Tag Archives: Linda McDonald

Exploration 21: MK–U Fame

30 January 2024 By in History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
FootnoteA

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground

Pink Floyd – Astronomy Domine: Written by Syd Barrett – Piper at the Gates of Dawn – 1967

“Astronomy Domine“, a Latin phrase meaning “An Astral Chant to the Lord” leads off Pink Floyd’s debut album: “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” containing the rhyming cadence of nonsense some of which are noted above. Many have attributed these lyrics to a psychedelic experience induced by LSD, but others say nay–you decide. Leaving that aside, Syd Barrett in 1968 was thrown out of the band that he helped create, reportedly due to his excessive use of psychedelics and mental illness, cause, and effect some would say. Barrett’s family denied that he was mentally ill only that he was occupying a point on the autism spectrum. Roger Waters, Floyd bassist, the world’s best-known antisemite and Red Chinese apologist, said Barrett was schizophrenic. David Gilmour, the band’s guitarist, believed that LSD may not have been the root cause of Barrett’s aberrant behavior but it likely was the catalyst. Barrett died in 2006 at the age of sixty, a painter, a gardener, a recluse.

MKUltra, as I discussed in a previous post concerning Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“, was a covert CIA designed, funded, and operated psy-op to brainwash and mentally torture subjects with the aim of controlling human behavior. The CIA used drugs, such as LSD, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, radiation, and other sadistic depravities to achieve their objectives. The operation officially ran from 1953 to 1963 or 1973 depending on source, but there is speculation that it continued well beyond the previously mentioned dates. Allegedly, all CIA documents related to MKUltra were destroyed in 1973 by the order of CIA Director Richard Helms. The operation was revealed to the public by the U.S. Senate Church Committee in 1975 with additional information coming from the Rockerfeller and Pike Committees run from the Senate and House of Representatives, respectively. The program consisted of 162 projects at 86 institutions including colleges, mental hospitals, prisons, and drug companies and employed at least 185 “researchers”. MKUltra was unethical and illegal, causing widespread human destruction and death among the thousands of unknowing subjects with little or no known repercussions or consequences for the instigators or managers of the program.

It is estimated that at least a thousand, likely more, a lot more, prostitutes’ and their clients, enlisted military, CIA and other government employees, drug company employees, terminal cancer patients, prisoners, college and university students, and the vulnerable were selected, some voluntarily, some not, for the experiments which frequently did not end well. Over 1100 soldiers in the U.S. Army alone were administered LSD; with some of their stories discussed below.

Using government-employed prostitutes, read that opening phrase again, unsuspecting men were lured to CIA safe houses where they were drugged with LSD and observed. George Hunter White, the federal agent in charge of this sub-program of MKUltra, known as Midnight Climax, is quoted as saying in a letter to the head of the program, Sidney Gottlieb, that his work was, “…fun, fun, fun…Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? High morals and ethics were not a requirement for employment at the CIA.

The agency also targeted individuals who were considered enemies of or threats to the government, including foreign agents and dissidents. The subjects were detained and coerced into participating in the experiments. Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan’s lawyer discussed in open court that his client may have been the subject of a MKUltra experiment but offered no evidence as proof.

The CIA experimented on their own employees, military personnel, and other government workers without their consent or knowledge. Frank Olson, a CIA scientist, was murdered because of his concerns over the program.

Some individuals were aware that they were participating in MKUltra experiments and consented to be part of the research such as Ken Kelsey mentioned above. These volunteers often included military personnel, government employees, and civilians who were recruited for specific studies. The late 50s early 60s crowd of bohemians and hippies were full of willing participants to experiment with LSD. No coercion needed.

 As a outgrowth of Nazi war crimes during WWII, the Nuremberg Code was established in 1947 and is still considered a fundamental document in the ethics of medical research. The Nuremberg Code was only six years before the onset of the MKUltra experiments.

Below is a compilation of some of the more notorious, famous, and not-so-famous subjects of MKUltra that are in the public records.

  • Harold Blauer, a minor talent in the professional tennis circuit during the 1930s, managed to reach the “Round of 16” in the U.S. Professional Tennis Tournament at Forest Hills in 1935 but lost to the eventual winner, Bill Tilden. Later in life, due to symptoms of depression, Blauer checked into the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1952, where he was diagnosed as a “pseudo-neurotic schizophrenic” which in modern terms is called “borderline personality disorder”. The doctors believed his condition was improving and scheduled him for release from the institute. Inexplicably the doctors began injecting Blauer with a derivative of mescaline, MDA, a psychedelic compound like LSD and psilocybin and a close cousin of MDMA, better known in the night clubs as Ecstasy. The drug was developed by the German company Merck in 1912. One month after checking into the Institute Blauer was dead. The treating doctors were treating him under a classified agreement with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, a front for the CIA’s MKUltra project. The doctors have stated that they did not know what they were injecting into Blauer. The CIA’s front man at the Institute was Dr. Paul Hoch. Hoch later became head of mental hygiene in New York and a professor at Columbia University. In 1975 the government admitted to Blauer’s family that the mescaline derivative injections caused his death. In 1987, the government, after being sued for Blauer’s death paid out $700,000 to his family.
  • Whitey Bulger was a crime boss heading up the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston and an FBI informant snitching on the Patriarca crime family. Prior to his criminal career in Boston, he was arrested for robbing a bank in Rhode Island. He was incarcerated in an Atlanta Federal prison for this crime in 1956, becoming an inmate participant of MKUltra in return for a lighter sentence. He was told the experiment was focused on finding a cure for schizophrenia. While in prison he was given large doses of LSD almost every day for 15 months. He claims that his violent tendencies in later life were due to the drug. Even though he was a protected informant for the FBI he was finally apprehended in California in 2011 and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in 2013. He was premeditatively murdered within 7 minutes of arrival at the high security Hazelton Prison in West Virgina in 2018. Who ordered his murder remains unknown.
  • Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, was an American poet, writer, and core member of the Beat Generation best known for his 1956 poem of lament “Howl“, a literary reaction to a bad peyote trip. Ginsberg became a volunteer in the MKUltra in the 1950s, but it is not exactly clear whether he was fully informed of the nature or purpose of the LSD experiments. After discovering that the experiments were a CIA operation he wrote, “Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one the CIA’s lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?” A dual head scratcher of a question framed by a poet.
FootnoteC
  • Robert Hunter was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, joining the band in 1967 but never playing on stage, who went on to write many of the band’s most memorable songs including: “Ripple“, “Truckin“, and “Terrapin Station“. He also participated, and was paid, in MKUltra experiments with LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline at Stanford University. He reported that his experiences were creatively formative for him. He went to sing the praises of LSD throughout the land. “Black Peter“, “Dark Star“, and “China Cat Sunflower” were all songs that he wrote while under the influence of LSD. He died in 2019 at the age of 78 in California.
  • Dr. Robert Hyde is credited with being the first American to take LSD. The doctor was a psychiatrist at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, where he was persuaded by the Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders, to try and prescribe LSD to treat schizophrenia in his patients. In 1949 Hyde obtained LSD from Sandoz Chemicals, the company where LSD was discovered in 1938. After taking the drug he didn’t experience any psychosis, but his colleagues found his behavior strange. Hyde went on to accept CIA funding to test LSD on one hundred patients. This was the first of many LSD experiment in the U.S. Robert Hyde continued his experiments on unwitting patients at the CIA’s center in Rhode Island and later at the Vermont State Hospital. It was never clear whether Dr. Hyde fully understood the purposes of MKUltra.
  • Candy Jones, an American model, and radio host claimed that she was hypnotized and brainwashed by an MKUltra agent in 1960 who later employed her as a courier and spy. She claimed the experiments on her resulted in her having a split personality. Jones also claimed that Dr. Gilbert Jensen was her CIA handler who hypnotized her and drugged her to bring forward a secondary personality named Arlene. This secondary personality was supposedly used for various covert missions. She claimed that the CIA trained her in every aspect of covert action, including explosives, close combat with improvised weaponry, disguise, and communications. Her experience is speculative and has never been proven but it is a great plot which was used in the 2010 movie Salt. Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt plays a double-agent who is mind-controlled by remnants of the former USSR secret service. 
  • Ted Kaczynski was an American mathematician and domestic terrorist better known as the Unabomber. While earning his undergraduate degree at Harvard he volunteered, in 1959, for a psychological study run by Dr. Henry Murray, a CIA employee working on the MKUltra project. Kaczynski, in the study was subjected to intense interrogation that were, in his own words, “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.” The aim was to psychologically break the subject and explore the effects of severe stress on the human psyche. He later became a recluse, living in the backwoods of Montana, and a long-distance murderer, mailing bombs to people who advocated for modern technology, injuring twenty-three and killing three. From his cabin in Montana, he developed a nihilistic, anti-capitalist, anti-technology political philosophy, writing a manifesto that opposed industrialization and rejected modern left-wing politics. After an intense manhunt he was captured in 1996 and died in prison in 2023. As a post-script, Timothy Leary began his research, in 1960, on psychedelics while at Harvard. While there is no evidence that Leary knew or ever met Kaczynski at Harvard, it has been said that Dr. Murray supervised Leary’s research into psychedelics.
  • Ruth Kelly a singer and waitress at the Black Sheep Bar in San Francisco, was unknowingly given LSD before performing on stage by George H. White, a veteran of the US Bureau of Narcotics or one of his men. White found Kelley attractive but uninterested and resistant to his advances. She was able to finish her set but rushed off to the hospital immediately afterward and wasn’t released until the effects of the LSD wore off. White headed up a part of the MKULTRA program called Operation Midnight Climax, a program that used prostitutes who gave their clients LSD, all the while agents behind one-way mirrors observed the effects of the drug. A CIA investigator later wrote that “The LSD definitely took some effect during her act.” White claimed he was trying to recruit Kelly for Operation Midnight Climax, which may have been true, but he may have had other motives. What became of Ms. Kelly after her run in with White is lost to the streets of San Francisco.
  • Ken Kesey was an American novelist who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“. After finishing college at the University of Oregon he moved to California and enrolled in Stanford to study creative writing from 1958 to 1961 while simultaneously settling into the counterculture lifestyle gripping the area and the nation. In 1959 he volunteered for the CIA’s LSD mind experiments being run under the code name MKUltra. These experiments were conducted at a VA hospital in Menlo Park, just northwest of Stanford. At the same time in 1959 he accepted a position as an attendant in the hospital’s psych ward, working there while tripping on LSD. He began writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1959 or 60 (various sources give different dates).
FootnoteD
  • Charles Manson was a pimp, arsonist, thief, rapist, murder, and leader of the San Francisco Manson Family religious cult. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934 to Kathleen Maddox, a 15- or 16-year-old prostitute and alcoholic. Manson took the last name of his mother’s first husband. Manson spent much of his teen years in juvenile reformatories and prison for theft and robbery. He was first sent to juvenile detention in 1947 which he promptly ran away from. From 1947 till 1967 Manson was sent to various prisons on various charges, eventually, at the age of thirty-two he was given his freedom. He had by that time spent sixteen years of his life behind bars. In prison he studied Scientology and continued with the practice for a brief period while he was in Los Angles after his release from prison. In 1967 he moved to San Francisco, collected a group of followers from the local street bohemians, and proclaimed himself a god. This group, known as Manson’s Family, was a communal religious cult who worshiped Manson and his teachings. In 1969, the Family carried out several notorious murders on Manson’s orders, including that of actress Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife. Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1971. Manson died in prison in 2017 at the age of eighty-three, spending 62 years of his life locked up. If you discount his first 13 years of life, Manson was only a free man for 8 years in which he spent his non-incarcerated time almost entirely as a criminal and a con man. Whether Manson was part of the MKUltra experiments has always been highly controversial with little corroborating evidence to link him to the CIA experiments. Author Tom O’Neill explored the possibility but concluded that the theory was “far-out”, but he authored a book about it anyway. Some also insist that Manson and his followers were heavily into LSD which they obtained from the San Francisco Free Clinic, reportedly sourced through CIA connections. Manson was a troubled kid and thoroughly wacked-out street smart adult who had the ability to connect and schmooze with anyone. It is unlikely that the CIA could have made Manson any crazier than he already was.
  • Linda McDonald, a 25-year-old mother, was admitted to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada in 1963 for fatigue and depression, known today as post-natal depression, after the birth of her fifth child in five years. After 3 weeks of uneventful and normal evaluations, Ewen Cameron, a famous doctor with impecable credentials diagnosed Linda as a paranoid schizophrenic or possible manic depressive, better known today as bipolar disorder. Her husband was told that she would be institutionalized for the rest of her life if he didn’t agree to his “deep sleep” treatment, but Linda was not informed of the treatment plan, nor did she give her consent. Within a month she was comatose and subsequently spent 73 or 86 days in a barbiturate infused sleep. She was also subjected to 102 or 109 high doses of electroconvulsive treatments along with repetitious “depatterning” phrases continually playing under her pillow as she slept. At the end of the treatment her mind had been totally wiped clean, and to this day she remembers nothing of her life before leaving the clinic. She had been turned into an infant to the point her husband had to potty train her. When considering her yearly age, she starts from the day she left the clinic, her first 26 years do not exist to her. She tried to commit suicide twice the first two years away from the clinic. Ewen Cameron was a friend of Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and his “Sleep Room” experiments were part of MKUltra. Fifty-five Canadian families are suing the government and the hospitals involved in MKUltra for monetary damages. The lawsuit was first filed in 2019 and continues to this day.
  • Frank Olson was an American bacteriologist and a biological warfare scientist who worked for the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, and was an employee of the CIA. Olson was one of the few who knew the true nature of MKUltra and was against the project’s human experiment protocols. In a 1953 meeting in rural Maryland, during the early days of MKUltra, Olson was secretly dosed with LSD by his colleague and superior Sidney Gottlieb, head of the MKUltra program. Olson had a severe and traumatic reaction to the drug which continued for days. Nine days after being dosed, Olson plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler in New York. The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others alleged murder. In 1975 it was learned from the Rockefeller Commission that Olson was dosed with LSD without his knowledge. His family threatened to sue, and the government eventually agreed to a $750,000 settlement and an apology from President Gerald Ford. In 1994 Olson’s son had his father’s body exhumed to be buried next to his mother. The family after exhumation had a second autopsy performed. The team that examined the body concluded that Frank Olson was murdered before being thrown out of the hotel window. The CIA’s manual of assassination says the most efficient “accident”, in a simple assassination is a fall from seventy-five feet or more onto a solid surface. Frank Olson stayed on the 13th floor of the Hotel staler, approximately 130 feet above the surface. It is believed that Allen Dulles and Richard Helms were directly involved in Frank Olson’s death.
  • Wayne Ritchie, deputy US marshal, veteran of the Marine Corps, claims that he was unknowingly dosed while at a holiday party with other federal officers in December 1957. In a sworn deposition given as part of the lawsuit Ritchie later filed, Ira Feldman, a CIA agent involved in the MKUltra program, nonchalantly explained the manner in which he observed the people he had secretly drugged with LSD: “You just sit back away and let them worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie,” he said, acknowledging that Ritchie’s dosage was “a full head”. He said Ritchie was dosed because he “deserved to suffer.” Shortly after being exposed to LSD, Ritchie armed himself with his government-issued service revolvers and attempted to rob a bar in the Fillmore District. During the robbery attempt, he was knocked out by another customer, and arrested by police a brief time later. He pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery and was sentenced to five years of probation and a fine of $500. 40 years after the incident, Ritchie learned of the CIA’s MKULtra program that covertly drugged people in the San Francisco area with LSD. He filed suit, which was dismissed, but the court acknowledged that it was quite possible that the CIA drugged Ritchie.
  • Jimmy Shaver, an airman at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, with no previous criminal record, was accused of the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl, Chere Jo Horton on the night of 4 July 1954. When Shaver was found he was shirtless, covered in blood, and in a “trance-like” state.  He was arrested and interrogated, during which he didn’t recognize his wife and insisted that another man was responsible, claiming to have lost all memory of the incident. Eventually, Shaver signed a statement taking full responsibility, saying the evidence was overwhelming and that he must have committed the heinous crime. Shaver 4 years later was executed on his 33rd birthday for the rape and murder of Chere Jo Horton. In 2019 it was revealed that Shaver was unknowingly used by MKUltra as one of its subjects in mind control. 
  • James Stanley joined the U.S. Army when he was 15 years old and by the time he was twenty he had been promoted to master sergeant which in these modern times takes about 20 years for a private to get promoted to MSG. To say he had a promising career in the Army ahead of him would be an understatement. Then he volunteered to test gas masks in 1958 at Edgewood Arsenal, a chemical weapons facility. While testing the masks the drinking water provided to him was secretly laced with LSD. It has been speculated that the testing of gas masks was a ruse while observing his reaction to LSD the real purpose of the experiment. Stanley began experiencing significant negative effects after being given the LSD. He suffered from hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and a personality change. He had spells of uncontrolled violence that destroyed his family and likely impacted his career as a soldier. He left the Army in 1969 and his marriage was dissolved one year later. The testing he was subjected to was done under the MKUltra project. He did not learn that he was exposed to LSD until 1975, when the Army followed up on the experiment by contacting him. He then realized that his odd behavior and feelings of confusion were the result of chemical testing that he had not agreed to. He sued the Army for the testing but lost his case. According to the Supreme Court, it didn’t matter whether his allegations were true. He lacked standing to sue because military personnel can’t sue the government or their superiors for damages, no matter how severe or even unconstitutional they may be. Dissenting Justices Brennan and Marshall write, “…it is important to place the Government’s conduct in historical context. The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects. Its first principle was: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” In 1994, Congress passed a private claims bill to remedy the CIA’s wrongful treatment of Stanley. In 1996, an arbitration panel awarded Stanley $400,577, which was the maximum amount allowed under the bill, after a 2-1 vote. There is no public record of who the people on the arbitration panel were.

On 22 January 2024 the FDA (the Food and Drug Agency) finalized new rules relaxing the need for informed consent when experimenting on human subjects with drugs.

FootnoteA: Piper at the Gates of Dawn Album Cover. Pink Floyd. EMI Columbia. 1967

Footnote B: CIA official crest.

FootnoteC: Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly. Photo by Philip H. Bailey. CC-By-SA 1991

FootnoteD: Charles Manson in a Courtroom During his Murder Trial. Getty Images. 1970