Battling Truth Decay: A Social Virus Can Also Be Deadly

Corruption of truth has been contributing to social division and civic decay for years. Yet there are few consequences for peddling lies and paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a vile premeditated hoax.

By Greg Guma

Conspiracy theories. They used to be good fun, provocative dinner table conversation and the focus of action movie plots. They were like certain parts of the body. Everybody had them and, most of the time, no one got hurt.

But that’s no longer true. Now believing in conspiracies can get people killed— like thinking a virus infecting millions is just more fake news— or cause confusion and havoc at the very least.

2019 Podcast

Listen to "The People’s Republic #5: Conspiracies" on Spreaker.

— Conspiracy History: From the Illuminati to Kennedy —

According to the FBI — itself the focus of considerable theorizing —  “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory are now officially a “domestic terror threat.” What’s QAnon? Also known as The Storm, it’s a secretive network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and also in Pizzagate, a related theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant — which didn’t actually have a basement.

Forget Jeffrey Epstein. These are the real perverts. Epstein is just another deep state victim. That’s how this thinking works.

Back in reality, supporters of QAnon have been linked to multiple threats, attempted acts of violence, even murders. And Trump has amplified Q messages dozens of times on Twitter. Just days before he destroyed part of downtown Nashville and killed himself last week, the Christmas Day bomber sent packages containing writings and videos promoting conspiracy theories to multiple people.

In October 2017,  QAnon jumped to the mainstream in the form of shirts and signs that were prominently visible at a Trump campaign rally in Tampa, FL. After that Trump met with several supporters of the conspiracy theory — at the White House. A QAnon supporter co-chaired a coalition group for Trump’s reelection campaign, and several believers have since been elected to Congress. In 2021, they are challenging the legitimacy of the last presidential election.

Do more people buy into conspiracies today? Or is it mainly more media coverage? Either way, for most of the last 50 years, between 60 and 80 percent of the country has believed in some form of JFK conspiracy theory. They’re obviously not all “conspiracy nuts.”

On the other hand, conspiracy thinking did cross over in 2016 — probably with foreign help — from Internet chat groups to mainstream news coverage. For example, a Yahoo News podcast, aptly named "Conspiracyland,” revealed that Russia’s foreign intelligence service was the origin of a hoax report that tied the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, to Hillary Clinton. Washington police concluded that Rich was killed in a botched robbery. There was no proof that his murder had any political connections. But many people believed there were.

Among the violent conspiracy theories cited by the FBI is one involving a man who thinks Transportation Security Administration agents are part of a New World Order elite. Another focuses on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government-funded facility in Alaska that has been linked to everything from death beams to mind control. (See Podcast Extra for more on HAARP.)

Whatever the truth about HAARP, two men were arrested in 2019 for “stockpiling weapons, ammunition and other tactical gear in preparation to attack” the Alaska facility. They believe it is being used “to control the weather and prevent humans from talking to God.”

 

Source: Reliable Sources/CNN

In response to the spread of conspiracy-motivated violence, the FBI is applying the same radicalization analysis it has used against foreign terrorism. They essentially focus on the ideological motives. FBI Director Wray claims that the Bureau is only concerned with violence, not with what people believe. 

But the number of extremist categories has certainly grown. According to Michael German, a former FBI agent with the Brennan Center for Justice, “It’s part of the radicalization theory the FBI has promoted despite empirical studies that show it’s bogus.”

“They like the radicalization theory because it justifies mass surveillance,” the former agent claims. “If we know everyone who will do harm is coming from this particular community, mass surveillance is important. We keep broadening the number of communities we include in extremist categories.”

But this argument is also, basically, a conspiracy theory. And that’s the problem. It’s increasingly hard to tell which ones to give credibility.

Not all conspiracy theories are dangerous. Even the FBI admits that much. Some may even be benign. But others have led to attempted or successful violent attacks. The Pizzagate conspiracy, for example, led a 28-year-old man to invade a Washington, D.C., restaurant to rescue the children he believed were being kept there and fire an assault-style weapon.

Or the related, overarching Deep State conspiracy theory. The FBI cites an unnamed California man, arrested in December 2018 after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car. He was allegedly planning to “blow up a satanic temple monument” in the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Ill. Why? To “make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who are dismantling society.”

The FBI’s intelligence analysis doesn’t mention Alex Jones or InfoWars by name. But it does include some of the conspiracy theories frequently associated with him, especially the New World Order theory. Jones claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 children were killed, was a hoax, a false flag operation intended as a pretext for the government to seize or outlaw firearms. The families of a number of victims sued Jones for defamation, saying his conspiracy-mongering contributed to death threats and online abuse.

Following the conspiracy trail a bit further, you quickly come to President Trump, who promotes a number of theories. Here’s a short list: He often talks about the Deep State, and frequently retweets output from QAnon. He’s the godfather of Spygate, which alleges that Obama and others wiretapped him, and a big pusher of the voter impersonation lie, aka the existence of millions of phantom voters. There is also white genocide theory, baked into his output, and of course, the Obama citizenship theory — which launched the movement that launched his presidential candidacy.

Yet it’s highly unlikely that the FBI will be investigating Trump for peddling conspiracies — no matter who they hurt — even after he is no longer in power. Instead, Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, has told Congress that the bureau now classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: 

* racially motivated violent extremism 

* anti-government/anti-authority extremism 

* animal rights/environmental extremism, and

* abortion extremism, used to classify pro-choice and anti-abortion extremists

The new focus on conspiracy theories falls under the broader category of anti-government extremism. And that’s a slippery slope.

A decade ago, the most successful right wing conspiracy theory involved Obama as a secret Muslim. Before Trump piled on, millions of people already believed it. They also believed that secular humanists wanted to repress religion, and that liberals were plotting to confiscate people’s guns and push a “gay agenda.” All of that set the context for Trump’s election.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, however, there is the idea that 9/11 was an inside job — and all that entails. On the first 2021 broadcast of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd raised that theory from the conspiracy graveyard, comparing the idea to Sen. Ron Johnson’s allegations about election fraud. Tit for tat.

In the past, I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist myself —for example, for saying that we should know more about the attack on the Twin Towers. Nevertheless, I also think that a modern-day Reichstag fire at multiple locations qualifies as a radical, somewhat implausible conclusion.

On the other hand, despite the fact that conspiracy theories can be distractions, even deliberate deceptions, some are worth consideration, as long as we stipulate that they aren’t necessarily 100 percent accurate, and certainly resist exaggeration or total buy-in. But some theories definitely pose a real and present danger as incitements to violence.

The problem is that it has become difficult for millions of people to tell the difference between the strange and the dangerous in an era when facts have been so seriously devalued. There are so many possibilities, the standard of proof appears to be in decline, and the theories tend to evolve, expand and mutate rapidly in unexpected ways as they circulate through cyberspace. There is often also too little follow up to see whether new facts reinforce or discredit a particular theory.

For several years, corruption of truth has been contributing to social division and civic decay. Yet there are few consequences for peddling paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a premeditated hoax. Instead, more actors are weaponizing these things to expand or hold onto power.

For all the false prophets, gross opportunists, and irresponsible rumor-mongers who currently threaten societies with truth decay, real accountability has been hard to get so far. But we do know who many of them are. 

So, how about this as a start? Let’s call them out, publicly, maybe even post their names on billboards, banner ads, and Trump’s Great Wall of Lies down at the border. And on the wall, please make the names big enough to be seen from space. Then let’s all stop listening to them.

Podcast Extra: REALITY CHECK

Let’s keep things in perspective — if that’s possible in such a confusing world — with a look back. Here’s some of what I observed on the same topic about ten years ago:

I usually resist the urge to challenge the controversial theories of fellow travelers, at least in public. Years ago, during an after-dinner discussion about Al-Qaeda after Osama, someone casually asserted that President Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it happen. No one objected or said a word. I thought about it, but let the moment pass.

Anything’s possible, right? Why be rude? But some theories and predictions are just too important. They are widely accepted as indisputable and part of an overall world view, usually linked with an anti-establishment ideology. They have practical consequences for social action, can spark deep divisions, and influence how people see and treat others. In some groups, if you question the conclusions of a prevailing theory you’re either a dupe or a collaborator.

Deep skepticism is often at the root, a good thing in general. After all, so much of what we once believed has turned out to be a lie, or at least a very selective version of reality. But still, shouldn’t there be standards? Also, why do some theories get all the attention while others, perhaps more credible ones, get buried? And can’t we at least call people to account when their claims repeatedly lead down false trails?

In 2004, when friends claimed that George W. Bush would invade someplace – probably Cuba – before the election, I was skeptical but said nothing. Four year later, when colleagues embraced the idea that either a) there would be a pre-election invasion – Syria this time, or b) federal troops would be used to install Bush as dictator and block Obama’s election – in short, Martial Law was imminent – I took bets.

In 2011, word spread in activist circles that the rise in US Drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks inside Pakistan were harbingers of something bigger. The war was going to be extended into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of seizing that nation’s nuclear weapons. Turns out they went after Osama, although many people believe that is also a lie and bin Laden was killed years earlier. 

These death conspiracies sound like the classic one about a fake moon landing – we never went there, right? – including phony video and a staged photo of the National Security brain trust looking at…what? Seal Team Six on a Top Secret movie set?

But speaking of plots, depopulation has been getting some attention, specifically related to the use of covert technology to allegedly cause earthquakes and tsunamis. (Which bring me back to HAARP — The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a joint military program involved in classified experiments involving the ionosphere.) 

The basic claim is that it has been involved for decades in developing various types of weather-based and environmental warfare capabilities. It doesn’t help that the military has a name for this kind of thing – weather modification. (That’s why the two men were stockpiling ammunition for an attack.)

Still, using HAARP to cause earthquakes, wipe out regions and thin the herd is something else. The theory went like this: Supporters of the depopulation theory say Haiti was a transparent example, and claimed as evidence that a US task force was ready to invade before the earthquake occurred. And before that came the Indian Ocean tsunami, where people weren’t warned as soon as possible. Afterward came Fukushima, a full-scale assault not only on Japan, but on the oceans and atmosphere.

“The established pattern, with disasters and invasions, is incremental escalation,” explained a friend who supported the theory. Nuclear reactors in the US are therefore sitting ducks, just waiting for a HAARP attack. “And they have made it clear that an 80% reduction in world population is their goal,” he explained. Who made it clear? The overseers of the New World Order. Them.

Early in 2011 a rumor also began circulating that Wikileaks was a CIA plot. The idea was that the leaks actually supported the US imperial agenda around the world. In short, Wikileaks was a US intelligence con job that would be used to crack down on the Internet and advance a long-standing anti-civil liberties agenda. 

Evidence used to support this idea included the shutting down of Wikileaks servers in the US and the 2009 introduction of S. 773, The Cybersecurity Act, which, if it had passed, would have given the president the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. We dodged a bullet there.

The problem was that, while the Wikileaks-CIA plot looked even then like a distraction, the Department of Homeland Security had actually begun to seize and shut down web domains without due process or trial. The focus was sites that supposedly “violate copyrights.” But the risk was that cyber censorship could be extended to, let’s say, combat alleged cyber terrorism.  A very slippery slope.

After several more websites were shut down, DHS held a hearing on the move to give the President more authority over the Internet during an emergency. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Joe Lieberman noted that China “can disconnect parts of the Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.” In this context, the Wiklieaks-CIA story may have been an attempt at disinformation, one that didn’t go viral.

(Additional comments from the August 8, 2019 podcast) 

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