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