The talk was mostly based on my investigation of FBI disinformation surrounding the arrest of a so-called “terrorist suspect” at the Canadian border. Pierce claimed he had an even more explosive story to tell.
     It wasn't difficult to verify his academic credentials and past employment. William A. Pierce had indeed been an academic star. Born in Lyndonville in 1921, he received the highest academic grades as a UVM undergraduate since John Dewey. After graduating in 1943 with an award for “unusual excellence in scholarship,” he was swept into World War II and served in the Navy at a Virginia proving ground until 1946. “I doubled as mathematician and church organist,” he recalled. After the war came three years at Harvard, where he taught and completed his doctorate.
     In 1950, attracted by “an excellent group of research scholars,” Pierce joined the Math Department at Syracuse University. But the City of Syracuse “was then a hotbed of anti-Communist activity,” he told me, “and the University was under considerable pressure to do something about ‘them reds on the faculty’ – especially the Jewish reds in the Math Department.”
     Syracuse was also the home of Laurence Johnson, supermarket chain owner and ardent enforcer of the McCarthy era blacklist. Johnson was widely known for threatening to place signs in his stores that warned customers not to buy the products of any company that sponsored a TV or radio program featuring one of "Stalin's little creatures." This meant anyone in Red Channels, a 213-page compilation of entertainers with alleged Communist links. 
     Some of the country’s largest corporations had bowed to Johnson’s pressure.
     A few months after Pierce arrival on campus, Dr. Donald Kibbey, acting Math Department chair, fired two members of the faculty for alleged activities in “controversial” political groups. Several other mathematicians submitted their resignations in solidarity, and one colleague, Professor Paul Rosenbloom, warned Pierce that he “was terribly wrong to stay at Syracuse.”
     Years later, Pierce chided himself for not seeking a teaching post elsewhere, as some of his colleagues did. “I was certainly untrue to myself,” he said. “It was the worst mistake I have ever made."  
     One reason was that the new math Chair wanted to reorient and rebuild his department “along security lines.” An early warning of the trouble ahead emerged during an argument between them. Pierce recalled Kibbey’s face literally turning red as he labeled Franklin Roosevelt a “crook” and accused Rosenbloom of being a Communist.  
     “At Harvard and Syracuse I was considered a left-winger,” Pierce admitted. “The label resulted partly from my membership in peace groups and opposition to the Cold War, but it was primarily my criticism of FBI investigations and security procedure in areas of human learning. There was some trouble, for instance, when I described Russian advances in certain fields of mathematics and science, and then urged that Americans wage a more effective, peaceable competition with the Soviet Union.”
     “Listen buddy,” one colleague snapped in response, “”if you don’t like your Uncle Sammy, get the hell back to Russia.”

Next: Naming Names

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