Acres of Skin by Hornblum Allen M

Author:Hornblum, Allen M. [Hornblum, Allen M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2011-08-07T21:00:00+00:00

VI

Since the end of World War II, the CIA had been preoccupied with the potential benefit and threat of truth serums and exotic drugs. Whereas the Army investigated drugs that incapacitated, the CIA pursued drugs that could control the mind. During the Korean War, two secret programs, code-named ULTRA and NAOMI, were established “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.”30 Everything from hallucinogenic mushrooms to BZ was studied by CIA investigators. In the attempt to create the perfect CIA operative, brainwashing, hypnosis, electroshock, personality assessments, and a host of other techniques were added to the drug list. The prospect of programming an individual to do one’s bidding—a human magic bullet more dependable than traditional agents—was overpowering. Most, if not all, of these initiatives proved useless; the vision of a simple, one-step drug to facilitate everything from police investigations to the unmasking of foreign spies was considerably more difficult to realize than the agency had expected.

Much of the documentation concerning the CIA’s role in human experimentation was destroyed in 1973 under the orders of Richard Helms, the agency’s director. President Richard Nixon’s decision to remove Helms and name a new director spurred Helms to order the destruction of embarrassing files, particularly those dealing with human experimentation. Furthermore, some CIA initiatives were considered too controversial for written transcription. “Closely guarded” experiments had their results “conveyed verbally,” leading to “sparse documentation” of the projects.31 Stansfield Turner, then chief of the CIA, told inquiring senators at one high-profile hearing that it had been agency policy “to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs” during much of their human research work.32

The CIA’s early investigations centered on the possibilities of dlysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. Discovered by accident in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffmann, a Swiss chemist working for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical firm, LSD was several times more potent than other mind-altering drugs like mescaline. In an attempt to discover how and why LSD worked as it did, and what antidotes could be used against it, the CIA sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into a whole new field of research. Funneled through front groups such as the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the agency was able to pay significant monetary stipends to worthy institutions willing to investigate new drugs.33

By the mid-1960s, the agency was ready to further explore “ways for predictably influencing human behavior through the use of drugs.”34 In early 1966, it established a “behavioral pharmacology program” in order to develop the “capability to manipulate human behavior in a predictable manner through the use of drugs and to devise defensive means…to protect agency personnel from drugs clandestinely administered by the opposition.” Such drugs would also be useful in “interrogation situations, penetration of guarded areas, covert action, and paramilitary operations.”

Part of this new effort, code-named Project OFTEN, was designed to test in animals a wide assortment of “drugs and chemical compounds having desired behavioral effects” that could then be “clinically evaluated with human subjects.

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