Spies in Academic Clothing
The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture –
And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%
by Jan Irvin
May 13, 2015
Articles in this series:
1) R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,and the Psychedelic Revolution. By Jan Irvin, May 13, 2012
2) How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes. By Jan Irvin, August 28, 2012
3) Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering, by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin, May 13, 2013
4) Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA, by Jan Irvin, November 11, 2014
5) Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%, by Jan Irvin, May 13, 2015
‘Books differ from all other propaganda media,’ wrote a chief of the CIA’s Covert Action Staff, ‘primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium [such as to] make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.’ The CIA’s clandestine books programme was run, according to the same source, with the following aims in mind: ‘Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers. Get books published which should not be “contaminated” by any overt tie-in with the U.S. government, especially if the position of the author is “delicate”. Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability. Initiate and subsidize indigenous national or international organizations for book publishing or distributing purposes. Stimulate the writing of politically significant books by unknown foreign authors – either by directly subsidizing the author, if covert contact is feasible, or indirectly, through literary agents or publishers.
The New York Times alleged in 1977 that the CIA had been involved in the publication of at least a thousand books.[1] [Emphasis added] ~ Frances Stonor Saunders
Introduction:
In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders makes startling revelations regarding the CIA’s clandestine books program. Citing the Frank Church Committee and the New York Times, she states that by 1977 the CIA had published over 1000 books, including those, ironically on “indigenous national or international organizations” – which would very likely include neo-shamanism and “native revivalism”.
If you’re a reader like I am, or even if you’ve ever read a book sometime in your life, then that means you may have read a book that was written by an intelligence agent and it’s likely, as Saunders shows, that you were misled. And even though this article pertains to the CIA’s MKULTRA program and the counterculture, it will provide insight into how the CIA (and intelligence community as a whole) influences information in other books and areas – including academia – as well.
As I’ll show in this essay, by 1979 things hadn’t changed much. And even to this day it seems the CIA, et al, is cranking out propaganda in book form (along with movies, music and other forms of pop-culture). And as we’ll see, it wasn’t just in international publications, but in books and media right here at home that intentionally misled the public regarding major issues of concern.
In my study of the CIA’s MKULTRA program I made the startling discovery that all of the early books on the subject, and very many of the later ones, were written by authors of the CIA and intelligence community to misguide the public’s perception of MKULTRA and what it was (and is) really about. This may seem like an outrageous “conspiracy theory” now, but as we go along the evidence will speak for itself.
The typical level of deception in most of these books seems to follow something along the lines of 70/30. If the authors of these books that have mislead public perception, as well as historical research, were entirely inaccurate, they would be easily found out. But by using a general rule of about 70% facts and 30% deception, these authors and academics for the intelligence community are able to tell their version of history while at the same time providing a misleading glimpse into the world of intelligence. And with some effort and research, one is able to stitch together, by little bits from each of these publications, and by digging through university library archives, etc., a much more accurate picture. This essay focuses on exposing the 30% deception and how it works – and how a major aspect of MKULTRA was covered up until the present day.
Over the years I’ve been able to piece together a much different perception of MKULTRA and the counterculture revolution, most of which I’ve revealed on the Logos Media website. In Gordon Wasson, the Man, the Legend, The Myth, 2012; and in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013, and more recently in Entheogens: What’s In a Name?, 2014, and in online videos and documentaries, I’ve revealed a large amount of primary evidence that shows that the official version of the MKULTRA story and psychedelic revolution is just another cover-up, and one that the CIA and intelligence community managed to get away with long after the MKULTRA program was first “exposed” in the 1970s. In doing this research I’ve been able to piece together how this deception works and is perpetuated throughout the intelligence community, and onto, or against, the “public” at large.
As Howard Zinn wrote in The Peoples' History of the United States:
The Church Committee uncovered CIA operations to secretly influence the minds of Americans:
The CIA is now using several hundred American academics (administrators, faculty members, graduate students engaged in teaching) who, in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. . . These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities and related institutions. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use of academics on his campus... The CIA considers these operational relationships within the U.S. academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and has strict controls governing these operations. . ..
In 1961 the chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff wrote that books were "the most important weapon of strategic propaganda." The Church Committee found that more than a thousand books were produced, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967.[2]
~ Howard Zinn
The CIA has to create an air of deniability, for if the public knew that the Agency violated its charter each and every day since its inception, and that its real target was largely the American people, they would have a totally different perception of the CIA – one of complete distrust – and that’s one the CIA doesn’t want. Though by now, with past scandals such as MKULTRA, and more recent ones such as the NSA’s spying, people are becoming less trusting, and less likely to blindly follow what they’re told are the facts regarding the intelligence community. Here Saunders (who’s very possibly a British counterintelligence agent exposing the CIA) reveals how the CIA hid funds from Congress and the public:
‘The key to all this is the counterpart funds,’ Lawrence de Neufville later revealed. ‘People couldn’t say in U.S. Congress, “oh, look what they’re doing with taxpayer’s money,” because it wasn’t our money, it was a byproduct of the Marshall Plan.’ In an innovative move under the early years of the Marshall Plan, it was proposed that, in order to make the funds perform double duty, each recipient country should contribute to the foreign aid effort by depositing an amount equal to the US contribution in its central bank. A bilateral agreement between the country and the US allowed these funds to be used jointly. The bulk of the currency funds (95 per cent) remained the legal property of the country’s government, while 5 per cent became, upon deposit, the property of the US government. These ‘counterpart funds’ – a secret fund of roughly $200 million a year – were made available as a war chest for the CIA. […]
Now Irving Brown was able to boost his CIA slush fund with Marshall Plan ‘candy’.[3]
~ Frances Stonor Saunders
In fact, the CIA had so much “candy” that:
We couldn’t spend it all. I remember once meeting with Wisner and the comptroller. My God, I said, how can we spend that? There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.[4]
~ Frances Stonor Saunders citing CIA agent Gilbert Greenway
This article seeks to aid readers to understand some newly uncovered facts that anyone may verify. More and more evidence is amassing that reveals that the CIA did, in fact, launch the psychedelic revolution and counterculture, and that it was not blow back as is the common understanding. Here we’ll show how academics, authors, and spies (some were all three), colluded together to mislead everything the public thinks it knows about the MKULTRA program and the subsequent counterculture and psychedelic revolution, as well as how this type of information manipulation bleeds into nearly every area of our lives. By the end of this article it will be clear how the CIA and intelligence community perform this function against the American people.
We’ll be uncovering evidence and citations from the seven main books on MKULTRA and the counterculture that show, it appears, serious ulterior motives behind them, and, as the evidence will show, that they were misleading the American people’s perception of the CIA’s mind control program – apparently intentionally. And the Church Committee cited by Saunders and Zinn for the above quotes was one of the congressional hearings regarding the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program.
Starting with John G. Fuller’s book The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968, regarding what turned out to be pre-MKULTRA-like tests in Pont Saint Esprit, France, I’ll show that it appears that Fuller was doing a follow up study and even does a bogus UFO media stunt to gain acceptance from the local community when he arrives. He’s checking up on the damage done by these early MKULTRA-type experiments performed by the CIA and military intelligence, and further misleading the local population who’d already gone through years of hell.
In Operation Mind Control, 1978, Walter Bowart omits several glaring facts regarding his background, a background which, as we’ll find out, is astounding. Furthermore, Bowart was heavily studied in Marshal McLuhan’s public relations and media manipulation, and staged the famous ‘flower in the rifle’ or ‘flower power’ photo opportunity at the Pentagon that was photographed by Bernie Boston.
If I mention the book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, 1979, many people have heard of it and may even know that it was written by John D. Marks. But unfortunately, for most people, their understanding of these very difficult subjects may stop at only one book – such as Marks’s –and they would only get about 70% truth in the focus of the one book. They may also not know that Marks was the assistant to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for the U.S. State Department. Of course we can hardly expect an unbiased representation of MKULTRA from an intelligence agency. It would be foolhardy to assume otherwise. The MKULTRA files that are available today were originally released by Marks.
As we’ll uncover, the infamous fable of R. Gordon Wasson, the so-called “discoverer” of magic mushrooms, being infiltrated by a ‘mole,’ the CIA’s agent Dr. James Moore, on their search for psilocybe mushrooms in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1956, must have started with Marks’s book. As we’ll see, it’s a story that’s ridiculous – but is repeated over and over in nearly every publication on the topic, including many ethnobotany publications since 1979. As it turns out, Wasson’s trip to Mexico with “personnel” was the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 58, which became ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom,’ in Life magazine, May 13, 1957.
In 1985 Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain published what is, in my opinion, the most misleading and poorly researched book in all the available MKULTRA / psychedelic revolution literature, titled Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. These authors repeatedly claim that there is no evidence that the government had launched the psychedelic revolution and counterculture – while apparently omitting certain evidence and dismissing other evidence out of hand. We’ll track some of this evidence down to the primary citations to show the reader that the authors may have covered up evidence that proved otherwise, while also quoting key CIA players and dismissing their quotes out of hand. Furthermore, the blow back mantra is repeated, as well as the James Moore myth started by Marks.
Jay Stevens is the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, 1987, and this book has some good nuggets, though they’re often misleading and whitewashed, which forces one to realize that Stevens had to be on the inside to get them.
David Black’s book Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, 2001, exposes more, especially with Ronald “Stark” Shitsky, and has some great leads, but he repeats the same themes about how the psychedelic revolution appears to be blow back, and Black’s leads on Mr. Shitsky, unfortunately, run into dead ends.
Hank Albarelli published A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments, 2010, and, again, he continues the James Moore story by Marks and that Wasson was personally unaware - while claiming to have read every page of the MKULTRA files and many more that others haven’t seen. Albarelli focuses on older, smaller, or more irrelevant aspects of MKULTRA, though must include some good material to not expose himself – which, as we saw in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013, he does anyway. As it turns out, Albarelli was a lawyer at the Whitehouse during the Carter Administration – when MKULTRA was first being exposed to the public.
A startling discovery, first pointed out to me by my friend, anthropologist Professor Jay Courtney Fikes, in his book Carlos Castaneda: Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties, 1993,[5] revealed that academics Prof. Peter T. Furst, Dr. Barbara Myerhoff, and Dr. Carlos Castaneda, had collaborated together and misled their readers for decades regarding the Huichol Indians, and appeared to have committed academic fraud. The best way I know how to describe this is what seem to be “academic cells” or groups of researchers and academics collaborating together, and citing each other’s misinformation to back up their stories. As I wrote in “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?”:
When Fikes first went public with the information in his book, Furst threatened to sue his publisher. Rather than standing firm, Fikes’ publisher panicked and pulled his book from print. And Fikes and other anthropologists had already brought charges of academic fraud against Furst to the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association in 1992[6], which also backed down due to Furst’s threats. Due to the depth of this scandal as we’ve been revealing here, we’re beginning to understand what was likely what caused the Anthropological Association to back down. Furst will have no such luck here. I’d love to get this scandal on the official record. Attempts to interview Furst have failed.[7]
As seen in this same article, “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” other similar type academic cells started emerging, such as it appears with R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl A. P. Ruck, Jonathan Ott, and their collaborators. And there are still others coming to light. These same tactics have been and are used in MKULTRA research, and furthermore, I’ve noticed a pattern of these academic and research “cells” cross-citing each other to further bury each owns’ frauds. And it spreads far into other areas of our lives as well. Here President Bill Clinton’s professor at Georgetown University, Carroll Quigley, explains this process on a similar, but political scale:
By the interaction of these various branches on one another, under the pretense that each branch was an autonomous power, the influence of each branch was an autonomous power, the influence of each branch was increased through a process of mutual reinforcement. The unanimity among the various branches was believed by the outside world to be the result of the influence of a single Truth, while really it was the result of the existence of a single group. Thus a statesman (a member of the Group) announces a policy. About the same time, the Royal Institute of International Affairs publishes a study on the subject, and an Oxford don, a Fellow of All Souls (and a member of the Group) also publishes a volume on the subject (probably through a publishing house, like G. Bell and Sons or Faber and Faber, allied to the Group). The statesman’s policy is subjected to critical analysis and final approval in a “leader” in The Times, while the two books are reviewed (in a single review) in The Times Literary Supplement. Both the “leader” and the review are anonymous but are written by the members of the Group. And finally, at about the same time, an anonymous article in The Round Table strongly advocates the same policy. The cumulative effect of such tactics as this, even if each tactical move influences only a small number of important people, is bound to be great.[8]
~ Carroll Quigley
With this in mind, the above can be very startling in that it reveals how deep this type of disinformation can run through society, which acts as a web to keep the public misinformed on any topic.
And I should mention that I have no doubt that the intelligence community will launch all forms of vitriolic attack on me for publishing this paper. The typical fallacious tactics used against me since first publishing my article on Gordon Wasson, 2012, include: name calling, public ridicule, slander, straw man arguments, cyber terrorism, and anything but addressing the citations and what my work actually says. Their sophist attacks and deceptions (spin) have further helped me to understand how these cover-ups work – and where to look for evidence – in the opposite direction of their attacks. As the old cliché: “You get the most flak when you’re over the target”.
When we begin to understand how CIA/intelligence disinformation works, how counterintelligence works, we begin to see that all along our questions were incorrect:
If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.[9]
~ Thomas Pynchon
By close study of the documents and history of MKULTRA and the counterculture we realize that (nearly) all of the early psychedelic stars were agents (or assets), and then we see a whole new picture come into focus: CIA agents don’t always wear black, but they often wear tie-dye (or professors’ khaki pants) – talk about plausible deniability. The question was not who was a CIA agent… But rather, who wasn’t?
Aside from tie-dye, we’ll also strip away some of this academic clothing to expose more spies in what was no more than the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Now that we have an overview of how the CIA and intelligence community misleads and misdirects information, it’s time for some real journalism.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.[10]
In chronological order, we begin with John G. Fuller’s The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, about the poisoning of an entire village, Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, with what appears to have been ergot or one of the many Lysergamides extracted at the nearby Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, in Switzerland. This nightmare ended in seven dead, with hundreds of villagers going mad for days, weeks, or months –and some never recovered. The true history of this event continues to be suppressed to the present day. This is but one more chapter in uncovering the atrocious crimes committed against humanity by the intelligence community.
John G. Fuller: The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968
(This section is dedicated to the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France)
John Fuller was an author and writer of several books, including:
The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968, which is a look into the ergot / lysergamide outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in mid-August, 1951. The impact of this event went on for many months. The “official conclusion” of this event was that it was “mercury poisoning,” which Fuller exposes as false – for the simple reason that the effects aren’t all that similar – and there were hundreds of first hand descriptions of the effects.
He’s also the author of Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, which is a look into Zé Arigó, a so-called “psychic surgeon,” from Brazil. In this book Fuller travels to Brazil with MKULTRA doctor and researcher, Andrija Puharich, to investigate Arigó and to supposedly tell his story.
Fuller’s book The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, though misleading, is quite good, and though it’s written as a story or narrative that’s nearly impossible to fact check –like all of his books, it does have an excellent “play-by-play” style. I would assume the letters and records he quotes should be in the official French records, although I have not verified this. No doubt there’s a strong possibility that he made up many of his “quotes”.
In my opinion, Fuller’s story in, well, all of his books, but in the case before us: The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, is a cover story. It appears that Fuller was doing a 15 year follow-up study for the CIA and Military intelligence community on the victims of what was apparently a Project BLUEBIRD or ARTICHOKE experiment (Project MKULTRA wasn’t funded until April 13, 1953):
I arrived in the bitter cold of Paris of January, 1967 […][11]
~ John G. Fuller
Before we continue, I should also point out that LSD does not create the effects of “Saint Anthony’s Fire,” as described in Fuller’s book, and nor does mercury – a very unlikely claim by the French officials, and backed by Albert Hofmann in his book LSD: My Problem Child.[12] However, there is at least one lysergamide that creates the exact effects as described at Pont-Saint-Esprit – Ergometrine – isolated at Sandoz by Albert Hofmann's boss, Arthur Stoll, in 1918. It’s very possible that Sandoz had made a fresh batch. And maybe it’s just in-your-face irony, but its effects are described as “Saint Anthony’s Fire”.
Possible side effects include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, tinnitus, chest pain, palpitation, bradycardia, transient hypertension and other cardiac arrhythmias, dyspnea, rashes, and shock. An overdose produces a characteristic poisoning, ergotism or "St. Anthony's fire": prolonged vasospasm resulting in gangrene and amputations; hallucinations and dementia; and abortions. Gastrointestinal disturbances such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, are common. [13]
Starting with the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident, after Fuller arrives in France, he worries over the lie he’s going to tell the French villagers in order to build their trust:
I decided that in order to discover the feeling of the town, and to try to get to know some of the people in a calm and unstrained atmosphere, I would have to practice a mild, benevolent deception. I knew no one whatever in the village, and had heard that it was almost certain that no one there could speak English. With my stumbling French it would be impossible to begin any depth-interviewing without getting to know some of the people well enough to beg their indulgence. I counted heavily on the tape recorder, so that I could listen and relisten to the interviews in French, and pick up the phrases I would lose in the thick Provencal and Languedoc accents of the Midi.[14]
~ John G. Fuller
He comes up with the idea to pretend to write about bridges, and then pretends that one of the villagers gave him another story –that he’s really there to investigate UFOs (more on this below):
“Vous avez raison,” I said, still wondering how he had penetrated my guise so quickly and easily. “You are absolutely right. I apologize”
“Why did you not come right out and tell me the real story you are here to investigate?” he said.
I stumbled around awkwardly, trying to find the right French words to express the subtleties of my apprehension and concern.
“So you come here to write the story of the Unidentified Flying Objects which have been reported,” he said. “I did not know that they had received such international attention. But obviously they have.”
I was completely stunned. […] I fell right into the accusation gladly.
“Yes,” I said. “You have uncovered my benevolent guise with impossible speed. I apologize profusely.”[…]
Although the subject was digressionary in my present situation, I felt that it would be an excellent way to get to know the village before beginning the research on the story of the “accursed bread.”[15]
~ John G. Fuller
So Fuller believes that deceiving the local villagers will be a good way to “get to know the village before beginning the research” on the “accursed bread”.
As a result, I did not hesitate to go along with M. Boudenne’s assumption that I was in Pont-Saint-Esprit to explore the UFO story.[…]
Within days my picture had appeared in all the newspapers of southern France in regard to the UFO story, and O.R.T.F., the national television network of France, sent an eight-man documentary film crew to the village to interview me on the parallelisms between the Pont-Saint-Esprit UFO sightings and those of Exeter. […][16]
~ John G. Fuller
Serendipitously, if you can believe it, Fuller had previously written two books on UFOs (Incident at Exeter, and The Interrupted Journey), but M. Boudenne was completely unaware of this fact.
I was completely stunned. I had said nothing about the subject of UFO’s—or soucoupes volantes as they are called in France. I had not even hinted at the subject, which was one I wanted to avoid getting further involved in, after the two books on it.[17]
~ John G. Fuller
Don’t you just love it when that happens? You show up in a strange, small town in a foreign country, where you’re trying to make up a lie, and a town local makes up a story for you that you’re there writing about UFOs, and, serendipitously, even though you’re trying to avoid the subject, you’ve written two books on UFOs, and, serendipitously the local didn’t know, and suddenly all of the newspapers and the national TV are promoting you! I’m sure it happens all the time. And it’s probably a really good thing that M. Boudenne’s assumption was so much better than Fuller’s “benevolent” lie about bridges.
After the newspaper and television publicity, I became somewhat of a pseudocelebrity in the town, which was helpful in getting to know the tradesmen, the bartenders, the villagers more quickly.[18]
~ John G. Fuller
How serendipitous that the TV and newspapers could be so helpful in making him a pseudo-celebrity overnight, because, without them, by Fuller’s admission, he couldn’t have done his study nearly as quickly, hence why he made up a lie in the first place planning to deceive the townsfolk. I suppose it didn’t matter what the lie was, as long as he got on national TV and in the papers. I’m sure his idea of writing about bridges or whatever (it could have been wine, butterflies, or bat guano), would have likewise made him just as popular a celebrity with the townsfolk and would have also gotten him on the national news, because, by Fuller’s logic, in order to: “discover the feeling of the town, and to try to get to know some of the people in a calm and unstrained atmosphere, [he] would have to practice a mild, benevolent deception.” –in other words, being a national news pseudo-celebrity creates a natural environment where one may “discover the feeling of a town” in a “calm and unstrained atmosphere” – if you can believe that.
And then, serendipitously, Fuller later just changed the story that he was there to research the “accursed bread”:
As the research began in earnest, and after confessing that the story of the bread was now my major objective, I learned that there were many ambiguities in the case, that the general feeling persisted that the entire case was squashed by the government of that time in order to avoid the possibility of having to pay out the millions of francs the indemnification would total.[19]
~ John G. Fuller
So no one was bothered that he just suddenly wasn’t a UFO researcher even after he was on national French television? I’m sure that would be a great trust builder in a town where seven people died and hundreds were driven crazy for days, weeks, or months from the OSS/CIA’s secret tests, since he’s now the talk of the town and he’s no longer talking about UFOs, but instead inquiring about every detail of the poisoned ergot derivative/LSD bread episode.
Serendipitously, these acts also got him a translator who helped him with his research on the bread, apparently without pay, and who also apparently wasn’t bothered that he suddenly switched from UFOs to bread research:
I was also lucky to find a British journalist from Cannes, Ted Clark, who spoke French fluently, and who came up to Pont-Saint-Esprit, Nimes, and Montpellier with me on several occasions to help out in the research. Even with the taped interviews I had done, I still had trouble translating their subtleties, and Clark and I spent long hours trying to unravel them.[20]
~ John G. Fuller
What’s that I smell? Is that… bullshit? What’s crazier is that no one’s exposed this since 1968. Such incredible luck for a guy who lied to get onto national television in a small town in a foreign country!
Further evidence that Fuller was in France to do a follow up study is in the fact that he worked on Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, in Brazil, with Dr. Andrija Puharich. Serendipitously, Puharich happened to work at the Army’s chemical center at Edgewood, Maryland, and is now known to have worked with Project MKULTRA:
[…] Dr. Henry Karl Puharich, later known as Andrija Puharich, the man who introduced the controversial Israeli psychic Uri Geller to the world. […] was an Army officer in the early 1950s. During that time, Puharich was in and out of Edgewood Arsenal and Camp Detrick, meeting with various high-ranking officers and officials, primarily from the Pentagon, CIA, and Naval Intelligence. The purpose of the meetings was Puharich’s relentless attempt to convince the military and Intelligence agencies to take the potentials of parapsychology seriously. […]Recently uncovered document fragments from the mostly destroyed MKULTRA collection reveal that Puharich had far more contact and interaction with the CIA and Army concerning drug experimentation than he indicates in any of his books. Indeed, it appears that Puharich participated in a number of secret experiments with Amanita muscaria, the species of psychoactive mushrooms mentioned in his book. The experiments took place at prisons for men in New Jersey and Maryland, as well as at Spring Grove mental hospital in Catonsville, Maryland.[21]
~ Hank Albarelli
However, Albarelli only briefly mentions that the two men were associated:
In the late-1960’s, American writer and investigative journalist John G. Fuller, an associate of Dr. Henry Andrija Puharich, began researching the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak.[22]
~ Hank Albarelli
That Puharich and Fuller were associated is of great concern. As Uri Geller, the infamous “spoon bender” admitted, who was also one of Puharich’s promotions: he, too, was an agent – for both the Mossad and the CIA.[23] Shall we assume, when Puharich and Fuller were promoting Arigo, that it was any different?
It was almost dark as the Volkswagen microbus twisted along the serpentine road from Rio de Janeiro, four hundred kilometers to the south, toward the village of Congonhas do Campo. The green mountains, rolling like a rumpled billiard table, had turned to a purple-gray as the hot Brazilian sun deserted them. […] Inside the microbus were four men: two interpreters, university students from the University of Rio de Janeiro, and two Americans of widely divergent backgrounds. Henry Belk, a rangy, congenial, fiftyish Southerner from North Carolina who was both a successful businessman and an intellectual adventurer, had been at the wheel for nearly ten hours, dodging over exuberant Brazilian drivers and maneuvering around the precipitous hairpin turns with considerable skill. Beside him was Dr. Henry K. Puharich (he rarely used his given name, Andrija) with a medical degree from Northwestern University and a specialty in bioengineering. He further had a proclivity for trying to fuse and consolidate his extensive scientific background with little understood psychic phenomena.[…] They had also encountered John Laurance in Rio, a systems engineer in RCA’s space program, and an executive who had served on the advisory committee in setting up NASA.[24]
~ John G. Fuller.
Don’t you just love it when that happens? You’re cruising around a foreign country with an MKULTRA doctor and expert in “parapsychology” – (a field of psychology in which you get your victim(s) to believe in magic so as to take advantage of their credulity), and you just finished a follow-up study on a mind control experiment in France, and what do you know? Suddenly you’re meeting up with one of the men from the advisory committee in setting up NASA.
As Aldous Huxley states about dianetics and magic (10 December, 1950):
[…] Meanwhile we have been looking into dianetics. […]Basically it seems to be a procedure by which one obtains age regression without putting the patient into deep hypnosis. The aim is to get at the words and phrases, heard by the patient at moments of lowered consciousness, and accepted by him as obsessive commands, like post-hypnotic suggestions. The sub-conscious seems to take these verbal commands literally and unreasoningly, without regard to their context. The result can be disastrous, both mentally and physically. (If this is really the case, we may have here the rationale of magic spells, curses, and anathemas and the like.)[25]
~ Aldous Huxley
And, serendipitously, Huxley had worked with Puharich. Here are two of the many letters confirming this fact from The Letters of Aldous Huxley:
#691, 18 March, 1955
[…] Dr. Puharich was here for a few days last week, with Alice Bouverie, and we had talks about his latest preoccupation—amanita muscaria, which he thinks will open the doors of ESP in a big way, (provided always it doesn’t first open the doors of an untimely grave). Puharich is a lively bird, and I look forward to seeing what he does when he gets out of the army.[26]
~ Aldous Huxley
#714, 2 August, 1955
[…] On Friday I go to Boston and on Sunday to Maine(c/o Dr. Puharich
Round Table Foundation
Glen Cove, Main).Shall stay there a few days and then, perhaps, go to Woods Hole for a day or two. Then back to Guilford. Love to all.[27]
~ Aldous Huxley
And Puharich confirms Huxley’s participation in his book The Sacred Mushroom:
On August 7, 1955, Harry was giving a demonstration of telepathy for Aldous Huxley. In the middle of the demonstration Harry spontaneously slipped into a deep trance.[28]
~ Andrija Puharich
Remember what Albarelli said, above? “it appears that Puharich participated in a number of secret experiments with Amanita muscaria” – Obviously Aldous Huxley was authorized by the CIA to sit in on these, and many other, MKULTRA experiments. It’s also clear from Huxley’s letters that he recommended many of the MKULTRA studies. We’ll get back to that later, so let’s not digress too far. Getting back to Fuller – it gets better. Way better.
By the time Jorge Rizzina, the intense, thirty-five-year-old Brazilian journalist, arrived from Sao Paulo, Puharich had plotted the best possible way for shooting both stills and motion pictures the next day.[29]
~ John G. Fuller
So not long after they get to Brazil the journalists are showing up there, too? This isn’t going to turn into a national media spectacle, is it?
The whole complex phenomenon was in the wind almost everywhere in Brazil, and some of it filtering to Europe and North America. But harnessing that wind was another problem. By the time Belk and Puharich were preparing to leave Rio, the press had seized on Arigo’s operation on Puharich, and the story was spread across the country in blazing headlines.[30]
~ John G. Fuller
I’m sure glad we haven’t heard that story anyplace before. You show up in a foreign country and do a PR stunt and staged operation to popularize a folk healer, start a study on how a mestizo Brazilian curendeiro does his work and you get on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the country. Don’t you just love it when that happens? I’m sure it happens all the time – if you’re John Fuller, or Andrija Puharich.
And then, over the years, you do some “studies” to back up your “research,” and as it serendipitously turns out, Dr. Timothy Leary’s student, Dr. Walter Pahnke – of the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project, happens to be involved.[31]
But it gets better. The faith healer gets arrested, is convicted for practicing illegal medicine and gets sentenced to 15 months in prison. But Puharich and Fuller had previously staged various healings with Brazilian senators and the President! Don’t you just love it when you get to go to a foreign country to study a faith healer, create another media spectacle, and then take him to the president of that country, who, later of course, gets your faith healer out of criminal charges with a presidential pardon?
But in May 1958 President Kubitschek learned that Arigo was waiting for the ax of the jail sentence to fall on his neck. Kubitschek lost no time going into action. Within minutes, a presidential pardon was dispatched to Congonhas do Campo authorities. It stated that as President of the Republic, Article 87, Number 19 of the Constitution gave him the power to pardon Jose Pedro de Freitas, more commonly known as Arigo, and that the defendant was to immediately be relieved of his jail sentence by presidential order.[32]
~ John G. Fuller
How serendipitous! But after Arigo’s pardon, he gets into trouble with the law again, but this time his life ends in a freak car accident. Do you like fiction? I never liked fiction much. Reality is way better because you can’t make stuff up as well as the intelligence community’s slapstick.
Back in the United States, Fuller would have his manuscript verified by Puharich and the rest of the team before it was published:
Back in the States, I reviewed my research and fattened it with additional interviews with Belk, Puharich, Laurence, Cortes, and other members of the medical team of the Congonhas expedition. They were most helpful, especially because my mind was so full of what I had absorbed in Brazil that it needed better focus.[33]
~ John G. Fuller
There’s nothing like adding some post trip propaganda from the MKULTRA boys to further embellish the story.
Before we finish with Fuller, I thought it would be fun to check into his other books to see if there were any other serendipitous stories regarding media spectacles, alien abductions, and UFOs. And as it turns out, it was Fuller who popularized the “alien abduction” psy-op with psychiatric patients Betty and Barney Hill in his book The Interrupted Journey, – which is touted to this very day as proof of alien abductions. In reality, however, the couple had likely been drugged and hypnotized by MKULTRA doctors.
As we saw above with Carroll Quigley’s quote on politics, here we’ll see how MKULTRA and psychological operations also overlap into other areas – such as with UFOs. And surprise! There was a media spectacle with that, too:
Several weeks later, a series of articles broke in a Boston Newspaper, telling without the full background material the story of Barney and Betty Hill and how, while under hypnosis by a Boston psychiatrist, they had told of being abducted aboard a UFO, given a physical examination, and released with the assurance that they would not be harmed.[34]
~ John G. Fuller
Remember that Aldous Huxley quote, above?
The aim is to get at the words and phrases, heard by the patient at moments of lowered consciousness, and accepted by him as obsessive commands, like post-hypnotic suggestions. The sub-conscious seems to take these verbal commands literally and unreasoningly, without regard to their context. The result can be disastrous, both mentally and physically.
~ Aldous Huxley - 10 December, 1950
In Fuller’s book Incident at Exeter, I found lots of good media-stunt slapstick:
This book was no sooner completed, when UFO reports began to break out in unprecedented numbers all over the country. After my research in Exeter, I was convinced that this would happen, surprised that it had not happened sooner. For the first time, the general press began treating the subject with respect.[35]
~ John G. Fuller
Gee, how serendipitous! It’s a good thing we haven’t seen that one before. Did Fuller have anything to do with the press “treating the subject with respect”?
I had lunch that same day, with Conrad Quimby, editor and publisher of the Derry (N.H.) News, Ken Lord of the Amesbury (Mass.) News, and June Miller of the Haverhill Gazette. […] They were as interested as I was in the progress of the research, but unfortunately I was not far enough into it to give them any real pattern of the scene as it unfolded.[36]
~ John G. Fuller
So let me get this straight: Fuller calls a meeting with a bunch of newspaper people about UFOs in Exeter that he hasn’t yet completed the research on? And then there’s a media spectacle? How serendipitous! No wonder he was convinced UFO reports would “break out in unprecedented numbers” – as he PR’d the whole thing, and there was the press – just as above.
I don’t suppose that Fuller would have had any connections to other, previous, UFOs in the media, would he? What would be the chances of that? In Incident at Exeter:
At this time, I knew nothing about the incident at Exeter and little, if anything, about Unidentified Flying Objects. At one time several years before, I had helped produce a CBS-TV show which had, as guests, some technicians who had sighted UFOs—but that was the extent of my knowledge.[37]
~ John G. Fuller
CBS-TV and technicians – I wonder if they were CBS’s own special effects technicians? Of course he’s unclear. And how serendipitous that Fuller just so happened to help produce that one, too! No wonder he was convinced that there would be a media spectacle. But as it turns out, in reality, in 1964 Fuller had received a book from the NICAP, The UFO Evidence, which he claims:
In the spring of 1964, it issued a scholarly and well-documented book titled The UFO Evidence which analyzes 746 reports from among 5,000 signed statements it has in its files. I had received a press copy of this volume when it was first published, well over a year before, but had never bothered to look at it.[38]
~ John G. Fuller
And apparently the NICAP was founded by the CIA to give credibility to the entire UFO charade, and Fuller just so happened to be getting their press releases, while claiming, of course, that he “never bothered to look at it”. But we’ve no reason not to believe Fuller at this point, do we?
And CBS-TV had nothing to do at Exeter, had it?
We piled into Kimball’s car, a big Chrysler especially equipped for his newsreel and documentary camera work, with a shortwave radio, a mobile telephone, cameras, lights and a film stock. It carried a license plate CBS-TV, although he worked for all three networks.[39]
~ John G. Fuller
Well, so much for that.
Obviously Fuller was heavily involved in making these “UFO sightings” happen and marketing them to the public. And being that we may now see a clear path between UFOs and MKULTRA, we may now see the overlap between the drugs, hypnosis, and UFO “sightings” and “abductions,” and the manipulation of reality – not only for the victims themselves, but also of public perception of reality by the intelligence community.
As anyone who’s studied logic and epistemology knows, it’s impossible to prove a negative. Anyone who makes a claim must provide their own evidence to support it – which is known as the onus of proof. At one place in Incident at Exeter, Fuller makes the absurd argument:
Regardless of official proclamations, the Air Force offered no definite proof of nonexistence (a paradox, of course, but everything in this case was a paradox, an ambivalence, a dichotomy).[40]
~ John G. Fuller
Of course it’s a logical impossibility to provide the “definite proof of nonexistence” of something – in this case, UFOs. For instance, if I claim that there is a green fairy sitting on my shoulder, it’s on me to prove that it’s there; not on you to prove that it’s not. If I can’t prove it’s there, it’s known as arguing the arbitrary, and is dismissed automatically. I don’t, instead, turn and attack you and say “well, you’re just stupid or not spiritual enough,” or blame the other side for my own claims. It was on Fuller to provide his own evidence for his own claims, not on the Air Force to prove that something does not exist. In fact, in US courts, this is the exact reason why we’re supposed to have “innocent until proven guilty” – as it’s on the prosecutor, the accuser (Fuller in this case), to provide their own evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Fuller, to explain away his obviously ridiculous statement, adds the part about paradoxes and dichotomies.
On page 86 of Incident at Exeter Fuller lets the truth slip out about the psychological operation:
The threat of the UFO was still psychological, however. No instance of any physical harm befalling a human being had been reliably reported in the twenty-year history of the phenomenon’s most yeasty occurrences.[41] [emphasis added] ~ John G. Fuller
On the following page he also states:
The Orson Wells [sic] “invasion” in the late thirties, a single dramatized radio program resulted in mass hysteria. Would the same thing—or worse—happen if official government sources announced blandly that we definitely had visitors from another planet?[42]
~ John G. Fuller
And if the UFOs were real, wouldn’t they cause a real threat?
He felt that since even the Air Force admitted that the UFO’s seemed to pose no threat to national security, the investigation and dissemination of information about the phenomena should be turned over to scientific agencies.[43] [emphasis added]
~ John G. Fuller
Obviously they weren’t a threat to national security because the intelligence community made them up.
Citing the Tavistock Institute’s sister organization, the Brookings Institution, on pages 33-34 Fuller explains the real agenda behind the psychological operation and the creation of the UFO hysteria:
He went into the report from the Brookings Institution, which suggested that grave social consequences might follow from contact with highly evolved life beyond the earth. The report had given considerable attention to this possibility. “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies,” it said, “sure of their place in the Universe, which have disintegrated when they came to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different ways of life… It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are mostly clearly associated with mastery of nature. …”[44] [emphasis added]
~ John G. Fuller
Fuller continues on the next page:
The warlike nations of the world might become suddenly more amenable to working out their differences amicably. The suicidal collision course of the Great Powers might be shifted in the interest of overall world welfare [communism]. The petty quarrels of man might be submerged into the interest of the wider Universe. The fear of alien visitors would obviously cause a disruption in the pattern of normal life. But what greater fear is there than the potential incineration of the earth by hydrogen bombs? [created by the same intel / military]. And how could any super-civilized visitors match or exceed man's inhumanity to man? The choice between even total dislocation of civilization (if UFO's were proven real and interplanetary) and total incineration (Atomic War) would be easy to make. The former is curable, the latter is not."[45] [emphasis added]
~ John G. Fuller
In other words, giving our autonomy up to the intelligence community’s newly manufactured alien gods. And of course it’s government, and not the general populace, that manufactures and releases atomic bombs. Blaming the general public for the actions of politicians, military personnel, and the elite, is about as preposterous as it gets.
And when we go back to France, we see that Fuller manipulated the whole scenario with UFOs to do his Pont-Saint-Esprit follow up study for the intelligence community.
Now that we’re done with Fuller’s slapstick jesting, we’ll get a little more serious as we turn to the first major book to address the government’s mind control program: Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control.
Walter Bowart: Operation Mind Control, 1978:
If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down. It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs.[46]
~ Walter Bowart
Walter Bowart was known as the world’s first yippie/yuppie. He’s mostly known for his 1978 book Operation Mind Control, which was one of the first books, if not the first, “exposing” the CIA and intelligence community’s mind control operations.
As we’ll discover, Bowart’s background is highly suspicious. For starters, Bowart was married to the Mellon banking empire heiress, Peggy Mellon Hitchcock. He was also the owner and publisher of the East Village Other, where he promoted the psychedelic “counterculture” to unsuspecting youth in the New York area. Bowart often hung around with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Marshall McLuhan, Andy Worhol, and many others in the psychedelic arena, including those at the Millbrook mansion – owned by his in-laws.
Bowart even went with Leary (and Arthur Kleps and Allen Ginsberg) before congress in 1966 when Leary recommended LSD’s regulation (below), revealing much of their agenda. And any one of us would go to speak to Congress on LSD, right? Why them?
However, what is likely Bowart’s biggest claim to fame is that he’s the one who PR’d the famous “flower power” media spectacle at the U.S. Pentagon:
As told by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in their book Acid Dreams:
What happened next was not something anyone had expected—in fact, it might never have happened had it not been for the FBI, which attempted to disrupt the antiwar gathering upon learning of a plot to sky-bomb the Pentagon with ten thousand flowers. Peggy Hitchcock (the sister of William Mellon Hitchcock, owner of the Millbrook estate) gave Michael Bowen and friends money to purchase two hundred pounds of daisies for the occasion, but the plan never got off the ground because of a dirty trick by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's men answered an ad for a pilot in the East Village Other but never showed up at the airport. Bowart was stuck with more flowers than he knew what to do with, so he turned around and drove back to the demonstration. Distributed among the crowd, the flowers were subsequently photographed by the world press protruding from the muzzles of rifles held by the soldiers guarding the Pentagon.[47]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
And as just mentioned, Bowart was the owner of the East Village Other. What does Bowart have to say about this event in his book? Absolutely nothing. Also notice that Lee and Shlain don’t bother to mention that the East Village Other was owned by him.[48] And, serendipitously, Marshal McLuhan – the media and public relations (PR) expert, was a regular feature of the publication.
Here Bob Dean/Neveritt, a.k.a. “Bob Dobbs,” who’s possibly Canadian intelligence (though he denies it), and promotes Julian Huxley’s trans-humanism and eugenics/dysgenics, and is the archivist for Marshall McLuhan, as well as having recorded long interviews with both Peggy and Walter Bowart, states:
Go back to 1967 with the levitating of the Pentagon, led by people like Abbie Hofmann and that. Well a little-known part of the story is that Bowart is the publisher of the East Village Other. He got the idea of dropping planeloads of flowers over the Pentagon and protesters when that was happening. Which would be October ‘67. So, if I recall he went… He put an ad in the paper for flowers, or for something. So he put feelers out there. So he started getting weird phone calls. So he suspected that the FBI or somebody was monitoring him. So when he went out to get the flowers and the plane at some airport, on the appointed day, he noticed there was no one around, it was totally empty at the hangar or wherever it was, and he just felt that there were people watching him. Now I can't remember the next details. I know that the flowers ended up in the Pentagon, and you have the famous picture of the girl, the hippie girl putting a flower in some Pentagon soldier’s rifle. […] Well Walter used to say those were his flowers. So somehow he got the flowers there, and I can't remember right now… he thought he was surveilled and something happened, and he got around it, and he got the plane off and they dropped the flowers. I may be wrong on the exact precision of that, but to me it was interesting to find out that the whole flower icon was stimulated by Walter's idea, and the suspicious activities around him once he put the idea out in his paper, and what happened that tried to frustrate them.[49]
~ Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs.
And though on his show, “Bob Dobbs” seems to want his listeners to believe that conspiracies don’t really happen, the CIA had every motive to mislead LSD and MKULTRA exposure, to make people think it was only about a Manchurian Candidate, that it was just a few thousand people – and to limit the scope of the investigation.
From Pont Saint Esprit and John G. Fuller, to Walter Bowart and John Marks, to Marty Lee and Bruce Shlain, and Jay Stevens - all of these original MKULTRA/psychedelic revolution researchers have, it appears, intentionally misled some amount of their MKULTRA research. These correlations are difficult to ignore. However, I want to mention too that each of these authors, especially Bowart and Stevens, have contributed vast amounts of valuable research and insight and their works should be studied regardless – at minimum to study how they spin information. We’ll see more of this tactic later in this article, but here we see Bowart cite some of those who assisted him with his book:
A number of professional people gave valuable technical assistance and patient explanations. My thanks to Harry Arons, Robert Brauers, Dr. and Mrs. Sidney M. Cohen, Dr. Remo Dicenso, Betty Dumaine, Dr. Milton E. Erickson, Morris Ernst, Bernard Fensterwald, George Griffin, Col. Laird Guttersen, Dr. Paul Henshaw, Edward Hunter, Hon. Louis K. Lefkowitz, John MacDonald, V. R. Sanchez, Alan W. Sheftin, Dr. Edgar Schein, Mrs. E. D. Yeomans, and Col. Joseph H. Ziglinski.
I received a great deal of assistance from a number of researchers and writers around the world. Thanks to Chip Berlet, Nancy Bressler, Jeff Cohen, Loren Coleman, Richard Crowe, William Grimstad, Paul Hoch, L. Ron Hubbard, Larry Lee, Charles Maierson, John Marks, David McQueen, Sandra Meiersdorff, Janet Michaud, Beverly Ogden, George OToole, Richard Popkin, Jeff Quiros, William Stevenson, Scoop Sweeny, Harold Weisberg, David Williams, and Peter Watson.[50] [emphasis added] ~ Walter Bowart
Bowart’s list contains a few names that are very interesting, such as L. Ron Hubbard – founder of the Church of Scientology. We also see two other names listed that will be recurrent throughout this essay: Dr. Sidney M. Cohen, and John Marks. A paragraph later, Bowart adds:
My understanding of the intelligence community was molded by exchanges with a number of intelligence and military people. They shall remain nameless.[51]
Some of the strongest evidence of Bowart’s collaboration with MKULTRA begins on page 79 of his book Operation Mind Control:
Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard in 1963, ostensibly for giving LSD to an undergraduate, but basically because of increasing controversy over the nature of their research. Leary and Co. retreated to Mexico, where they attempted to carry on LSD experiments outside the U.S. government's purview. In June of 1963 they ran afoul of even the notoriously corrupt Mexican government and were expelled from that country for "engaging in activities not permitted to a tourist."
From Mexico they moved to Millbrook, New York, and established the International Federation for Internal Freedom (later the Castalia Foundation), which served as a platform for Leary to propagandize for LSD which, he now believed, could save the world from nuclear perdition by 'blowing the mind."
Leary frequently took LSD himself. His speeches, which were addressed to overflow audiences, were tailor-made for true believers in the new drug cult. Leary issued many public statements on the benefits to the individual and society of LSD. Always politically naive, he predicted that there would come a day when "a new profession of psychedelic guides will inevitably develop to supervise these experiences."
Finally, in the mid-sixties, Leary coined his famous slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and spoke at college lectures to the legions of young people who had illegally experimented with LSD and other psychedelic substances.
Through magazine interviews, television appearances, movies, records, and books Leary projected himself as the culture hero of a new generation which was fighting for an individual's right to alter his own consciousness—a right which Leary maintained was guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 and obtained by John Marks under a Freedom of Information suit in August, 1977, featured Dr. Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert and their organization which advocated the expansion of consciousness through psychedelic chemicals, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In alarming tones the memo ordered all CIA groups involved in mind control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA.[52]
~ Walter Bowart
From The Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited for the book Moksha, by Michael Horowitz, we find:
1960
Huxley and Osmond visited Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard, where the Psychedelic Research Project had gotten underway. Here is Leary’s account of his impressions of Huxley upon the occasion of their first meetings in Cambridge.
~ Michael HorowitzWe talked about how to study and use the consciousness-expanding drugs and we clicked along agreeably on the do's and the not-to-do's. We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness. Avoid labeling or depersonalizing the subject. We should not impose our own jargon or our own experimental games on others. We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a detached schizoid; nor Christ as an exhibitionistic masochist; nor the mystic experience as a symptom; nor the visionary state as a model psychosis. Aldous Huxley chuckling away with compassionate humor at human folly.
And with such erudition! Moving back and forth in history, quoting the mystics. Wordsworth. Plotinus. The Areopagite. William James.[53]
~ Timothy Leary
Serendipitously, Huxley’s everywhere! As I exposed in my last article, “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” Humphry Osmond was in fact MKULTRA, and it’s well known that he worked directly with Huxley:
As it turns out, Dr. Hoffer was a CIA MKULTRA doctor and worked with Dr. Osmond performing human experiments in Saskatchewan; as was Dr. John Smythies, who contributed to MKULTRA subproject 8 at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. As a CIA MKULTRA document of March 25, 1964, exposes, Osmond was further involved with Subproject 47 with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, who wrote the letter on Osmond’s letterhead.[54]
From the reunion video A Conversation on LSD, 1979, we find Osmond and Tim Leary discussing Leary’s hiring. Osmond’s been drinking and discloses some important and vivid revelations: that he and Huxley had hired Dr. Timothy Leary to take on the persona of ‘Tim Leary’ the hip drug pusher:
Humphry Osmond: Remember the first time we met, which was in Cambridge? On the night of the Kennedy election.
Tim Leary: 1960.
Humphry Osmond: 1960. We went out to this place. And Timothy then was wearing his gray flannel suite and his crew cut. And we had this very interesting discussion with him. And when we went.. . and I don’t think I told you this, Timothy. But the night we went we both said “what a nice fellow he is”. He says “he’s a very nice man”, and Aldous said “it’s very very nice to think that this is what’s going to be done at Harvard”. He said “it would be so good for it”. And then I said to him, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” [laughter] Aldous said “you may be right”, he said “but after all isn’t that what we want?” [laughter]
Timothy, when I’m discussing the need for understanding human temperament this is the story I tell. Because I said, yeah Aldous and I were deeply interested in the nature of human temperament and we meet someone who I think that was probably the least satisfactory description of you ever made, Timothy. I think even your greatest enemies would never make that description. And we made it. We were very very concerned because we held that perhaps you were a bit too unadventurous. You see what insights we had.
Al Hubbard: Well, you sure as heck contributed your part, but uh... [8:26]
Leary sees the subject of his hiring as off limits and switches the subject.
Tim Leary: I've always considered myself very square.
Humphry Osmond: So we were right in a way!
Later in this same conversation Leary describes the organization as having cells, which I’ve described, above, –an accurate description of the various groups that were recruited to create the counterculture.
Sydney Cohen: You're talking about Gerald [Heard] and Aldous?
Tim Leary: Yes, right right. Yeah. And, uh, Ivan. Uh, of course…uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angeles, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell, whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh…
Sydney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster!
Tim Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow [Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are here identified as undercover agents]…. [33:20ff]
Later, in an interview with Bowart himself, Leary would reveal that he accepted the CIA’s job offer, which, it appears, came via Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond:
"I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the control of consciousness."
[...] "Yes," he answered strongly. "I was a witting agent of the CIA..."
[...] "So, you work for the Central Intelligence Agency?" I asked. "Is it the Deputy Director of Plans you work for? Who makes out your checks?"
"It's none of your business to know how those things work. I'll answer you no questions that have to do with business. I'll answer you any question about history or people..."[55]
~ Walter Bowart interviewing Timothy Leary
Discussing different types of intelligence cells, in Acid, David Black states:
The conspiracy starts with three people […]. These three in turn recruit two other people to form three new cells. This recruitment process continues until a large network of cells is built up. The advantage of the structure is that if cell members do not know each other’s sub-cells, then they cannot give them away if captured. The drawback is that if a single cadre is arrested and cannot resist interrogation, then the enemy can arrest the half-a-dozen comrades he or she knows and thus reach the sub-cells. […] A more sophisticated system discussed in Heinlein’s book [The Moon is a Harsh Mistress] is a pyramid-of-pyramids set-up – a sort of ‘Internet’ without the computers […]”[56]
~ David Black
Regarding this pyramid-of-pyramids set-up, Robert Heinlein writes in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:
“Ought to take your money. Take same cells, arranged in open pyramid of tetrahedrons. Where vertices are in common, each bloke knows one in adjoining cell—knows how to send message to him, that’s all he needs. Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net. It’s why you can knock a hole in a man’s head, take chunk of brain out, and not damage thinking much. Excess capacity, messages shunt around. He loses what was destroyed but goes on functioning.” […]
“Each vertex of each triangle shares self with zero, one, or two other triangles. Where shares one, that’s its link, one direction or both—but one is enough for a multipli-redundant communication net. On corners, where sharing is zero, it jumps to write to next corner. Where sharing is double, choice is again right-handed.
“Now work it with people. Take fourth level, D-for-dog. This vertex is comrade Dan. No, let's go down one to show three levels of communication knocked out-- level E-for-easy and pick Comrade Egberg.
“Egbert works under Donald, has cellmates Edward and Elmer, and has three under him, Frank, Fred, and Fatso … But knows how to send messages to Ezra on a zone level but not in his cell. He doesn't know Ezra's name, face, address, or anything-but has a way, phone number probably, to reach Ezra in emergency.
“[…] Casimir, level three, finks out and betrays Charlie and Cox in his cell, Baker above him, and Donald, Dan, and Dick in sub cell-which isolates Egbert, Edward, and Elmer. And everybody under them.
“All three reported-redundancy, necessary to any communication system-but follow Egbert's yell for help. He calls Ezra. But Ezra is under Charlie and his isolated, too. No matter, Ezra relays both messages through his safety link, Edmund. By bad luck Edmund is under Cox, so he also passes it laterally, through Enwright … And that gets it past burned-out part and it goes up through Dover, Chambers, and Beeswax, to Adam, front office… Who replies down other side of pyramid, with lateral pass on E-for-easy level from Esther to Egbert and onto Ezra and Edmund. These two messages, up and down, not only get through at once but in way they get through, they define to home office exactly how much damage has been done and where. Organization not only keeps functioning but starts repairing self at once." [57]
~ Robert A. Heinlein
So in 1960 Huxley and Osmond went to Harvard to hire Leary for MKULTRA, and we saw Leary and Osmond discussing their meeting and “cells,” and “undercover agents,” above. Leary admits that he was an agent by 1962, and we know from the title of the “Harvard Psychedelic Research Project,” that he’d already been using Osmond’s word, “psychedelic,” by 1960. As I wrote in “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” regarding Osmond’s creation of the word psychedelic, and Leary’s subsequent adaptation of it at Harvard:
Notice that Leary named Harvard’s “Psychedelic Research Project” after Osmond’s newly created term. Though Osmond coined the word [psychedelic] in 1957, in 1960 Leary at Harvard had already made full use of it. In fact, the Psychedelic Research Project would eventually recruit more than 40 Harvard doctors and hundreds of students. Leary had already been testing this new word – and he was successful.[58]
David Black in Acid, states:
Back at Harvard in the autumn of 1960, Leary learned that the Swiss Sandoz company had synthesized the active ingredient of psilocybin, so he obtained a batch of pills. He got some advice on using them from Aldous Huxley, […] Leary began to organize experimental sessions with the drug for his staff members and some of their graduate students. They were impressed.[59] [emphasis added] ~ David Black
Now back to Bowart. The reader may have noticed he doesn’t mention that it was his own wife that funded IFIF and was the New York director, and that his in-laws, Peggy’s brothers, including Billy Hitchcock, owned the Millbrook mansion. Peggy is only briefly mentioned at the beginning of Bowart’s book:
Kudos to Dr. Robert M. Thomson, Johanna Moore G., Martha Sowerwine, my mother Fenna, and my wife Peggy for their patience and support.[60]
~ Walter Bowart
Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain reveal more of the details:
Thanks to a sizable inheritance and a family trust fund that provided him with $15,000 per week in spending money, Billy Hitchcock was in a position to offer a lot more than moral support to the psychedelic movement. He first turned on to LSD after his sister, Peggy, the director of IFIF’s New York branch, introduced him to Leary. They hit it off immediately, and Hitchcock made his family’s four-thousand-acre estate in Dutches County, New York, available to the psychedelic clan for a nominal five-hundred-dollar monthly rent.[61]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
Regarding Peggy Hitchcock, in Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens admits:
Of all the socially prominent people that they met during these months, the most important, in terms of our story, was Peggy Hitchcock, the artistically inclined twenty-eight-year-old jet-setting heir of the Mellon millions. Peggy, as Leary later wrote, "was easily bored, intellectually ambitious, and looking for a project capable of absorbing her whirlwind energy." Mind expansion fit the bill and she joined Flo Ferguson as the unofficial patronesses of the psilocybin project.[62]
~ Jay Stevens
About Millbrook, Stevens also notes:
In less than three months they had been thrown out of three countries and one world-class University. Their plans were in disarray; they were deeply in debt; it was not an auspicious beginning for the ancient game. All they wanted was a hole they could crawl down and sleep for a few weeks. And it was then that Peggy Hitchcock mentioned an estate her twin brothers, Tommy and Billy, owned in Millbrook, New York, a village ninety miles north of New York City.[63]
~ Jay Stevens
Stevens also identifies others (probable agents / assets) on the IFIF Board of Directors:
In early January 1963, IFIF filed incorporation papers with the state of Massachusetts. Leary was designated president, Alpert, director, with Gunther Weil, Ralph Metzner, George Litwin, Walter Houston Clark, Huston Smith, and Alan Watts listed as members of the Board of Directors.[64]
~ Jay Stevens
Also, since Bowart’s wife was on the board of directors for New York IFIF, this point is especially interesting since it’s omitted from his book.
The entire MKULTRA era is riddled with banking families, and there is evidence that the CIA was aided in its founding by these families.
JP Morgan Bank and Gordon Wasson ran MKULTRA subproject 58. The Warburg family funded and ran Sandoz Pharmaceuticals – the makers of LSD, where Wasson was a director.[65] The Mellon family funded the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project, IFIF, owned the Millbrook mansion, and Billy Hitchcock LSD Enterprises, and was tied back to JP Morgan Bank. The Mellon family was also tied directly to the head of the CIA. As David Black exposes in Acid:
The CIA’s Director from 1966 to 1973, Richard Helms, was a regular guest at the Mellon family mansion in Pittsburgh. Even Tim Leary thought that the ‘liberal CIA’ were ‘the best Mafia you could deal with’.[66]
~ David Black
One thing that is difficult to understand is the fable regarding Tim Leary’s getting fired from Harvard in 1963 and the exposure by Dr. Andrew Weil. It appears from the evidence that Weil’s “exposure” was just an old trick using the Hegelian dialectic: problem, reaction, solution; – or thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Without Leary having been fired from Harvard he’d never have been able to create the appearance of the hippie guru he’d later use to promote the psychedelics to the youth for the CIA and Huxley and Osmond. Weil’s so-called “exposure,” and Leary’s subsequent “firing” (along with Dr. Richard Alpert), created the illusion, in my opinion, that Harvard, et al, were trying to suppress Leary’s “spiritual message”. This gave Leary and the CIA the psychological advantage they’d need to use against the public. And, after all, Leary and the others were nearly all out of the Harvard Social Relations Department under the well-known MKULTRA conspirator, Dr. Henry A. Murray – who headed the department.
Above we also saw Bowart cite a CIA memo regarding Leary:
A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 and obtained by John Marks under a Freedom of Information suit in August, 1977, featured Dr. Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert and their organization which advocated the expansion of consciousness through psychedelic chemicals, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In alarming tones the memo ordered all CIA groups involved in mind control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA.[67]
However, with the realization that those “buses running around the country painted in dayglow,” above, meaning Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, were agents, it makes the theory that it was only Leary doing this and that he’d gone rogue, ridiculous.
Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow.
~ Timothy Leary
In the same reunion video at roughly 30 minutes, Dr. Sydney Cohen, yet another of the CIA’s specialists, who played the role of nemesis to Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert, admits that it was all a show:
Sydney Cohen: Well I think we need people like Tim and Al. They're absolutely necessary to get out, way out way out, too far in fact, in order to move the shit… move things around. And we need people like you to be reflective about it, and to study it. And, uh, little by little a slight movement is made in the totality. So, you know, I can't think of how it could have worked out otherwise. Uh, I must confess that when I studied LSD, and then I heard that it was getting out on the streets, I said this this’ll never sell. It's too intense, people will be too shook up. But it didn't work that way at all. I'm not quite sure I know why. But apparently people were able to sustain it - this intense response. So my record as a prophet is about one down and s…
A CIA document from November 1, 1963, (Mori ID # 146149) discusses how Alpert got them fired from Harvard and that Leary went too, but that IFIF was really supposed to be undercover for experimentation. However, it does not make clear if the experimentation was for the CIA, but we may see from Cohen’s above admission that it was:
These professors had been using hallucinogenic drugs in experiments involving undergraduate students... Drs. Albert and Leary had set up an organization known as the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which obviously was a cover for additional experimental work in the hallucinogenic drugs. [emphasis added]
We also saw the true meaning of Al Hubbard’s words: “Well, you sure as heck contributed your part, but uh...”
Other letters are cited from Huxley and Osmond on this issue with Leary, too, and though there may have been some internal disagreement, Leary was not the originator of this plan to “turn on” the masses. In reality it was Allen Ginsberg, the “indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs,”[68] who wanted to give LSD out to the masses.[69]
Giving more of the secret away, as well as exposing more agents, in the same reunion video at roughly 35 minutes:
Tim Leary: Well, Of course we have to mention Ken Kesey. and of course Allen Ginsberg was a, Allen Ginsberg was an indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs, and the, uh, uh, so they…
Sydney Cohen: At the very beginning what would you say? What turned you on, Tim? I don't remember.
Tim Leary: And Gordon Wasson! [MKULTRA Subproject 58] Don't ever underestimate the effect of that wonderful, respectable, far out mind he has. In Life magazine, there he is, a banker, a Morgan Guaranty Trust banker, lying on the mud hut, of a Mexican uh… you know… Saying “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!”
Someone: Oh boy!
Tim Leary: Talk about Joe Namath, uh, commercials! [laughs]
Leary exposes that it was all public relations when he says “Talk about Joe Namath, uh, commercials!” Serendipitously, Ginsberg was cousin to Oscar Janiger, who, serendipitously, hosted the same reunion party. And, serendipitously, Ginsberg was first dosed by Gregory Bateson – who helped to found the CIA. With all of these psychedelic “heroes” being agents, it appears that someone may have slipped in a few documents and letters to mislead the public regarding Leary and his assignment (more below). Leary, as the evidence now shows, was just a scapegoat – a covers story. By putting all the blame on Leary the CIA was able to keep the larger operation under wraps – for another 40 years.
What is clear is that from there the CIA took its MKULTRA tests on the road – with IFIF, then to Millbrook, etc, and with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ “Acid Tests,” – aided by the Grateful Dead – until successfully launching the so-called “psychedelic revolution” a few short years later.
And as “Bob Dobbs” admits, Peggy Hitchcock provided the funds necessary to get the Grateful Dead’s first album produced:
One of the things Peggy told me she did was, when the Grateful Dead made their first album they had, you know, budget problems. And she provided money to get that first album out. So she's key in that whole Grateful Dead scenario. So one of the things Peggy did in her life was, she helped the Grateful Dead get out their first album - she gave them some extra money, they were starving, and it wasn't looking good for the album. So she helped get the Grateful Dead myth started. She’s there. So there’s Walter involved with the Grateful Dead, and here's LaRouche saying the Grateful Dead is an MKULTRA scenario. And Walter’s in between. He's not fooled by hippie naivety. He's sophisticated. He's also a journalist. And his East Village Other is mentioned in the history of journalism. Any books on the history of the 50s or 60s, what he did is part of journalism history that students learn. So he's not naïve. He understands it could be, could be, a subtle ruse.[70]
~ Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs.
Typically researchers without an agenda would disclose to their audiences that they have a conflict of interest in such matters as these. The fact that Bowart doesn’t mention that his wife and in-laws funded all of this research (including the Psilocybin Project, IFIF, the Millbrook mansion, and the Grateful Dead’s first album), and that his own brother in-law ran Billy Hitchcock LSD Enterprises, and that his wife and in-laws were directly related to the Mellon banking empire, which also helped to found the CIA, forces the conclusion that there’s an intentional cover-up going on here – and Bowart was involved.
By 1968, society seemed to become divided into those who had taken illegal drugs and those who hadn't. Eventually LSD, marijuana, and cocaine were available on street corners and schoolyards throughout the land. If the government had covertly supported the unwitting Leary and associates, the snowballing effects of their LSD propaganda now caused a reversal of policy.[71]
~ Walter Bowart
Furthermore, Bowart claims that there was “a reversal of policy,” but he doesn't mention that he went with Leary before Congress in 1966 when Leary requested LSD's outlaw – furthering the apparent dialectic started by Weil with Leary getting “fired” from Harvard. In “The Narcotic Rehabilitation Act of 1966. Hearings before a special subcommittee, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session,” we find Leary’s testimony. Serendipitously, I should point out that these quotes were omitted from all of the books that I could find that mentioned Leary’s congressional testimony, forcing a trip to the local university’s Congressional archives to discover the best, omitted parts:
Senator Dodd. Don't you think that the drug needs to be put under control and restriction?
Dr. LEARY. Pardon, sir.
Senator Dodd. Let me rephrase my question. Don’t you feel that LSD should be put under some control, or restriction as to its use?
Dr. LEARY. Yes, sir.
Senator Dodd. As to its sale, its possession, and its use?
Dr. LEARY. I definitely do. In the first place, I think that the 1965 Drug Control Act, which this committee, I understand, sponsored, is the high water mark in such legislation.
[…]Dr. Leary. Yes, sir. I agree completely with your bill, the 1965 Drug Control Act. I think this is---
Senator Dodd. That the Federal Government and the State governments ought to control it?
Dr. Leary. Exactly. I am in 100 percent agreement with the 1965 drug control bill.
Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts. So there shouldn’t be---
Dr. Leary. I wish the States, I might add, would follow the wisdom of this committee and the Senate and Congress of the United States and follow your lead with exactly that kind of legislation.
Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts. So there should not be indiscriminate distribution of this drug should there?
Dr. Leary. I have never suggested that, sir. I have never urged anyone to take LSD. I have always deplored indiscriminate or unprepared use. [72]
Bowart wants his readers to believe that the “snowballing effects of their [including his own] LSD propaganda now caused a reversal of policy”. In fact, they needed Leary to popularize the drugs to a certain extent, which Bowart’s wife and in-laws helped to facilitate. And then in a PR move they outlawed the drugs to make them much more popular and widespread with rebellious teenagers - Bowart himself having gone before the US Senate Subcommittee with Leary in 1966 while Leary recommended this very action.
Bowart continues in Operation Mind Control:
It became obvious to them that LSD and the other psychoactive drugs were politically dangerous. They allowed people to see through the indoctrination of the government, the credibility gap, and the government propaganda for the Vietnam War. The "acid heads" adopted a visionary fervor and began actively criticizing the war in Vietnam and calling for many social reforms.[73]
~ Walter Bowart
I’ve exposed the following quote from the CIA’s Dr. Louis Jolyon West in prior articles. This quote is important because it provides insight into how the CIA and intelligence community uses hallucinogens to control the population (it’s repeated again, below):
The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.
But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.
To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome--and less expensive--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. […] The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[74]
~ Louis Jolyon West
While Bowart claims that the drugs “allowed people to see through the indoctrination of the government,” he doesn’t disclose that he and Leary perpetuated the “visionary fervor” and that they, and his own billionaire wife, Peggy Hitchcock, and his billionaire in-laws, were using them as systems of control, as well as to kill the very active anti-war movement he mentions here.
If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down.[75]
~ Walter Bowart
Here Bowart wants us to believe that the huge explosion in the use of LSD that happened after the ruckus began at Millbrook, and after he went with Leary to congress who requested LSD’s regulation in 1966, was the government “shutting it down” – rather than funding the entire thing and creating a Hegelian dialectic. In fact, the party wasn’t in full swing until 1967 – with the infamous “Summer of Love”.
Several months after the subcommittee hearing, LSD was banned in California. In Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens reveals:
Although the Summer of Love officially began on June 21, the summer solstice, its actual beginning occurred the previous fall, specifically on October 6, 1966, the day the California law making possession of LSD a misdemeanor went into effect.[76]
~ Jay Stevens
The University of Richmond, Virginia, website also confirms this:
Leary was one of many experts who testified at the 1966 subcommittee hearings, which showed both ardent support and uncompromising opposition to LSD.[…] Just several months after the subcommittee hearings, LSD was banned in California.[77]
Again, Bowart doesn’t admit that he, and Leary, and his wife, and his brother-in-law, were all a part of those who helped to make it popular in the first place. In fact, it appears that it was Leary who introduced Bowart to Peggy Hitchcock.
Here Bowart describes his version of how the government shut down the LSD supply –and fueled the subsequent drug epidemic:
It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs. Underground LSD labs were raided, and it wasn't long before its quality degenerated and the supply dried up.
Several studies have shown that when LSD became illegal (October 6, 1966) real LSD ceased to be available on the street. What was sold as LSD was every other kind of chemical, including several forms of veterinary tranquilizers!
Often methedrine was sold as LSD, as well as heroin mixed with amphetamines.
Simultaneously, as the LSD supply dried up, large supplies of heroin mysteriously became available. It was strong heroin, imported from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia (largely under CIA control). Many young people who had had their "consciousness expanded" too far to distinguish between one drug and another turned to heroin.
The government-inspired hysteria over drugs had led many to think, "Well, they lied to us about pot, they must be lying about heroin." And so when psychedelics were no longer easily obtained, and heroin was, many young people became addicts.[78] [Emphasis added] ~ Walter Bowart
Bowart describes how the government “shut down” the psychedelic revolution. However, it’s well understood that children don’t rebel with legal substances, and that LSD had to be outlawed (as well as remarketed – see “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?”), in order to launch the psychedelic movement, should now be clear. The additional impact was that American streets were now rampant with CIA drugs. As Time Magazine admitted in 2007:
After Wasson's article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America to "turn on, tune in, drop out." In other words, you can draw a woozy but vivid line from the sedate offices of J.P. Morgan and Time Inc. in the '50s to Haight-Ashbury in the '60s to a zillion drug-rehab centers in the '70s. Long, strange trip indeed.[79]
Now we’ll turn to John D. Marks and his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979, which is considered the most “respectable” work on MKULTRA to date. As Walter Bowart states about Marks:
Following the release of the Rockefeller Report, John D. Marks, author and former staff assistant to the State Department Intelligence Director, filed a Freedom of Information Act appeal on behalf of the Center for National Security Studies requesting documentation from the CIA. Marks requested documentation for the evidence cited in the Rockefeller Report on the CIA's mind-control activities conducted within the United States.[80]
~ Walter Bowart
John Marks: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979:
It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame on—or give all the credit to—the CIA for spreading LSD. One cannot forget the nature of the times, the Vietnam War, the breakdown in authority, and the wide availability of other drugs, especially marijuana. But the fact remains that LSD was one of the catalyst of the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s. No one could enter the world of psychedelics without first passing, unawares, through doors opened by the Agency. It would become a supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous research for weapons among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture.[81]
~ John D. Marks, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, U.S. State Department.
John Marks was the assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research under the US State Department, and the author of the book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, 1979. Again we have an obvious conflict of interest and an issue with disclosure. How can the intelligence community investigating itself possibly be unbiased? It was Marks who got the bulk of MKULTRA documents available to the public today, released in 1977.
As I showed in Entheogens: What’s In a Name?, 2014, as well as in my video Psychedelic Intelligence, Marks’s quote is completely unfounded.
Just one fallacy that Marks exemplifies, above, is that the counterculture was not created by the Agency. You may have also noticed that he used what is known as an appeal to ridicule to force his readers to agree with his conclusions:
It would become a supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous research for weapons among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture.[82]
Having investigated Gordon Wasson for years, I know how he operated. I have many hundreds of his letters which reveal his moves and activities, and I’ve studied what he’d done to other scholars who told the truth, such as with John M. Allegro. I’ve also shown how Wasson faked historical research.[83]
We have:
- The background.
- The motive.
- The history to show that he’s done it before.
- The evidence that he did it again.
Just the notion that Marks had all of the MKULTRA documents, including JP Morgan on the “Institutional Notifications”[84] documents, and even more so, that Marks wrote about Subproject 58 and Wasson (pp. 114), but doesn’t mention JP Morgan’s involvement, is very revealing:
Institutional Notifications:
National Philosophical Society (Subproject 58 – Cosponsor)
Unable to locate – not sentJ.P. Morgan and Co., Inc. Subproject 58
[Redacted – Gordon Wasson?] 23 Wall Street
New York, N.Y. 10015
Marks just omits that little, itsy, detail about JP Morgan Bank (Where Wasson was VP of propaganda) being on MKULTRA Subproject 58 documents, as well as the American Philosophical Society where Wasson lectured in 1956.[85] Furthermore, it’s very clear that it’s Wasson’s own letterhead requesting the infamous $2000 from the Geschickter Fund in the Subproject 58 documents (below), which proves that Marks knew that JP Morgan and Wasson were guilty, and likewise he would have known that Wasson had directly requested the $2000, which Marks then covers up with the James Moore scapegoat story:
James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists on the lookout for the magic mushroom. For three years after Morse Allen’s man returned from Mexico with his takes of wonder, Moore and the others in the Agency’s network pushed their lines of inquiry among contacts and travelers into Mexican villages so remote that Spanish had barely penetrated. Yet they found no magic mushrooms. Given their efforts, it was ironic that the man who beat them to “God’s flesh” was neither a spy nor a scientist, but a banker. It was R. Gordon Wasson, vice-president of J. P. Morgan & Company, amateur mycologist, and co-author with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms, Russia and History. Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian born wife had become fascinated by the different ways that societies deal with the mushroom, and they followed their lifelong obsession with these fungi, in all their glory, all over the globe. […][86]
A few pages later Marks embellishes the story further:
A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that reached both CIA headquarters and then James Moore.
During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote Wasson—"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls—and expressed a desire to look into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore eventually suggested that he would like to accompany Wasson's party, and, to sweeten the proposition, he mentioned that he knew a foundation that might be willing to help underwrite the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter Fund, made a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for the divine mushroom became Subproject 58.[87]
– John Marks
The letter Wasson wrote to the Geschickter Fund requesting the money was written in 1956. The $2000 requested in 1956 is worth over $17,300 in 2014 dollars, and was comparatively valued at $6884 by 1979 when John Marks wrote his book. The point is that $2000 sounded far less in 1979 than it was in 1956 and sounds far less today. It is likely that that much money in 1956 funded the entire trip – though Marks and Wasson’s collaborative efforts claim that it only covered part of the trip.
February 8, 1956
Attention, Dr. [redacted – Sidney Gottlieb or Charles Geschickter?]
Dear Sirs,
Over recent months, as Dr. [redacted] will inform you, I have had conversations with him and Dr. [redacted – James Moore?] of the [redacted – Geschickter Fund?] concerning certain pioneering inquiries that we are [unintelligible] hallucinatory fungi used by some of the more remote [redacted – Mexican Indian cultures] in association with their indigenous religious practices.
I am planning a fourth expedition to the mountains in the [redacted – Oaxaca region of Mexico] for July. I should like to hope that the expenses involved with this expedition would be borne by a [redacted – fund?] in the medical aspects of the research. With this in mind, I take the liberty of applying to you by this letter for a grand-in-aid of $2000 for the purpose of gathering the specimens in the field, identification thereof, their conservation either in liquor or in the dry state, and their conveyance to [redacted – CIA or Albert Hofmann?].
For your further information, Professor [redacted – Roger Heim], leading [redacted – French] mycologist and Director of the [redacted – Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle] has committed himself to accompany us on this trip. His great experience in mycology generally and in tropical mycology in particular will be of very great value to us. In order that we may plan accordingly, I should hope that your decision on this matter could be communicated to me before too long. I am leaving for a trip to [redacted – Europe] at the end of March to be gone for two months, and before my departure for [redacted - Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico] I should like to settle on all details concerning the equipment we shall take and the personnel of our expedition.
I remain Respectfully Yours
~ Gordon Wasson [redacted in the original] [emphasis added]
It appears that Marks and those involved in “assisting” with his book’s writing had a meeting and coordinated their cover-up. They were all agents. The only reason to throw Dr. James Moore under the bus was as a cover – for the other agents and the larger operation – which we now know is fact.
On a side note, I should mention that with Leary as a scapegoat in the last section, and the issue with Wasson and Huxley and the rest supposedly not wanting to make psychedelics popular with the public, but only to select elite – well Wasson had popularized “magic mushrooms” across the nation in Life magazine (1957), where on the front cover was cleverly placed: “The Discovery of Strange Mushrooms that Cause Visions,” directly followed by the words “Teen-Age Allowances,” –long before Leary had joined their efforts in 1960. Furthermore, Huxley had published the popular book The Doors of Perception, 1954, wherein he popularized mescaline – only one year after MKULTRA was funded.
Early this summer I took mescalin [sic], under the supervision of Dr. Humphry Osmond, […]. I have just finished an account of the experience, with reflections on its philosophical, aesthetic and religious implications, which I will send you as soon as it is printed. Incidentally, Osmond wants to get funds from some Foundation to carry out an investigation of the effects of mescalin upon a select group of persons with special gifts and high abilities. He thinks, and so do I, that this might throw a great deal of light on the nature of the mind and its relation with brain and nervous system.[88] [Emphasis added] ~ Aldous Huxley
Apparently The Doors of Perception was the CIA’s first MKULTRA publication.
Returning to Moore, I speculated about him in my 2012 article on Gordon Wasson, but didn’t yet have the evidence:
I consider the entire James Moore story to be a red herring. A red herring is a fallacy that leads someone from one topic to another. In other words, he's a decoy or a scapegoat. When we consider Moore as a decoy, the contradictions in the storyline disappear. Wasson and Allen Dulles were friends; the CIA had known all along about Wasson's work; Dulles worked with the German conglomerate IG Farben, which was related with Sandoz AG. It's hard to believe that the CIA needed a field agent when they had Wasson himself. Rather than admitting that the entire project was an elite/CIA/intelligence operation, it was best to slip an agent into the story line who would serve to lead researchers astray for decades. That way Wasson didn't have to work for the CIA openly, and he could still publish his books, which he just published in elite publishing houses – too expensive for anyone to acquire – and delivered many of them to the CIA and CFR himself. It was a slick move, and fooled many hundreds of researchers – but like all lies it was bound to get figured out. If anything, Wasson could likely have been Moore's superior at the CIA, and Dulles himself would have likely approved the $2000.[89]
Basically, Moore gets a nice check and some time on ABC TV,[90] and is forever remembered as the CIA’s bad guy. If the truth had been exposed by Marks that Wasson was also dirty, and that the whole of the Mexico team were agents, or “personnel,” the CIA’s psychedelic revolution and counterculture agenda would have been exposed and over by 1979. Though one thing I did have wrong, it appears that the “Acting Chief” and “Research Director,” gave final approval for Wasson’s trip on authority of Dulles’s Memoranda of 13 April 1953:
21 March 1956
MK-ULTRA [unreadable]: COMPTROLLER
ATTENTION: Finance Division
SUBJECT: MK-ULTRA, Subproject 58Under the authority granted in the Memoranda dated 13 April 1953 from the DCI to the DD/2, and the extension of this authority in subsequent memoranda, Subproject 58 has been approved, and $2,000.00 of the over-all Project MK-ULTRA funds has been obligated to cover the subproject’s expenses and should be charged to Allotment 6-2502-10-001.
[redacted – Acting Chief] TSS/Chemical Division
APPROVED FOR OBLIGATION OF FUNDS.
Research Director [redacted] Date: [redacted]
As we just saw in the last section from the transcript of the reunion party, A Conversation on LSD, Dr. Sydney Cohen and the group are sitting there having a discussion (don’t worry, we’ll revisit this transcript yet again):
Tim Leary: Yes, right right. Yeah. And, uh, Ivan. Uh, of course…uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angele [break in audio – mic muffled]s, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell, whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh…
Sydney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster!
Tim Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow [Ken Kesey and the Merry pranksters – here identified as undercover agents]….
Oscar Janiger: Yeah, and then Zinnberg says that the visionary experience, and all of the things he was doing at Harvard, and the others, his residence, and the rest he was giving LSD to, they never had a visionary, or ecstatic, or mystic experience. That the whole thing was a California invention, he said.
Tim Leary: Wonderful, They're right!
Oscar Janiger: The only time it happened, was when you cross the Colorado River.
[Room laughs]Sydney Cohen: I'm reading John Marks book on, the Manchurian… The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, in which he says the CIA turned us all on, you know. But,
Cohen brings up the book by John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and the CIA, to deflect investigation/discussion into this area. In fact virtually everyone in the room had some relationship to the CIA or military intelligence.
In the previous section we saw how Cohen and Marks assisted with Bowart’s book. Here, too, Cohen and Osmond (amongst others) are cited in thanks and Cohen (and also Gordon Wasson, James Moore, and Albert Hofmann), are also cited for their assistance in the introduction to Marks’ book:
There has been a whole galaxy of people who have provided specialized help, and I would like to thank them all: Jeff Kohan, Eddie Becker, Sam Zuckerman, Matthew Messelson, Julian Robinson, Milton Kline, Marty Lee, M. J. Conklin, Alan Scheflin, Bonnie Goldstein, Paul Avery, Bill Mills, John Lilly, Humphrey Osmond, Julie Haggerty, Patrick Oster, Norman Kempster, Bill Richards, Paul Magnusson, Andy Sommer, Mark Cheshire, Sidney Cohen, Paul Altmeyer, Fred and Elsa Kleiner, Dr. John Cavanagh, and Senator James Abourezk and his staff.
I sent drafts of the first ten chapters to many of the people I interviewed (and several who refused to be interviewed). My aim was to have them correct any inaccuracies or point out material taken out of context. The comments of those who responded aided me considerably in preparing the final book. My thanks for their assistance to Albert Hofmann, Telford Taylor, Leo Alexander, Walter Langer, John Stockwell, William Hood, Samuel Thompson, Sidney Cohen, Milton Greenblatt, Gordon Wasson, James Moore, Laurence Hinkle, Charles Osgood, John Gittinger (for Chapter 10 only), and all the others who asked not to be identified.[91] [emphasis added] ~ John D. Marks
So Cohen, one of the CIA’s doctors and an agent, says that he’s reading the book when he actually assisted with the book’s writing. And then Cohen’s telling the group what Marks is saying in the book about their own actions – right when Leary begins discussing “cells” and “Our undercover agents in Los Angeles”. It’s all PR - like Wasson. You tell the author what to say and he says it.
And when Marks says “and all those others who asked not to be identified,” this is simply another way that the CIA adds an additional layer of plausible deniability by having agents and assets not wish to be identified. The joke was on us: they were all agents and assets.
In my 2012 article Gordon Wasson: The Man, The Legend, The Myth, I revealed the following academic cover-up regarding Wasson’s involvement with JP Morgan and Civil War’s Hall Carbine Affair:
It appears that Wasson was able to gain his position at J. P. Morgan bank as VP of Public Relations (propaganda) by helping to cover up J. P. Morgan, Sr.'s involvement in the Civil War's Hall Carbine Affair, to which Wasson titled his own book on the matter. Documents uncovered at Yale University in the Andrews archives reveal that Wasson had been telling the Civil War historian, Allan Nevins, what to write about J. P. Morgan and the carbine affair, and then Wasson would turn and cite Nevins as an appeal to authority in his own arguments on the matter – which is an obvious conflict of interest, not to mention that someone working in PR for Morgan might likewise have a conflict of interest in writing an account of the matter. Furthermore, Wasson had been telling Prof. Charles McLain Andrews about the entire affair, and Andrews had forwarded Wasson's manuscript to Nevins.[92]
Here we see Wasson utilizing these same tactics with Yale’s Professor Charles McLain Andrews and historian Allan Nevins, revealing yet another “cell”:
December 15, 1937
I could make a very good use of the copy of my Civil War Carbine monograph that Mr. Nevins has, if he is back from California. My recollection is that he would be returning about this time. I hope it is not too much trouble for you to make sure that he returns it.
I think my name does not appear on the monograph. Do you happen to remember whether you let him know who wrote it? If not, there might be an advantage in leaving him in the dark if we should publish the manuscript through some other medium.[93] [emphasis added] ~ R. Gordon Wasson
August 15, 1939
Dear Mr. Andrews:
I hasten to write you to assure you that Allen [sic] Nevins treated my manuscript exactly as I would've wished him to do. He refers and is taxed to a “careful investigation” which “has shown that he must announce transaction and was really prudent and commendable.” In an appendix he summarizes the episode in two or three pages. He doesn’t identify “the recent investigation”, and for this I am very glad. Since his revised Life came out, he and I had an exchange of cordial letters on the subject.[94] [emphasis added] ~ R. Gordon Wasson
October 28, 1941
I am most grateful to you for your comments on the Hall Carbine paper, and we shall give earnest consideration to your advice. I have sent a copy of it to Allan Nevins, with whom I have often discussed it, and also to our good friend Steve Benet. We wish to think out carefully our procedure, and, fortunately, we can choose our own time. Perhaps after we let the matter simmer for some months we may bring out a second and larger edition.[95] [emphasis added] ~ R. Gordon Wasson
It’s the exact same stunt here with Marks. Simply replace the name Allan Nevins with John Marks. In one instance we have JP Morgan and The Hall Carbine Affair with Wasson (and Nevins and Andrews) covering it up, and in the other instance we have JP Morgan and MKULTRA with Wasson (and Marks, et al) covering it up.
The fact that Wasson himself requested the money from the Geschickter Fund proves that the James Moore story was fabricated – and this myth begins in John Marks’ book. And, as was shown above, like Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, James Moore is also listed as one of those who “assisted” Marks with his book.
Many of the most common MKULTRA myths, in fact, seem to have started with John Marks’ book, including (but not limited to):
1) That most of the MKULTRA research was geared toward a Manchurian-type candidate.
2) That the CIA had not intentionally created the psychedelic revolution.
3) That Frank Olson committed suicide.[96]
4) That James Moore had infiltrated Wasson’s group to Mexico for the CIA.
5) That Albert Hofmann “discovered” LSD and the subsequent origins of “bicycle day,” which begins the first page of Marks’s book.[97] And as we saw, above, Hofmann, too, assisted Marks with his book.[98]
6) That Albert Hofmann had beaten out the CIA in producing psilocybin.[99]
7) That Tim Leary became interested in mushrooms from Wasson’s Life magazine article (the “Joe Namath commercial”). [100]
8) That Tim Leary had gone rogue.[101]
Gottlieb's dream of a CIA monopoly on the divine mushroom vanished quickly under the influence of unwanted competitors, and indeed, the Agency soon faced a control problem of burgeoning proportions. While Moore toiled in his lab, Roger Heim in Paris unexpectedly pulled off the remarkable feat of growing the mushrooms in artificial culture from spore prints he had made in Mexico. Heim then sent samples to none other than Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who quickly isolated and chemically reproduced the active chemical ingredient. He named it psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the CIA, and the men from MKULTRA found themselves trying to obtain formulas and supplies from overseas. Instead of locking up the world's supply of the drug in a safe somewhere, they had to keep track of disbursements from Sandoz, as they were doing with LSD. Defeated by the old master, Moore laid his own work aside and sent away to Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin.[102]
~ John D. Marks
One person whose curiosity was stimulated by the article was a young psychology professor named Timothy Leary.[103]
~ John D. Marks
And so the fables are repeated by the “group,” or, “cell(s)”:
Among those whose interest was piqued by Wasson’s article in Life was a young professor named Timothy Leary.[104]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
Apparently, one of the “various foundations” from which Gordon was hoping to obtain a grant was the Geschickter Fund in Washington, D.C. It had been mentioned to him as a possible source of funding by James Moore, the CIA operative, when he initially contacted Gordon in August 1955. Unknown to Gordon, the Fund was a front for the CIA to channel money secretly. According to John Marks’ book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” (New York: Dell, 1979), it anted up $2,000 to help finance Gordon’s expedition in the spring of 1956.[105]
~ Allan Richardson
And though this topic deserves an entire article, it appears that Arthur Stoll, Albert Hofmann's boss at Sandoz, is really who invented LSD – sometime between 1918 and 1933. Hofmann was just a cover story – and, apparently, another CIA asset.
Wasson said that Albert Hofmann “worked in some way with the CIA” and that Hofmann’s “discoveries were imparted in whole by Sandoz to the U.S. government. Sandoz wanted to be on the right side of things.” Hofmann’s connection to the CIA has never been officially confirmed by the CIA, which maintains a policy of not commenting on or revealing information on foreign citizens who find their way into its employment.[106]
~Hank Albarelli
To his credit, Hank Abarelli (discussed more below) exposed Hofmann as likely being a CIA asset in his book A Terrible Mistake. And obviously if Hofmann was CIA “personnel,” then Moore couldn’t have been the only “mole”. Hofmann was also at Pont-Saint-Esprit, as first exposed by Fuller:
Much overlooked in Fuller’s book is a brief section noting the presence of Sandoz Company researcher Dr. Albert Hofmann in Pont-St.-Esprit during the summer of 1951. Hofmann himself has briefly, and parenthetically, mentioned the French outbreak in his own book, LSD: My Problem Child, first published in 1979, but for some reason, he does not mention that he was in the town of Pont-St.-Esprit in the days immediately following the outbreak.[107]
~ Hank Albarelli
Furthermore, In Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013, I exposed that it’s highly unlikely that Hofmann had actually invented LSD, which was known about at least 5 years before his so called discovery of it.[108]
And though his version of events is obviously distorted, too, here’s how Dr. Willis Harmon, an SRI (Stanford Research Institute) researcher, and MKULTRA man for the CIA, told his version of the origins of LSD, psilocybin, and MKULTRA, on Australian ABC radio in 1977:
The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village in Southern Germany. In 1935 a dark cloud was over Europe so the members of this group set out very deliberately to synthesize chemicals which were like the natural vegetable substances which they were well aware had been used in all the world’s major religious traditions down through the centuries. By 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin, LSD and about thirty other drugs. They had stopped to think about the consequences of letting all this loose, and decided against it. They decided that they were not sure what the negative effects of the drugs would be and that it just wasn’t a very wise thing to do.
Five years later, in 1943, when Europe was really in bad shape, they decided apparently that possible negative consequences were nothing compared to the consequences of not doing this.
Now, two members of this group, which lived in a very tight religious community, were in the Sandoz chemical company – that’s partly how this project came to be. One of them was the chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann. He cooked up the newspaper story, that everyone has heard now, about the accidental ingestion of LSD and the realization of what its properties were after an amazing bicycle ride home and the visions and so on. This group quietly gave supplies of the chemical to a number of doctors around the world… [109] [emphasis added] ~ Willis Harmon
Harmon states that by 1938 they had created LSD, psilocybin and “about thirty other drugs”. He claims that they began to synthesize them in 1935, but we know from Saint Peter’s Snow by Leo Perutz, 1933, that LSD must have been invented in or before 1933. Obviously by 1938 they would have had to have known the outcome of what they were trying to do, and, again, targeting the masses with drugs was hardly the way to stop a war created by the elite – which was a genocide on those very masses. And, how, exactly, would they know five years later that releasing drugs would somehow help the masses and end the war? It’s a ridiculous cover story.
As it turns out, Harmon’s work at SRI involved the creation of a modern cult that came directly out of MKULTRA –which was printed in a study called Changing Images of Man, 1974, published by SRI. Others involved in this project included Dr. Carl Rogers – MKULTRA Suproject 97; B.F. Skinner – who created “operant conditioning”; Dr. James Fadiman – who did the last legal LSD studies in the USA; Margaret Mead – whose husband Gregory Bateson helped found the CIA, and the both of them were involved in the MKULTRA Macy Foundation conferences; Dr. Ralph Metzner – who worked with Dr. Timothy Leary at Millbrook and also came out of the Harvard Social Relations department; and Joseph Campbell – who would help them all create the new cult based on his knowledge of religion and the “power of myth”; amongst other participants.
Now let’s turn to the next book in our study of MKULTRA and the psychedelic revolution: Acid Dreams, written in 1985 by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain. Their book would become one of the leading sellers in MKULTRA / counterculture disinformation.
Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, 1985
What was Helms trying to hide? The wholesale destruction of these memoranda suggests there may have been a lot more to the CIA’s LSD program than the revelations that came to light during the post-Watergate housecleaning of the mid-1970s. Of course, it's highly improbable that the CIA would ever have drawn up a "smoking gun" document describing the details of a plot to dump millions of hits of acid on the black market. Nor is it likely that the Agency anticipated the catalytic impact of LSD and its disruptive effect on the youth movement. The CIA is not an omniscient, monolithic organization, and there's no hard evidence that it engineered a great LSD conspiracy. (As in most conspiracy theories, such a scenario vastly overestimates the sophistication of the alleged perpetrator.) If anything, it seems that a social phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as the psychedelic subculture was beyond the control of any single person or entity.[110]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain are the authors of Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, 1985. Theirs, in my opinion, is the worst of all the MKULTRA-related books reviewed here. In this book the authors repeatedly claim that there's no evidence that the psychedelic revolution and counterculture were intentionally created or launched by the CIA, while dismissing or omitting evidence.
For example, they cite at least five times the very same MKULTRA reunion video where this fact is directly admitted by the agents themselves – A Conversation on LSD, 1979.[111] But apparently no one has ever asked why Lee and Shlain only quote the first several minutes of this hour-long video. In my opinion, they seem to have intentionally avoided quoting any of the actual words of admission from the reunion video in order to help perpetuate the CIA’s own myths about MKULTRA and the origins of the psychedelic revolution and counterculture:
Unless Lee and Schlain were trying to mislead their readers, why would they claim that “there’s no hard evidence,” and then cite the very video 5 times where the entire operation is admitted by the agents themselves, and then ridicule “conspiracy theories”?
Lee and Shlain’s above claim, of course, is ridiculous, and, as the evidence shows, appears to expose them in an intentional cover-up of the facts regarding the origins of the psychedelic counterculture and the CIA’s involvement. And it appears that they must have known this fact since they’d obviously seen the above reunion video by 1985 when they wrote Acid Dreams (only 6 years after the video was recorded – on Feb. 16, 1979):
In February 1979 Leary showed up at an "LSD Reunion" in Los Angeles, hosted by Dr. Oscar Janiger. An animated discussion ensued among the thirty psychedelic pioneers who attended this private gathering. Dr. Humphry Osmond and Laura Huxley were there, along with Sidney Cohen, John Lilly, Willis Harmon, and Nick Bercel. The legendary Captain Al Hubbard, then seventy-seven years of age, swaggered into Janiger's home wearing his security uniform, with a pistol and a bandolier around his hip. “Oh, Al! I owe everything to you," Leary greeted the Captain. "The galactic center sent you down just at the right moment." To which Hubbard responded, "You sure as heck played your part.” It was the last time most of them would see the Captain, for he died a few years later, not long after receiving a card from President Reagan wishing him a happy birthday.[112]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
And oh, how cute! A birthday card from President Reagan and all! But what did the video say? In fact, Lee and Shlain misrepresent where Al Hubbard’s quote took place in the conversation, where he says: “You sure as heck played your part”. At just around 4 minutes into the video is Leary’s “galactic center” comment (referring to the CIA):
Tim Leary: Oh, Al, I don't say that I owe everything to you.
Al Hubbard: Ah, [unintelligible - I don’t think you do(?)] but I think you would have.
Tim Leary: Galactic center sent you down just at the right moment to..
Al Hubbard: create a disturbance.
And, surprisingly or not, more than four minutes later is where Hubbard states: “you sure as heck contributed your part” – in the part of the discussion, shown above and repeated here, again, where Huxley and Osmond went to Harvard to hire Leary:
Humphry Osmond: Remember the first time we met, which was in Cambridge? On the night of the Kennedy election.
Tim Leary: 1960.
Humphry Osmond: 1960. We went out to this place. And Timothy then was wearing his gray flannel suite and his crew cut. And we had this very interesting discussion with him. And when we went.. . and I don’t think I told you this, Timothy. But the night we went we both said “what a nice fellow he is”. He says “he’s a very nice man”, and Aldous said “it’s very very nice to think that this is what’s going to be done at Harvard”. He said “it would be so good for it”. And then I said to him, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” [laughter] Aldous said “you may be right”, he said “but after all isn’t that what we want?” [laughter]
Timothy, when I’m discussing the need for understanding human temperament this is the story I tell. Because I said, yeah Aldous and I were deeply interested in the nature of human temperament and we meet someone who I think that was probably the least satisfactory description of you ever made, Timothy. I think even your greatest enemies would never make that description. And we made it. We were very very concerned because we held that perhaps you were a bit too unadventurous. You see what insights we had.
Al Hubbard: Well, you sure as heck contributed your part, but uh... [8:26]
Tim Leary: I've always considered myself very square.
Humphry Osmond: So we were right in a way!
Tim Leary: I always try to hang around the hippest person in the area and I continue to do that. […]
Lee and Shlain’s quote is actually pulled from two different and unrelated segments of the first eight and a half minutes of the reunion video: from the first four minutes –and then is confounded with the discussion four minutes later, near 8:20ff.
According to Robert Forte, Lee and Shlain may have actually been at the reunion party, and possibly even filmed this video of it. But regardless, why, then, since they obviously knew of the reunion video by 1985, did they make the above claims and then omit the following transcript of the video from their book? The following is from the reunion video at roughly 35 minutes (we also saw this above):
Tim Leary: I think, you know, sometimes it's interesting to think too, as you’re going around the country, I'm sure you've all experienced… you talk to, uh, middle-aged, fairly respectable people in Tucson Arizona, and they say “this is where the acid thing really happened.” [Laughs] Tucson! In San Francisco “this is where it really happened.” The lower East side, you know, they say “that’s where it really happened.” And, uh, no one has ever really, uh, uh told us what was really going on in Los Angeles during those, uh, years. And I think there was much more done down here, there was a much wider range, there were more doctors involved. There were more scientists, and we…
Sydney Cohen: You're talking about Gerald and all of us.
Tim Leary: Yes, right right. Yeah. And, uh, Ivan. Uh, of course…uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angele [break in audio – mic muffled]s, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell, whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh…
Sydney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster!
Tim Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow [Ken Kesey and the Merry pranksters – here identified as undercover agents]….
Oscar Janiger: Yeah, and then Zinnberg says that the visionary experience, and all of the things he was doing at Harvard, and the others, his residence, and the rest he was giving LSD to, they never had a visionary, or ecstatic, or mystic experience. That the whole thing was a California invention, he said.
Tim Leary: Wonderful, They're right!
Oscar Janiger: The only time it happened, was when you cross the Colorado River.
[Room laughs] Sydney Cohen: I'm reading John Marks book on, the Manchurian… The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, in which he says the CIA turned us all on, you know. But,
They claim there’s no evidence while citing the very video where the admissions are clear.
The CIA is not an omniscient, monolithic organization, and there's no hard evidence that it engineered a great LSD conspiracy.[113]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
Then why not show the full transcript, unedited, Marty? Maybe they mean as long as they cover the evidence up, and pretend that it doesn’t exist…?
And, as we saw in the previous section, Marty Lee is also mentioned in the introduction to Marks's book. How serendipitous!
There has been a whole galaxy of people who have provided specialized help, and I would like to thank them all: Jeff Kohan, Eddie Becker, Sam Zuckerman, Matthew Messelson, Julian Robinson, Milton Kline, Marty Lee, M. J. Conklin, Alan Scheflin, Bonnie Goldstein, Paul Avery, Bill Mills, John Lilly, Humphrey Osmond, Julie Haggerty, Patrick Oster, Norman Kempster, Bill Richards, Paul Magnusson, Andy Sommer, Mark Cheshire, Sidney Cohen, Paul Altmeyer, Fred and Elsa Kleiner, Dr. John Cavanagh, and Senator James Abourezk and his staff.[114] [emphasis added] ~ John D. Marks
It’s a coincidence theory! And we must ask why Lee “provided specialized help” – and what help was it?
And, serendipitously, Lee and Shlain also admit that Al Hubbard was “a high-level OSS officer,” involved in smuggling:
That Hubbard, of all people, should have emerged as the first genuine LSD apostle is all the more curious in light of his long-standing affiliation with the cloak-and-dagger trade. Indeed, he was no run-of-the-mill spook. As a high-level OSS officer, the Captain directed an extremely sensitive covert operation that involved smuggling weapons and war material to Great Britain prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.[115]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
And to admit that Hubbard was “a high-level OSS officer” – and of course the OSS was the precursor to the CIA, and then claim there’s no evidence, is ridiculous. And it’s suspected that Hubbard actually helped to create and launch MKULTRA. But Lee and Shlain only state that it’s “all the more curious”.
Here, again, we see what strongly appears to be a cover-up of the origins of the psychedelic revolution and counterculture by Lee and Shlain in their book Acid Dreams. Why else would the authors cite the very video 5 times where the admission is made that those men were agents and then claim that there’s no evidence? Regarding Hubbard they further state:
Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers, he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut Captain was the quintessential turned-on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover; Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdos—especially longhaired radical weirdos who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and the acid subculture. After conferring with Harmon, the Captain donned a khaki uniform, a gold-plated badge, a belt strung with bullets, and a pistol in a shoulder holster. That was the uniform he wore throughout his tenure as an SRI consultant, which lasted until the late 1970s.
Ironically, while Harmon and Hubbard were probing the relationship between drugs and radical politics, a number of New Left activists grappled with a similar question. Political and cultural radicals from both sides of the Atlantic discussed the drug issue at a conference on "the dialectics of liberation," which took place in London during the summer of 1967. Some were wary of mixing acid and politics. "Don't give LSD to Ché Guevara, he might stop fighting," said Dr. David Cooper, a British psychiatrist who feared that drugs might undermine political commitment (the same thesis put forward by the Rand Corporation). But others, such as Allen Ginsberg, saw great advantages in a "politics of ecstasy." The pro-LSD faction insisted that acid was a radicalizing factor and that psychedelics would continue to galvanize the youth rebellion.[116] [Emphasis added] ~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
“Seasoned spy veteran,” “eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and the acid subculture ,” “an SRI consultant,” “Rand Corporation” and “politics of ecstasy” – there’s nothing to see here, folks, move along…
Here’s a document marked “confidential” from the Department of the Army, dated 23 November 197(?):
Stanford Research Institute
Security DivisionGentlemen:
I have received certain documents from Special Agent A. M. Hubbard to be given to Major William E. Smith.Very truly yours,
Dollie B. Smith
Secretary to Major Smith
So in the 1970s the Department of the Army is still calling Al Hubbard a “Special Agent,” and it’s also clear that in the 1970s SRI was still involved with mind control operations – headed by Willis Harmon, who, in 1968, gave Hubbard a job as a “special investigative agent”.
Adverse publicity forced IFAS to disband in 1965, whereupon Harmon, who considered himself a disciple of the Captain, became director of the Educational Policy Research Center at SRI. In October 1968 he invited Hubbard, then living in semiretirement in British Columbia, to join SRI as a part-time "special investigative agent." [117]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
Furthermore, on p. 198 of Acid Dreams is Harmon’s October 2, 1968, letter to Hubbard (the original is on SRI’s letterhead) admitting the outline of Hubbard’s “study”:
Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug usage prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of longrange educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available.[118] [Emphasis added] ~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
It’s like the fox investigating the hen house. And if I had to grade Lee and Shlain on their abilities at spin and counterintelligence bullshitting, I’d have to give them an “F”. Their spin is simply atrocious.
While at times Lee and Shlain omit citations while claiming there’s no evidence to the contrary, at other times, such as the above quotes, they cite them and then pretend they’re of no significance – when Harmon was also known to be CIA/MKULTRA (the Army’s letter was addressed to him, which proves that he had clearance to discuss “Special Agent” Hubbard), and Hubbard was an admitted “Special Agent” – and, apparently, an original founder of MKULTRA. And Harmon, serendipitously, was also at that same reunion party.
Here’s another quote where Lee and Shlain attempt their weak powers of bullshit – playing down the idea that Leary was an agent:
On repeated occasions PL castigated SDS regulars for being "escapist" and "objectively counterrevolutionary" when they spoke in favor of turning on. (Quite a few SDS members would have agreed with Arthur Kleps when he said, "Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes.") PL also criticized propaganda tactics like guerrilla theater and rock bands at rallies as "creeping carnivalism," and they even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot.[119] [emphasis added] ~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
But wait a minute! An imperialist plot!? That’s some not-so-fancy loaded language. We just read Leary’s admission to Bowart (husband of Mellon banking heiress Peggy Hitchcock), above; and his own admission about “undercover agents,” and “cells,” above – from the same reunion video Lee and Shlain cited – 5 times! Apparently only the quotes they selected and took out of context were good enough for their book, while the quotes that tell a more direct story, somehow, were not:
"I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the control of consciousness."
[...] "Yes," he answered strongly. "I was a witting agent of the CIA..." [120]
~ Walter Bowart quoting Timothy Leary
And
Tim Leary: […]uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angele [break in audio – mic muffled]s, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell, whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh…
Sydney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster!
Tim Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow ….
What’s that I smell? Is that… bullshit? I hope you have your boots on, because there’s more:
He [Leary] wrote a widely acclaimed psychology textbook and devised a personality test called ""The Leary," which was used by the CIA, among other organizations, to test prospective employees.[121]
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
So Leary wrote the entrance exam for the CIA. How… serendipitous!
They also try to play down, while discussing, the obvious connections between the psychedelic revolution and youth movements:
On New Year's Day 1968 they dropped acid together so they "could look at the problem logically," as Rubin put it, and they hit upon a recipe for social change. Mix one part hippie and one part activist, marinade in Marx (Groucho, not Karl) and McLuhan, season radically with psychedelics, and what do you come up with? Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist, a satirical underground magazine, said it first: "Yippie!"—the battle cry of the Youth International Party. It was a name to conjure with, a rallying point for stoned politicos and militant hippies who had merged the "I protest" of the New Left with the "I am" of the counterculture. "We figured we could create a new myth of the dope-taking, freedom-loving, politically committed activist," Rubin explained. "Some day, we dreamed, the myth will grow and grow until there were millions of yippies …. Soon there will be yip-pies and a Youth International Party throughout the Western world."[122]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
So then why heap all the blame on Leary? As we’ve already seen, this whole story against Leary is a lie. Leary was but the scapegoat to protect the larger MKULTRA operation. And, as we saw above, Walter Bowart was the first Yippie, and worked with Marshall McLuhan, and both were pals of Leary.
Repeatedly throughout their book they either entirely omit, or quote, and then deny.
Reflecting upon the sixties, a surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse so as to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion. "LSD makes people less competent," contends William Burroughs. "You can see their motivation for turning people on. Very often it's not necessary to give it more than just a little push. Make it available and the news media takes it up, and there it is. They don't have to stick their necks out very much."
Burroughs was one of the first to suspect that the acid craze of the 1960s might have been a manipulated phenomenon—an opinion shared by John Sinclair, the former White Panther leader who once sang the praises of LSD as a revolutionary drug. "It makes perfect sense to me," Sinclair stated. "We thought at the time that as a result of our LSD-inspired activities great things would happen. And, of course, it didn't …. They were up there moving that shit around. Down on the street, nobody knew what was going on."
Even Ken Kesey, who still views LSD in a positive light, would not dismiss the possibility that the CIA might have meddled in the drug scene. "Could have been," Kesey admitted. "But, then again, they were giving us the cream, and once you've seen the cream, you know how good it is. And once you know how good it is, you know they can never take it away from you. They can never take that strength away."
Nearly a decade before Kesey was introduced to psychedelics as part of a government-funded drug study in Palo Alto, the CIA embarked upon a major effort to develop LSD into an effective mind control weapon. The CIA’s behavior modification programs were geared toward domestic as well as foreign populations; targets included selected individuals and large groups of people. But in what way could LSD be utilized to manipulate an individual, let alone a subculture or a social movement?
LSD is not a habit-forming substance like heroin, which transforms whole communities and turns urban slums into terrains of human bondage. Whereas opiates elicit a predictable response, both pharmacologically and socially, this is not necessarily the case with psychedelics. The efficacy of acid as an instrument of social control is therefore a rather tenuous proposition.
The CIA came to terms with this fundamental truth about LSD only after years of intense experimentation. At first CIA researchers viewed LSD as a substance that produced a specific reaction (anxiety), but subsequent studies revealed that "set and setting" were important factors in determining its effects. This finding made the drug less reliable as a cloak-and-dagger weapon, and the CIA utilized LSD in actual operations—as an aid to interrogation and a discrediting agent—only on a limited basis during the Cold War. By the mid-1960s the Agency had virtually phased out its in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ and related derivatives, which were shown to be more effective as incapacitants. But that did not mean the CIA had lost all interest in LSD.[123]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
It appears that Lee and Shlain want their readers to ignore the evidence they present and then dismiss, while at the same time leading the discussion on what a “CIA weapon” would be. The Deadheads, for instance: following the Grateful Dead around for years doing nothing but drugs with their lives – and navel gazing.
But in what way could LSD be utilized to manipulate an individual, let alone a subculture or a social movement?
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
Remember the quote by Thomas Pynchon in the introduction of this essay?
If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
And then Lee and Schlain set up their own analysis of the things LSD is and isn’t, apparently trying to mislead people away from the conclusions that I finally revealed in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013.
LSD is not a habit-forming substance like heroin, which transforms whole communities and turns urban slums into terrains of human bondage. Whereas opiates elicit a predictable response, both pharmacologically and socially, this is not necessarily the case with psychedelics. The efficacy of acid as an instrument of social control is therefore a rather tenuous proposition.
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
Obviously it would be very important for the CIA to use counterintelligence to cover up the fact that it had launched the psychedelic revolution and counterculture as a system of social control over the general population. In other words, the CIA had intentionally launched a major psychological war against the American people (you should be really angry by now), and had to cover it up. And it appears, like the others discussed in this article, that Lee and Shlain were involved in that cover-up.
As the above mentioned MKULTRA psychiatrist, Dr. Sydney Cohen, stated before Congress in 1966:
May I add something to what you have just said, Senator? I think another thing that has to be pointed out to these young people is that the LSD state is a completely uncritical one, a hypersuggestible one, and that what happens there can overwhelm some people and yet be quite illusory. There are insights here to be found and examined, but also the great possibility that the insights are not valid at all and overwhelm certain credulous personalities.[124]
~ Sydney Cohen
Here we also see Prof. Marlene Dobkin de Rios discussing the hyper-suggestibility factor:
Psychedelic substances like ayahuasca create a state of hypersuggestibility in which persons are very open to being influenced by others. Many traditional cultures have utilized this condition to inculcate cultural values and behaviors in young people as they receive initiation into adulthood. In the West, countercultural values can be inculcated in young people when using these psychedelics, especially when using them in an antinomian context.[125]
~ Marlene Dobkin de Rios
Harvard Professor David McClelland, also made this point clear:
It is probably no accident that the society which most consistently encouraged the use of these substances, India, produced one of the sickest social orders ever created by mankind in which thinking men spent their time lost in the Buddha position under the influence of drugs exploring consciousness, while poverty, disease, social discrimination, and superstition reached their highest and most organised form in all history.[126]
~ David McClelland
Wrapping this section up, we’ll conclude with the CIA’s Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who’s cited by Lee and Shlain in the footnote on page 48:
* In his letters Huxley mentioned "my friend Dr. J. West," a reference to Jolly West, who conducted LSD studies for the CIA. At one point, while West was engaged in MK-ULTRA research, Huxley suggested that he hypnotize his subjects prior to administering LSD in order to give them "post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction." Needless to say, the CIA was intrigued by this idea. Huxley also lectured on parapsychology at Duke University, where J. B. Rhine (with whom Huxley communicated) was engaged in ESP studies for the CIA and the army.[127]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
In The Letters of Aldous Huxley, we find the discussion between Aldous Huxley and Dr. Humphry Osmond, regarding Dr. West:
DEAR HUMPHRY,
1 June, 1957
... It sounds to me very good, and if you could get away for at least some of the duration of the experiments, it should be possible to achieve something significant. Using the same subjects in a regular series of tests should make possible a really systematic exploration of their other world. It will also be possible to see what can be done by combining hypnosis with LSD or mescalin.
Dr. L. J. West, of the Medical School of the University of Oklahoma, was here a few weeks ago-an extremely able young man, I think.
His findings are that mescalinized subjects are almost unhypnotizable. I suggested to him that he should hypnotize his people before they took LSD and should give them post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orientating the drug-induced experience in some desired direction, and also at the very desirable goal of enabling subjects to recapture the LSD experience by purely psychological means, after their return to normal consciousness, and whenever they so desired. The fact that this kind of experience occurs in some persons spontaneously indicates that chemicals are not indispensable, and it may be that the unconscious can be persuaded, by means of post-hypnotic suggestions, repeated if necessary again and again, to open the door without the aid of chemical keys. Such a set-up as Eileen envisages would be ideal for this kind of experiment. It would be a great thing if you could get down to Florida to supervise at least the initial phases of the work.[128] […] [emphasis added] ~ Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley’s letter makes clear that he was involved in directing MKULTRA studies, and he suggests that Osmond “get down to Florida to supervise at least the initial phases of the work”. And we already saw that Huxley was also involved with Dr. Andrija Puharich’s “secret experiments with Amanita muscaria” mushrooms, and that he worked with Humphry Osmond, who also worked with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer on MKULTRA Subproject 47. And, as we saw from Dr. West in the previous section on Walter Bowart:
The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.
But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.
To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome–and less expensive–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. […] The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[129][emphasis added]
~ Louis Jolyon West
To answer Lee and Schlain’s question, that’s how LSD could be utilized to manipulate an individual, let alone a subculture or a social movement.
Now let’s turn to a book that’s a little more worth our while: Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stevens, 1987.
Jay Stevens: Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, 1987
What if Aldous Huxley hadn’t read that particular issue of the Hibbert Journal? What if Robert Graves hadn’t passed on an obscure reference to his friend the New York banker? What if the CIA … you could play the what-if game for hours.[130]
~ Jay Stevens
Jay Stevens is a poet, historian, and journalist, and is the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, 1987. And to Stevens’ credit, his is probably one of the more readable books of the bunch being reviewed here, though at times his level of slapstick reaches that of John Fuller’s book.
And while we can speculate endlessly sans the evidence, as we’ll see, Stevens, like the others, repeats many of the same myths – as his above quote suggests. For instance, on page one, just as Marks, he starts with Albert Hofmann and bicycle day (there appears to be a formula or blueprint for these books – aside from cross-citing each other). One of the best quotes from his book, however, is the following:
On April 13, 1953, while Huxley was dashing off that enthusiastic note to Osmond concerning mescaline, the CIA formally approved MK-ULTRA, and diverted $300,000 to fund its initial investigations. […] Hiding itself behind two respectable fronts, the Josiah Macy Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the CIA began funneling dollars to an intercontinental network that rivaled the one being forged by Huxley and Hubbard.[131]
~ Jay Stevens
In the above quote we see Stevens speciously admit that “the CIA began funneling dollars to an intercontinental network that rivaled the one being forged by Huxley and Hubbard.” In reality, however, as we saw above, Huxley and Hubbard were both MKULTRA. And the funneled money didn’t rival Huxley and Hubbard –it funded them. And, serendipitously, we see that the CIA funded MKULTRA at the same time that Huxley wrote to Osmond, who was also MKULTRA.
That the answer might come from the field of psychopharmacology was a possibility that Huxley did not rule out. In an essay written at Sanary around the time he read Lewin's Phantastica, Huxley had mused that should he ever become a millionaire he would "endow a band of research workers to look for the ideal intoxicant."[132]
~ Jay Stevens
Thank goodness for Huxley that the CIA funded his work and a “band of research workers to look for the “ideal intoxicant”! How serendipitous! But an “ideal intoxicant” for what purpose?
Aldous Huxley paid a memorable visit to a UCLA lab that was filled with cats and monkeys, each with a forest of electrodes sticking out of its skull. The caged animals, by pressing a lever, could massage their brains' pleasure centers with little electrical shocks, an experience so wondrously ecstatic that some pressed the lever eight thousand times an hour, until they collapsed from exhaustion and lack of food. "We are obviously very close to reproducing the Moslem paradise where every orgasm lasts six hundred years," Huxley wrote to a friend.[133] [Emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
Oh, the “Moslem paradise,” of course! This is just one more example (of many) of Huxley’s involvement in mind control studies and staying abreast in all of the latest developments in psychological and animal/human experimentation. And who would have thought that the man who pioneered the psychedelic revolution would be an ardent supporter of animal experimentation? And in reality, Huxley’s “friend” was Dr. Humphry Osmond (MKULTRA Suproject 47, etc.). The letter quoted by Stevens is dated 23 September, 1956, wherein Huxley writes:
#756
My dear Humphry, […]
While Julian [Huxley] was here we went to see, at UCLA, the rats and cats and monkeys with electrodes stuck into various areas of their brains. They press a little lever which gives them a short, mild electric shock—and the experience, in certain positions of the electrode, is evidently so ecstatically wonderful, that they will go on at the rate of eight thousand self-stemuli per hour until they collapse from exhaustion, lack of food and sleep. We are obviously getting very close to reproducing the Moslem paradise, where every orgasm lasts six hundred years.[…][134]
~ Aldous Huxley
Oddly, we don’t see Huxley volunteering himself for these “ecstatically wonderful” experiences. And let’s not forget Huxley’s “soma” for the masses in his Brave New World. As he wrote George Orwell:
But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.[135] [emphasis added] ~ Aldous Huxley
Jay Stevens continues:
The mescaline served Huxley in another capacity as well, filling his period of bereavement with new faces and exciting plans. Because of Doors and Heaven and Hell, which appeared in 1956, he found himself at the center of a peculiar movement, part religious, part scientific, which for the first time since the 1880s was mounting a concerted assault on Mind at Large.[136]
~ Jay Stevens
Stevens admits that MKULTRA is “part religious, part scientific,” and adds that Huxley’s plans are “a concerted assault on Mind at Large.” On the following page Stevens discusses Huxley’s lecture at the American Psychoanalytic Association, and does his best to separate Puharich and the “crackpots” from Huxley and the rest of the MKULTRA team. To do this, he uses Huxley’s letters to focus, rather than on the human experiments, instead on Puharich’s “strange household” and the “parascientific fringe movement”:
Huxley was invited to the American Psychoanalytic Association's annual convention, where he was the only nondoctor to participate in the panel on psychotomimetics. His reception by "the Electric Shock Boys, the Chlorpromaziners, and the 57 Varieties of Psychotherapists," was not effusive—compared to that of the Lab Madness Lobby.15 What might have been called Aldous's Visionary Potential Party was limited to himself, Osmond, Heard, and a small population of peripheral "crackpots" like the parapsychologist Andraj [sic] Puharich, who had already entertained Aldous at his Glen Cove, New York, headquarters. The specifics of Puharich's "strange household" are worth recording for the insight they provide into this parascientific fringe movement.[137] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
We just saw that Huxley thought the “Electric Shock Boys” at UCLA were creating “ecstatically wonderful” experiences and claimed that “We are obviously getting very close to reproducing the Moslem paradise, where every orgasm lasts six hundred years.” And furthermore, as we saw above, Huxley was more than entertained at Puharich’s house in Spring Grove. In reality, Huxley states that Puharich was actually much more than a “crackpot”. From The Letters of Aldous Huxley:
#747, 29 June, 1956
Dear Humphry,
[…] Al [Hubbard] too was in great form. His methods of exposition are a bit muddled; but I suppose he and his group have by now a mass of written material on their cases—material which will show how the other line of experimentation works. For obviously one must proceed on both lines—the pure-scientific, analytical line of Puharich, trying out factor after factor in a standardized environment, and the line of the naturalist, psychologist and therapist, who uses the drug for healing and enlightening, and in the process, if he is a good observer and clear thinker, discovers new facts about the psycho-physical organism.[138] [emphasis added] ~ Aldous Huxley
It appears that Stevens’ quotes from The Letters of Aldous Huxley are very selective, choosing not to quote those that expose the real agenda – and MKULTRA. And since we’ve been revealing Al Hubbard, here we see Hubbard’s influence on Huxley:
Thanks to Hubbard's system, a question began to take shape in Huxley's mind. Was it possible to use these new mind changers to stimulate a subtle but revolutionary alteration in the way the smart monkey perceived reality? At what point, provided you selected the right mix of brilliant, influential people, and gave them LSD or mescaline in a carefully controlled setting, doing everything possible to lead them to the Clear Light, at what point would the culture begin to shift to another tack? If you initiated the best and the brightest to the Other World, and let the knowledge filter down … It was an appealing speculation, and the more Aldous thought about it, the more convinced he became that it was not too farfetched. If one moved cautiously, doing nothing to startle the philistines …[139] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
On the following page we see Stevens discussing Hubbard recruiting new researchers and flying around the world to keep all of the (CIA’s) doctors supplied with LSD:
Al Hubbard […] materialized on doorsteps all over the world, wherever a researcher was working with LSD or mescaline. Hubbard was constantly on the go, visiting with Osmond in Saskatchewan, then down to Los Angeles to see Huxley and Heard, then across the continent—New York, Boston, Bethesda, D. C.; then off to Europe to check on progress there, then back again to repeat the circuit: vetting new researchers, conducting sessions for interested professionals, brainstorming on the best way to "launch" the psychedelic movement; paying his way with the latest experimental wrinkles, the most delicious gossip, and of course his inexhaustible supply of experimental substances, which he stored in a large leather bag.[140] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
And as we saw Stevens remark, above:
[T]he CIA began funneling dollars to an intercontinental network that rivaled the one being forged by Huxley and Hubbard.[141]
~ Jay Stevens
Apparently Stevens wants us to believe that these aren’t the same things: Special Agent Hubbard flying around the world, and the “intercontinental network,” that he claims “rivaled” Huxley and Hubbard. If you believe that, then I have a UFO to sell you.
So “Special Agent” Hubbard, as Huxley, was one of the key founders of MKULTRA, flying around and keeping “check on the progress” and providing the “latest experimental wrinkles, the most delicious gossip, and of course his inexhaustible supply of experimental substances”. But experimental substances from whom and where? And we see that Hubbard, too, was involved in “brainstorming on the best way to "launch" the psychedelic movement,” which makes the blame on Tim Leary, ridiculous:
And he wasn't alone. For some reason—the presence of Huxley? Southern California in general?—the Los Angeles LSD scene was particularly fertile. One day it seemed there were only five researchers working with the drug, the next day ten, the day after that twenty, all exchanging those knowing looks.[142] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
Those “knowing looks” must have been a “wink wink, I’m an MKULTRA researcher for the CIA, too.” It’s also clear that the psychedelic revolution didn’t only begin in San Francisco.
Above we saw that the “reunion party,” A Conversation on LSD, 1979, was held at Dr. Oscar Janiger’s home. In the next paragraph Stevens provides a little more insight into Janiger’s relation to Dr. Sydney Cohen:
One of Janiger's counterparts was Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist attached to the Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which was part of the Veterans Administration. Cohen had obtained his first LSD fully intending to pursue the model psychoses work of Max Rinkel and the other Lab Madness researchers, but his own personal experience with the drug had caused him to change direction.[143]
~ Jay Stevens
Serendipitously, Dr. Max Rinkel was an MKULTRA consultant for the CIA at Boston Psychopathic Hospital. He’s the guy who murdered tennis-pro Harold Blauer with an overdose of a synthetic mescaline derivative:
As with the experiments in prisons and military bases, hospitals held dangers for the human guinea pigs. In one of the first projects, at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, assembled by Bob Hyde and another CIA consultant, Max Rinkel, the tennis-pro, Harold Blauer, died from poisoning after he tested a synthetic mescaline derivative.[144]
~ David Black
And if you need a little more serendipity, Cohen is also the same CIA psychiatrist who dosed both Henry and Claire Boothe Luce, discussed above, and we’ll see more on Henry in the next section.
Cohen was also “consulted” when Laura Huxley injected Aldous with a (lethal) dose of LSD (and other drugs) the same day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination – a topic that deserves a full investigation on its own. However, I’ll say briefly that a careful analysis of Laura’s specious claims regarding the matter in her letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley of December 8, 1963,[145] (which everyone should read) suggests that Aldous was actually murdered by her, and/or the entire story is a fabrication to further market LSD for MKULTRA – right up to the end. As Laura states at the end of her eight-page “letter”:
If the way Aldous died were known, it might awaken people to the awareness that not only this, but many other facts described in ISLAND are possible here and now. Aldous' asking for moksha medicine while dying is a confirmation of his work, and as such is of importance not only to us, but to the world. It is true we will have some people saying that he was a drug addict all his life and that he ended as one, but it is history that Huxleys stop ignorance before ignorance can stop Huxleys.[146]
~ Laura Huxley
However, if you read the letter, it’s clear that Aldous never asked for “moksha medicine” and it’s all based on Laura’s interpretation of events and body language. This entire charade became the foundation for using psychedelics to aid in death. As I wrote in the epilogue of my last article, “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?”:
There was one last disturbing notion that kept creeping up as I researched and wrote this article. And now that we have the context, and being that so much of the psychedelic experience is based on suggestion, I thought I had to ask: Had Maria Sabina, being unlettered, suggested that 17-year-old boy to his death? Had this incident led Wasson to understand the mushroom’s full potential for social control? And what about the ‘December 21, 2012, end of the world’ movement, supposedly based on the Mayan calendar? As Wasson stated: “[T]he number of human sacrifices that are set forth in detail, the way in which they are keyed to the religious calendar…”
And, as we saw above, serendipitously, Aldous and Osmond hired Tim Leary for MKULTRA on the same day that Kennedy was elected. And Kennedy is the same president who fired DCI Allen Dulles and wanted to shut the CIA down – over MKULTRA and other fiascos, such as the Bay of Pigs. The New York Times claimed that Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”[147]
In my article “Gordon Wasson: the Man, the Legend, the Myth,” 2012, I exposed that it appears that Gordon Wasson was a key figure behind JFK’s assassination. Serendipitously, Dulles was one of seven appointed to The Warren Commission to investigate the assassination.
Our appetite for simplicity has caused us to compress the chaos of the ‘60s into one monolithic “Youth Revolt.” But there were two philosophies then among the revolutionaries on how the world might be remade. One path, endorsed by political power and using the vantage to raise consciousness and save the world. The other path proposed an attack on the consciousness itself using a controversial and soon outlawed family of psychochemicals –the psychedelics. [emphasis added][148]
~Jay Stevens
If I had to take a guess at who was behind the path endorsed by political power that wanted to raise consciousness, my guess would be Kennedy. But I think it’s now obvious that the path that “proposed an attack on the consciousness itself using a controversial and soon outlawed family of psychochemicals-the psychedelics.” –the CIA, is the path that won.
But let’s not digress too far. Cohen was also at the CIA sponsored Macy Conferences on MKULTRA.
Next we see Stevens discuss Hoffer’s lecture at the Macy Conferences on his and Osmond’s MKULTRA experiments in “treating” alcoholism with hyper-suggestion, but no admission that the Macy Conferences were in fact a CIA operation and part of MKULTRA:
Besides introducing the word that would ultimately triumph in the public consciousness, Hoffer also briefed his colleagues on the startling way in which he and Osmond were now using LSD. Unlike most of the therapists at the Macy conference, they were not using small doses to "liquefy" defenses, thus speeding up the time needed for a successful treatment. Using Hubbard's curious techniques, they had begun giving their patients massive doses and then guiding them, if they could, into that part of the Other World where egos melted and something resembling a spiritual rebirth occurred. As Hoffer described it, there was scarcely any psychotherapy involved at all: "They come in one day. They know they are going to take a treatment, but they know nothing about what it is.[149] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
Now let’s return to Timothy Leary. In the following quote Stevens makes clear Leary’s contempt for the middle class, which provides the motive for all of these attacks on the “sheep-like bourgeois”:
Leary also impressed them with his contempt for everything middle class, which was nothing exceptional at Harvard, except that Leary's gibes contained an abrasive edge that went far beyond the usual swipes at the sheep-like bourgeois; Tim really did hate those faceless, conforming Organization Men. Charles Slack, a fellow psychology instructor and frequent drinking partner, concluded that one of Leary's most powerful drives was his desire to "escape the middle class … his whole career was a flight from middle-class values, relationships, people, scenes, everything."[150] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
We’ve seen throughout this article how scapegoating is a counterintelligence tool used as a cover for larger operations. While keeping to the official version of the story, Stevens later admits:
For Huxley, Tim Leary was like a strong breeze in a sail that had started to sag. His enthusiasm, his theoretical orientation, and most of all his connection with Harvard, made him the perfect man to advance Aldous's psychedelic scenario. One night when they were lying in front of the fire at the Newton house, having taken psilocybin, the conversation turned to the proper way to introduce the concept of mind expansion to a culture of organization men. It wasn't something Aldous had to think twice about: turn on the elites, he urged Leary. The artistic elite, the intellectual elite, the economic elite. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on."[151] [emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
But we’ve already seen how Wasson, Ginsberg, Hubbard, et al, were trying to kick off a psychedelic revolution, and how Huxley “was mounting a concerted assault on Mind at Large” – which fits perfectly with Leary’s contempt of the middle class – and helping them to bring about their neo-feudalism. So, again, the idea that Leary went rogue is patently absurd. They needed Leary to create “behavior change”:
In the balkanized world of academic psychology, Tim was considered an expert in personality assessment and behavior change, which meant he was a whiz at interpreting diagnostic tests like the TAT and MMPI, while at the same time he was taking a crack at one of psychology's really Big Questions: behavior change.[152]
~ Jay Stevens
And in chapter 8 of Storming Heaven we see Stevens repeat the same fables from John Marks:
Had Wasson's public exposure been limited to half a thousand copies of a book costing the equivalent of two weeks' pay, our story might have been different. But one day, while recounting his Mexican adventures during lunch at the Century Club, Wasson was overheard by an editor at Time-Life, who invited him to write the experience up and submit it to Life magazine, which had a running feature devoted to true-life adventures. Wasson's account of the mushroom ceremony was published, along with Allan Richardson's pictures, in the July 1957 issue of Life, where it was read by millions, and in particular by a young psychologist named Frank Barron, who was best friends with another young psychologist named Timothy Leary.
But these are reverberations that properly belong to the future. A better question, for the present, might be: Who was James Moore, and why had he been so eager to accompany Gordon Wasson into the Mexican outback in the summer of 1956?
As far as Gordon Wasson knew, James Moore was a professor at the University of Delaware.
Moore had written to him in the winter of 1956 expressing an interest in the chemistry of Mexican fungi, and upon learning that Wasson was planning another expedition to Huatla de Jimenez that summer had asked to tag along. To sweeten his unsolicited presence, Moore had mentioned a foundation that might underwrite the whole trip, the Geschickter Fund.
And sure enough, the Fund had ponied-up two thousand dollars to cover expenses. In retrospect, it was barely enough to cover the irritation of Moore himself.
The man was a complainer. Apparently he had thought a trip to Huatla de Jimenez would be little different from a jaunt to Acapulco; in any case he was unprepared for the diarrhea, the dirt floors, the monotonous food. "I had a terribly bad cold, we damn near starved to death, and I itched all over," was Moore's memory of the journey. To which Wasson has replied:
"He was like a landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all."[153]
~ Jay Stevens
Stevens claims “In retrospect, it was barely enough to cover the irritation of Moore himself.” – but as we’ve already seen, $2000 in 1956 money is equivalent to $17,300 in 2014 money – and the trip was to a very remote location in Mexico, where the money would go very, very far.
And regarding “He was like a landlubber at sea,” – that quote is from John Marks’ book (p. 114) – the section Wasson “assisted” with (it appears to be Wasson’s own writing). The spin is so ridiculous that people never stop to think and to question it. It sounds so stupid it must be true!
Stevens further remarks:
Moore's complaints quickly alienated him from the other members of the expedition, among them Roger Heim, the eminent French mycologist. While Moore grumbled, the others reveled in the raw primitiveness of the adventure. Moore even found the mushrooms a disappointment. While the others soared—"I had the most superb feeling, a feeling of ecstasy," reported Wasson—Moore felt nothing save a disorientation that was compounded by the droning Indian dialects, the dirt floor, and the anarchy of his bowels. Already a thin man, he discovered upon his return to Delaware that he had dropped fifteen pounds. It took him a week to regain his strength, but when he had, he notified Botner that he was ready to work on the bag of mushrooms he had brought back from Huatla de Jimenez.
Botner was Moore’s case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency.[154]
~ Jay Stevens
You can hear the hippies jumping for joy: “The CIA’s bad guy gets it from the mushrooms! Hell yeah!” Of course the story is as ridiculous as it gets – as the entire team were “personnel”. But how would Stevens have known that Moore had “notified Botner” if he wasn’t on the inside? Stevens’ mention of Botner is not cited, and it doesn’t appear in Marks’ book. Stevens continues in the next paragraph:
While Heard and Huxley had been searching for a substance that would open the Door to the mind’s higher powers, the Central Intelligence Agency had been looking for a mind-control drug—a Manchurian candidate, to borrow the phrase popularized by Richard Condon’s best-selling novel of 1959.[155]
~ Jay Stevens
The slapstick and spin gets so stupid that one can only shake their head. And Stevens’ book was written almost 30 years ago, but no one’s called him on this gibberish until now?
Here we see Stevens admit that “Kesey stood in relation to Leary as Leary did to Huxley”:
In a sense, Kesey stood in relation to Leary as Leary did to Huxley: each represented a radicalization of the other’s position.[156]
~ Jay Stevens
Once again, we see that blaming Leary for all of this is nothing but a farce, a cover – as each were merely a radicalization of the other – a PR stunt.
Several pages later, Stevens remarks along the same lines that we saw previously with Bowart:
LSD allowed you an objective look at your own conditioning, at all the categories you had been taught to filter experience into, first as an infant and later as a functioning member of a complex, highly organized society. This was more or less in line with Leary's belief that psychedelics revealed the games one had unconsciously adopted, but it put matters in a starker, more appealing light: take LSD and wipe the slate clean of all that Madison Avenue-Big Business-Behaviorist crap.[157]
~ Jay Stevens
But wait a second... Didn’t we just see that Leary was a leading behaviorist? How could one possibly “take LSD and wipe the slate clean of all that Madison Avenue-Big Business-Behaviorist crap.” – when LSD was being promoted by the Harvard behaviorists – such as Leary, et al? It’s an absurd contradiction.
And in my last article I suggested that these substances be called “suggestogens” – and here we see Stevens admit that those of the Millbrook crew were intentionally manipulating suggestibility:
In a sense, the electronic whisperings […]—these were comparable to the huge eight-hour tapes that Metzner had devised at Millbrook.
Both were designed to manipulate the suggestibility of the psychedelic condition, to move the tripper in novel directions, except that the Acid Test piled on roaring guitars and flashing lights and hundreds of ecstatic fellow voyagers going wherever the flow led them. The ideal was to get everyone participating, adding their own creative juice to the gestalt. To get hundreds, maybe even thousands, synched up … to leave the planet![158] [Emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
Above we exposed how Leary went before congress requesting LSD’s regulation. Here Stevens claims:
In Private, though, Tim admitted that his chances of forestalling prohibition were slim.[159]
~ Jay Stevens
And, ironically, Stevens comments on Leary’s congressional testimony:
It was at this low ebb that Leary agreed to testify before one of the Congressional subcommittees, joining Allen Ginsberg and Art Kleps, among others, on the advocate side of the aisle.[160]
~ Jay Stevens
But as we already saw, with Leary recommending regulation at the Congressional hearing, only if we omit Leary’s entire testimony, as Stevens does, can we say that Leary was on the advocate side of the aisle. Stevens continues regarding the Congressional hearings:
Kleps, you will recall, was one of the Millbrook-trained guides. Since then he had gone on to form an LSD-based religion called the Neo-American Church, of which he was Chief Boo Hoo. ("Are you really called a boo hoo?" one of the senators asked him. "I'm afraid so," said Kleps.)23 Although Leary was not active in the Church, he was, Kleps informed the senators, a holy figure, the equivalent of Jesus Christ or Mohammed. "On the day the prison doors close behind Tim Leary," warned the bearded Chief Boo Hoo, "this country will face religious civil war. Any restraint we have shown heretofore in the dissemination of psychedelics will be ended."
After such a dramatic build-up, the senators must have been a bit nonplussed when Leary sat down before them in his old professorial tweeds. He began by stating his bona fides:[161]
~ Jay Stevens
The following is the only excerpt of Leary’s Congressional testimony presented by Stevens:
I believe that the criteria for marijuana, which is about the mildest of the psychedelic drugs, should be about those which we now use to license people to drive automobiles, whereas the criteria for the licensing of LSD, a much more powerful act, should be much more strict, perhaps the criteria now used for airplane pilots would be appropriate.[162]
~ Tim Leary
Stevens only provides a brief mention of Leary’s suggestion of regulation, but presents nothing that I’ve quoted, above. Stevens continues:
A miscalculation had been made, perhaps as far back as the gray November day when Leary, over hot milk, had rejected Huxley's elitist perspective in favor of Ginsberg's pro bono publico perspective. And this, with a generous nod to Kesey and the Pranksters, was the result: kids gobbling LSD wherever and whenever they could, completely ignorant of set and setting, without the least bit of interest in the Unspoken Thing.[163]
~ Jay Stevens
And so the myths are created and spread – until they become religious gospel. Finally, Stevens admits:
Of course Leary no longer sees himself as a drug guru either—that was just a role he played, at first for his own amusement, and then because his fans and detractors expected it of him.[164] [Emphasis added] ~ Jay Stevens
Sure, just for his own amusement. There’s nothing to see here, folks, so let’s move along to David Black’s book Acid…
David Black: Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, 1998
There has been much conspiratorial theorizing about the MK-Ultra ‘Mind Control’ programme of the CIA. Some have even argued it was actually responsible for the LSD explosion of the 1960s and ‘70s, as part of a plot by some all-powerful secret society.[165]
~ David Black
David Black is a British freelance author, writer, journalist and musician. His book The Secret History of LSD was originally published in 1998, and republished in a revised and expanded edition in 2001, with a new subtitle, Acid: A New Secret History of LSD.
I’m going to keep this section short because we’re beginning to see the same themes in repetition. But at least each of these books provides a new angle and a few more details of the story for us to stitch together.
Some people in the orbit of the intelligence community highlighted the potential social benefits of drugs such as LSD, rather than their military applications. One of the earliest public expressions of this view came from publishing magnate, Henry Luce, who saw his Time-Life empire as the semi-official voice of the US State Department. Behind the scenes, Luce was a keen advocate of LSD and mescaline and mind-expanders for the American policy-making elite and encouraged his fellow-trippers to collaborate with the CIA.
Former OSS officer Alfred Hubbard was introduced to LSD by Dr Ronald Sandison, the founder in 1953 of the first public clinic in Britain to use LSD therapy. Hubbard, based in Canada, obtained a plentiful supply of Sandoz LSD and, with CIA approval, doled it out to his old World War Two OSS contacts and to countless other people he encountered on his travels in North America and Western Europe. [166] [emphasis added] ~ David Black
Aside from Henry Luce encouraging “his fellow-trippers to collaborate with the CIA,” as we saw, above, Luce was also at the Century Club where Wasson, Allan Richardson, DCI Allen Dulles, and others, socialized. Luce also worked at the CFR with Wasson and Dulles, [167] and was a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones.[168] And he’s the one who was dosed by Dr. Sydney Cohen. We also saw that one of the myths created by Marks was that Leary got the idea of psilocybin through Luce’s publication of Wasson’s “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life, May 13, 1953.
As with Lee and Schlain, above, Black exposes Hubbard but again plays down his role. If Hubbard doled out LSD “with CIA approval,” and he was a “Secret Agent,” as we saw above, then this contradicts the appeal to ridicule that Black provides us: “Some have even argued it was actually responsible for the LSD explosion of the 1960s and ‘70s, as part of a plot by some all-powerful secret society”. – And we’ve already seen Leary admit that he and the others were agents, so there’s no need to repeat it here, again.
Here Black provides some brief background on agent/asset Ronald Hadley “Stark” Shitsky:
Stark seems to excel at medicine, psychiatry, biochemistry and modern languages, and studies at institutions that are carrying out work for the US Department of Defense. He then falls under the umbrella of the CIA MK-Ultra project and its fronts, such as the Human Ecology Fund.[169]
Stark worked with Leary, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and sold LSD all over the world. And if Leary, Hubbard, Harmon, et al, were agents, as we saw they were, and if Stark was an agent, as we see Black admit here, then we can see that in fact the CIA was largely responsible for the LSD explosion of the 1960s and ‘70s – no matter if Black attempts to ridicule some false “all-powerful secret society”. Furthermore, we see that Stark took over for Billy Hitchcock’s LSD Enterprises:
Brotherhood members were described as ‘mystics’ who studied the ‘religious’ philosophy of Leary, who with Bill Hitchcock was placed at the top of the conspiratorial pyramid. In reality, Ronald Stark had more or less succeeded Hitchcock as procurer of LSD production materials and money launderer back in 1969; he had even unsuccessfully tried to fill Leary’s shoes, as ‘Guru’, with R. D. Laing.[170]
~ David Black
Dr. Ronald D. Laing, as it turns out, was also at Millbrook with Leary and crew, and, serendipitously, Laing worked with the Tavistock Institute.[171] And we saw, above, how the Mellon family was connected to the CIA – and that Peggy and Billy Hitchcock were Mellon family heirs, and that Peggy funded the Psilocybin Research Project, IFIF, and the Grateful Dead; and how Billy, her brother, provided the Millbrook mansion and ran Billy Hitchcock LSD Enterprises. Here Black reveals that Stark, an agent, “succeeded Hitchcock as procurer of LSD production materials and money launderer…” Serendipitously, Billy also knew Stark. And when we consider that Leary was an agent, and that Peggy and Billy funded the MKULTRA research and Billy was the procurer of LSD production materials, which agent Starky then took over, we have to consider another cover-up going on here.
Regarding secret societies and Black’s statement “as part of a plot by some all-powerful secret society,” he contradicts himself again:
The P-2 Masonic Lodge was headed by Licio Gelli. A former Blackshirt under Mussolini, Gelli had managed to escape execution for the murder of partisans by defecting to US Army intelligence at the end of the War. After some years of exile in Argentina, Gelli returned to Italy in 1964 and eventually made himself the main intermediary between the Italian SID secret service and the US Central Intelligence Agency.[172]
~ David Black
So there was, or there wasn’t a secret society? Obviously with the words “all powerful” Black creates and appeal to ridicule over the idea. Often intelligence agencies overlap with groups like the Masons, OTO, and Skull and Bones – and always have. In fact, serendipitously, we know that the Scottish Rite Freemasons helped to fund MKULTRA.[173]
The CIA is, in fact, a secret society – and indeed it has far too much money and power. And as long as we use appeal to ridicule (an argument that essentially says “you’re wrong because: haha”), we never have to address the facts and citations that show otherwise. And as we saw from Saunders in the introduction regarding CIA ‘candy’:
We couldn’t spend it all. I remember once meeting with Wisner and the comptroller. My God, I said, how can we spend that? There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.[174]
~ Frances Stonor Saunders citing CIA agent Gilbert Greenway
In this quote Black uses what appears to be a red herring in order to take the heat off Leary:
Leary’s great enemy at the Harvard Centre for Personality Research was Professor Herbert Kelman, who accused Leary of ‘corrupting’ the students and undermining academic authority. Leary learned from an old friend at the State Narcotics Bureau that Kelman’s work at the University was funded by a ‘CIA front called the Ecology Fund’, and that ‘some people in the government have spent $25 million to research these drugs of yours. Secretly. A lot of it right here in Harvard medical school…
They want to stop you’.
Leary, at that that time, knew nothing about the CIA MK-Ultra programme and this was the first time he’d heard of the Human Ecology Fund, which was controlled by it. […]Leary began to suspect that his efforts were being undermined by CIA assets within academia. A CIA MK-Ultra consultant at Harvard, Martin Orne, who had been comparing his subjects’ Weschler scores with their susceptibility to hypnosis, also took a sneaking interest in the Harvard Psychedelics Project, though Leary had no inkling at the time of his CIA connection. Leary was also warned by Frank Barron that if he tried to ‘compete’ with such powerful and well-financed forces, they would turn on him.[175]
~ David Black
And of course we know that this passage is untrue because Leary admitted that he was a witting agent by 1962, and we saw Huxley and Osmond go to Harvard to recruit Leary in 1960; and all too many of these MKULTRA personnel worked with the Harvard Social Relations Department.
Black repeats many of the same intelligence community fables that originate with John Marks, including that LSD was invented in 1938 by Albert Hofmann (p. 26), that Frank Olson committed suicide (p. 33); that Leary and Dick Alpert were fired. (p. 13) And that there is no evidence that the CIA launched the psychedelic revolution – intentionally (p. 205).
And so the intelligence community’s fables are repeated – ad infinitum.
Now let’s turn our attention to Hank Albarelli, a former Whitehouse lawyer for the Carter Administration, and author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, 2010.
Hank Albarelli: A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, 2010:
Huxley and MK/ULTRA: a pipe-dream on your part. Wasson was not CIA. I challenge you to document that.[176]
~ Hank Albarelli
Hank Albarelli is a former Whitehouse lawyer from the Carter Administration, and the author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, 2010, which, despite some of the complications we’ll be discussing here, is a good book and is definitely worth the read. The best part of Albarelli’s work is in exposing that Dr. Frank Oslon was murdered, rather than having committed suicide – which was the official version of the story, as we already saw, that was apparently created by John Marks, et al.
However, it is worthy of notice that it was around the same time that Albarelli worked at the Whitehouse, during the Carter Administration, that much of MKULTRA came to public light. As I exposed in my 2013 article, “Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering,” regarding my personal interactions with Albarelli:
An example of how Wasson’s activities for the CIA have been kept hidden is the work of MK-ULTRA “expert” and author Hank Albarelli, a former lawyer for the Carter administration and Whitehouse who also worked for the Treasury Department. Though Albarelli presents himself to the public as a MK-ULTRA ‘whistleblower’, he apparently attempted to derail Irvin’s investigation into Gordon Wasson. Over a 3-year period – which Irvin has carefully documented – Albarelli pretended to help Irvin file CIA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. During this period Albarelli repeatedly claimed that the FOIA requests had come back empty, or that the Agency had not responded and had not yet filled the FOIA requests. Albarelli’s claims were untrue. The agency had filled separate FOIA that Irvin had filed on Wasson in just 90 days.
Though several pages on Wasson were released to FOIA requests by the CIA in 2003, eventually Albarelli sent a fake CIA response to Irvin, wherein Albarelli stated that the CIA’s response was: “0 on Wasson. “All pages most likely destroyed in 1973 MK/ULTRA destruction of documents.”” Then, after his many claims that the FOIA request hadn’t yet been filled by the CIA, Albarelli changed his story and claimed that the delay was due to the fact that he had never filed it, even though Irvin maintained numerous email records where Albarelli had claimed to have done so. Suspicious, Irvin filed his own FOIA request with the CIA, which was promptly filled by the Agency and exposed Albarelli’s cover story as, apparently, a fabrication intended to slow Irvin’s research. Here are just a few of the conversations regarding the matter that Irvin recorded:
On February 16, 2010, Irvin wrote:
Hi Hank,
Question, would you be willing to help me do a FOIA request on Wasson? I have no idea where to begin or who to send it to. I've looked a few times and it all was so intimidating for me - which is what they want I suppose. But that seems the best way to get to the core of this issue.
Best,
JanOn February 16, 2010, Albarelli replied:
Sure. The first thing we need is an obit on Wasson from a major newspaper like the NYT's. After that, I can do the rest for you.
On May 04, 2010, Albarelli wrote:
0 on Wasson. All pages most likely "destroyed in 1973 MK/ULTRA destruction of documents."
On Oct 22, 2010, Irvin wrote:
I also asked if you would send me the CIA FOIA response so that I have it in my Wasson records?
On Oct 22, 2010, Albarelli replied:
[Y]ou can't without my revealing all those other files/documents/subjects I requested and I have no intention of doing that... that simply was not part of our arrangement which is a bit one-sided thus far...On July 04, 2011, Albarelli, contradicting his email of May 04, 2010, claims:
[Y]ou need to read more carefully-- FOIAs have NOT been answered: these [are] the refiled FOIAs.I will share nothing with you that does not involve your writings or work...
[…] Please do not keep bothering me with this stuff... I do not share your interest in Wasson: I don't care if he worked for the CIA; I am only interested in Pont St. Esprit and the French use of LSD, matters you know nothing about as far as I know.On February 22, 2013, Albarelli wrote:
Huxley and MK/ULTRA: a pipe-dream on your part. Wasson was not CIA. I challenge you to document that.
[...] 90 days for a neophyte filing, but look at what you got in response; documents that were released 25 years ago. [...] I did NOT file a FOIA for you because I did NOT want to be associated with you in any way.During the above conversation on February 22, 2013, Albarelli threw insult after insult at Irvin and refused to answer any direct questions. Though Albarelli claims that he did not want to be associated with Irvin in any way, after the above emails regarding the FOIAs and requesting his help, Albarelli did a full interview on Irvin’s podcast show to promote his book A Terrible Mistake, and he also agreed to publish this interview in print and did the editing of the interview himself. Albarelli accuses Irvin for being a neophyte for getting a response from the CIA in 90 days, but from the above February 16, and May 04, 2010 missives, it’s clear that Albarelli, too, received the response from the CIA within 90 days. Albarelli also claimed that the files had been released 25 years ago, when they had actually been released on 5/5/2003 – 6 years and 9 months before Irvin’s first request to Albarelli for help. When Albarelli claims: “you can't without my revealing all those other files/documents/subjects I requested,” in fact the CIA answers each FOIA request individually by postal mail.
Between the CIA FOIA request documents that Albarelli apparently attempted to withhold from Irvin, and also the CIA documents from MK-ULTRA subproject 58, it’s quite easy to document that Wasson was involved with the CIA and MK-ULTRA – as we’ve already revealed above.
In our opinion, in light of the above and the documents showing that MK-ULTRA funded Wasson, Albarelli’s description of Wasson’s relationship to the CIA below can be seen as clever disinformation intended to hide the truth from the public.
What is most disturbing, however, is how Albarelli, who claims to have read all of the available CIA MKULTRA files, repeats and embellishes the same mantra, discussed above, about Gordon Wasson being infiltrated by James Moore – the story created by John Marks’s team:
Especially significant in the history of LSD and psychotropic drugs is the work of Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna. The couple traveled the globe in search of exotic and rare psychoactive mushrooms, and they were the first to use the term ‘ethnomycology’. Over a forty year period, the two collected and catalogued the “food of the Gods.” In 1977, Wasson commented that throughout his many excursions to Mexico from 1952 through 1962, “I didn’t send a single sample to an American mycologist. I didn’t get a penny, not a single grant from any government sources. I’m perfectly sure of that.”
There is no reason to doubt Wasson, but what he did not know at the time of his excursions was that the United States government was closely monitoring every one of his trips and that each and every one of his collected samples found their way back from Mexico to CIA-funded laboratories. Wasson also sent his samples to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Labs in Switzerland. Hofmann, according to Wasson, “was doing the key work synthesizing the active ingredients” of the samples. What Wasson again did not realize was that the fruits of all of his and Hofmann’s labors were being plucked from the vine by the U.S. Army and CIA both of whom, since at least 1948, had covert operatives working in the Sandoz Laboratories.
Wasson also was unaware of CIA penetration into a number of his Mexico excursions. In 1956, Dr. James Moore of the University of Delaware, under secret contract with the CIA’s TSS, traveled to the Oaxaca section of Mexico to collect rivea corymbosa samples. Moore, according to Wasson, was collaborating with the Argentine-based mycologist, Dr. Rolf Singer, a Bavarian-born Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for Czechoslovakia. […].
Wasson, in a 1977 interview, implied that Singer had some sort of ties to the CIA through Moore, but the specifics are unclear and it must be stated here that Wasson reportedly did not care much for Singer and considered his work “rushed” and often “borrowed” from others. Wasson only traveled once with Moore, in 1956, and the experience was horrible, he said. Said Wasson: “he was an awful ass… He expected to have a water closet in Mexico. It was laughable.”
~ Hank Albarelli
One of the CIA’s MKULTRA documents regarding MKULTRA subproject 58 that Albarelli should have read, which we saw in the section regarding John Marks, above, says:
February 8, 1956
Attention, Dr. [redacted – Sidney Gottlieb or Charles Geschickter?]
Dear Sirs,
Over recent months, as Dr. [redacted] will inform you, I have had conversations with him and Dr. [redacted – James Moore?] of the [redacted – Geschickter Fund?] concerning certain pioneering inquiries that we are [unintelligible] hallucinatory fungi used by some of the more remote [redacted – Mexican Indian cultures] in association with their indigenous religious practices.
I am planning a fourth expedition to the mountains in the [redacted – Oaxaca region of Mexico] for July. I should like to hope that the expenses involved with this expedition would be borne by a [redacted – fund?] in the medical aspects of the research. With this in mind, I take the liberty of applying to you by this letter for a grand-in-aid of $2000 for the purpose of gathering the specimens in the field, identification thereof, their conservation either in liquor or in the dry state, and their conveyance to [redacted – CIA or Albert Hofmann?].
For your further information, Professor [redacted – Roger Heim], leading [redacted – French] mycologist and Director of the [redacted – Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle] has committed himself to accompany us on this trip. His great experience in mycology generally and in tropical mycology in particular will be of very great value to us. In order that we may plan accordingly, I should hope that your decision on this matter could be communicated to me before too long. I am leaving for a trip to [redacted – Europe] at the end of March to be gone for two months, and before my departure for [redacted - Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico] I should like to settle on all details concerning the equipment we shall take and the personnel of our expedition.
I remain Respectfully Yours
Gordon Wasson [name redacted in the original]
As the OED defines the word “personnel”:
- a.1.a The body of persons engaged in any service or employment, esp. in a public institution, as an army, navy, hospital, etc.; the human as distinct from the matériel or material equipment (of an institution, undertaking, etc.).
“Engaged in any service or employment, esp. in a public institution, as an army, navy,..” – and I’ll add, the CIA.
For those familiar with the history, as we saw, above, it could not have been James Moore requesting the funds for the trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, because Moore hadn't been there on three prior trips:
I am planning a fourth expedition to the mountains in the [redacted – Oaxaca region of Mexico] for July
Furthermore, by cross referencing Wasson’s other letters I was able to fill in that he had a trip in March to Europe, and I found it in Wasson’s letters just before the above date – February 8, 1956. There can be no other conclusion but that it’s Wasson requesting to settle on all details “concerning the equipment” and “personnel of our expedition,” – identifying Roger Heim, Albert Hofmann, James Moore, Allan Richardson, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, and Masha Wasson Britten, et al, as “personnel” – other agents and assets – for their expedition.
Regarding the James Moore myth, in my 2012 article “Gordon Wasson: The Man, The Legend, The Myth,” I wrote:
James Moore and the Red Herring
As I have considered all of these connections over the years, one question always comes up. What about James Moore? Moore was a CIA agent. He contributed $2000 to Wasson’s trip. Here’s how this myth begins:
“Nervous and paranoid” correctly describes a “short-order chemist” for the CIA, James Moore (Lee & Shlain, 1985; Marks, 1979; Stevens, 1987), who secretly infiltrated one of Wasson’s small expeditions into the Sierra Mazateca in 1956.
A scientist from the CIA’s “Project ARTICHOKE” had traveled to México in search of a so-called “stupid bush” and other plants which might derange the human mind, politically useful to control enemies’ minds in war time. Large quantities of morning glory seeds were sent to CIA laboratories for analysis by CIA scientists searching for compounds useful for extracting confessions, locating stolen or lost objects, perhaps even predicting the future. Visionary mushrooms were of special interest in these investigations. According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, James Moore was an expert in chemical synthesis who worked for the CIA. In 1956, Moore invited himself into one of Wasson’s expeditions to México. He offered Wasson a grant for $2,000 dollars from a CIA- front known as the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, Inc. In 1955, Wasson had declined to collaborate openly with the CIA.” […] Moore collected specimens for his CIA-sponsored research and returned to Maryland, where he endeavored to isolate for the CIA the active principle of both the mushrooms and morning glory seeds. Unfortunately for Moore he was unable to find the active ingredients in the mushrooms and lucky for the world that he didn’t find them since they would of most likely been used as tools of mind war under the direction of the CIA.[57] [emphasis – mine] ~ John W. Allen
Notice that the above passage does not say that Wasson declined to collaborate with the CIA. It says that “In 1955, Wasson had declined to collaborate openly with the CIA.” In other words, if Allen’s statement is correct, while Wasson may have refused to collaborate “openly” with the CIA, this does not mean that he declined to collaborate with the CIA – two very different things. Then how would Wasson collaborate? He would need a cover story.
I further wrote (some of this was quoted, above):There seems to be a repeated theme with Wasson disparaging people he actually knows are agents. I brought attention to this in my book The Holy Mushroom in regards to Wasson’s actions with Dr. Andrija Puharich,[59] and I think he’s doing the same here with Moore. Wasson wants to conceal his own identity as a CIA agent or asset, and to make himself look more innocent in the entire affair.
The above accounts seem absurdly impossible in light of all of the information regarding Wasson’s own participation in the CFR and CIA and with all of his own connections to all of these people in the CIA and intelligence. I consider the entire James Moore story to be a red herring. A red herring is a fallacy that leads someone from one topic to another. In other words, he’s a decoy or a scapegoat. When we consider Moore as a decoy, the contradictions in the storyline disappear. Wasson and Allen Dulles were friends; the CIA had known all along about Wasson’s work; Dulles worked with the German conglomerate IG Farben, which was related with Sandoz AG.[60] It’s hard to believe that the CIA needed a field agent when they had Wasson himself. Rather than admitting that the entire project was an elite/CIA/intelligence operation, it was best to slip an agent into the story line who would serve to lead researchers astray for decades. That way Wasson didn’t have to work for the CIA openly, and he could still publish his books, which he just published in elite publishing houses – too expensive for anyone to acquire – and delivered many of them to the CIA and CFR himself. It was a slick move, and fooled many hundreds of researchers – but like all lies it was bound to get figured out. If anything, Wasson could likely have been Moore’s superior at the CIA, and Dulles himself would have likely approved the $2000. Surely Dulles and Wasson had already discussed it over dinner at the Century Club. Wasson possibly needed a chemist along for the trip who could also aid in collecting mushroom samples – and would act as a possible future scapegoat should someone uncover their plot.
And although the photocopy of Wasson’s Geschickter Fund letter is partially redacted, one can tell it’s on Wasson’s JP Morgan letterhead by holding it up and matching it to his many hundreds of other available JP Morgan letterheads. Therefore, it is impossible for James Moore, who had never been to Oaxaca except on the one trip, to have written the letter. Furthermore, we see Allan Richardson, Wasson’s photographer for the trips, showing up at the Century Club:
Sometime just before or soon after our return from the '56 expedition, Gordon and I were dining at the Century Club in New York. He noticed Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life magazine, alone at a table nearby, and asked him to join us. We talked about the article Gordon was working on to publicize what he'd discovered in Mexico. Thompson said Life might be interested in publishing it, and invited us to make a presentation at his offices.[177]
~ Allan Richardson
As I have exposed in several previous articles, the Century Club was a front for the CIA. Here’s a letter from DCI Allen Dulles to Wasson providing a letter of recommendation to allow Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador to India and Vietnam, into the club:
3 April 1957
Dear Gordon:
It was a great pleasure to write a letter of recommendation on behalf of my good friend, Ellsworth Bunker, to the Century Association. I enclose a copy. It was good to hear from you. Let me know if you are in Washington.[178]
~ Allen Dulles
So therefore, it appears that Richardson was also working with the CIA and helping in the cover-up. We saw, above, that Richardson was propagating the official myth, and then he refers to John Marks as the originator:
Apparently, one of the “various foundations” from which Gordon was hoping to obtain a grant was the Geschickter Fund in Washington, D.C. It had been mentioned to him as a possible source of funding by James Moore, the CIA operative, when he initially contacted Gordon in August 1955. Unknown to Gordon, the Fund was a front for the CIA to channel money secretly. According to John Marks’ book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” (New York: Dell, 1979), it anted up $2,000 to help finance Gordon’s expedition in the spring of 1956.[179] [Emphasis added] ~ Allan Richardson
Another major problem with James Moore being the only agent to “infiltrate” the Mexico team is this quote by Gordon Wasson, found in Albarelli’s book:
In the same interview, Wasson said that Albert Hofmann "worked in some way with the CIA" and that Hofmann's "discoveries were impaired in whole by Sandoz to the US government. Sandoz wanted to be on the right side of things." Hofmann's connections to the CIA has never been officially confirmed by the CIA, which maintains a policy of not commenting on or revealing information on foreign citizens who find their way into its employment. Former agency officials have commented anonymously that several Sandoz scientists and officials, including Hofmann, maintain a close relationship with the CIA, but the "agency never fully trusted the Swiss" and "always held a dual insurance policy with Sandoz" by vetting and placing covert employees within the firm's laboratories and administration.[180]
~ Hank Albarelli
And so it’s ridiculous that James Moore was the only agent, as Wasson admits, and Albarelli quotes, that Albert Hofmann, too, was likely agent or asset. I should also point out that Albarelli fails to provide a citation for Wasson’s above interview, and so it’s impossible to fact check it. In a February 12, 2010 email, Albarelli wrote:
I looked long and hard at Wasson and enjoyed all that I discovered and read.
He's mentioned, I think, several times in my book. Indeed, he was my source for Albert Hofmann's CIA's connections; I had been given a past, never before published interview with Wasson in which he was questioned about his thoughts and experience with Hofmann, and on various other subjects.
~ Hank Albarelli
However, in an email from July 4, 2011, Albarelli admits (I’ve preserved his spelling and grammar – in all its glory):
[…]yOU NEEDTO UNDERSTAND THATwASSOM IS FAIR GAME FOR ANYONE; i'VE ALSO USED THE CIA INTERVIEW WITH HIM EXTENSIVELY
AGAIN, NONE OF YOUR MATERIAL WHICH i HAVE NOT READ AND THE LITTLE I KNOW OF
RE WASSON IS NOT BACKED UP WELL WITH SOURCES...
~ Hank Albarelli
So therefore we know that the interview used by Albarelli, above, was a CIA interview. Also, regarding his statement of being only interested in Pont St. Esprit, at one point after beginning communication with him I had heard that he was working on a book on Wasson, and so I asked him about it and for full disclosure of the documents I had requested for my inquiry, which explains his statement: “wASSOM IS FAIR GAME FOR ANYONE,” even though he had previously stated: “I do not share your interest in Wasson: I don't care if he worked for the CIA; I am only interested in Pont St. Esprit and the French use of LSD, matters you know nothing about as far as I know.”
And regarding Albarelli’s claim that my Wasson work is not backed up with sources, and that he’d not read it: “not read and the little I know of,” on February 17, 2010, regarding my book on John Allegro and Gordon Wasson, The Holy Mushroom, 2008, Albarelli stated:
I bought it last Sat. from Amazon and it came in 2 days Fed. Ex. Yes, I'm about half way through it. I think it's great.
Really enjoy your style and the way facts are laid out. Damn good book.
~ Hank Albarelli
Further contradicting himself regarding Wasson, on May 16, 2011, Albarelli wrote:
yes, means he was either OSS or CIA or both...
But we saw Albarelli declare, above, regarding Wasson from February 22, 2013:
Wasson was not CIA. I challenge you to document that.
Anyway, it’s now clear that everyone on the trip to Oaxaca with Wasson were the CIA’s “personnel,” – including Wasson.
As I wrote in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013:
Albarelli’s “research” seems to only expose insignificant aspects of the overarching MK-ULTRA programs, sacrificing older operations to keep the more important and more current ones separate and hidden.
Also of note is that the CIA FOIA request that Irvin filed behind Albarelli’s was on Gordon Wasson, and several of the files received from the CIA are personal letters between Wasson and Allen Dulles (one is quoted above) – from just 5 weeks before Wasson’s Life magazine article was published.
Conclusion:
In the process of studying “counterintelligence” and how it works, we’ve explored two primary myths: One concerns the true origins of the psychedelic movement and counterculture. The other concerns the veracity of each of the main books on MKULTRA and the origins of the counterculture, and the false history that’s been perpetuated by them.
We’ve also seen how counterintelligence and disinformation works against the general population – right here at home in the USA – and anyplace else for that matter. And we’ve exposed at least a dozen primary methods of sophism and spin used, which reveal how the intelligence community (mis)leads the discussion and muddies the waters on important topics, thereby misinforming and controlling the 99%.
The unanimity among the various branches was believed by the outside world to be the result of the influence of a single Truth, while really it was the result of the existence of a single group.[181]
~ Carroll Quigley
And Carroll Quigley’s quote brings us full circle, providing us an understanding of how intelligence cells and “groups” work. We may now understand how books and publications are cross-cited and published with such frauds, and then later perpetuated by those, willful dupes, who’ve bought into their lies – with MKULTRA, and just about any other topic.
And everyone has, at one time or another, been a willful dupe. I know I have. And I’m doubtful that anyone, an agent or not, could possibly know all of the different ways that the people are fooled simultaneously – and by all of the various intelligence agencies and groups – whether it’s the CIA, NSA, MI6, Mossad, the Masons, or the OTO, et al. This fact should give pause to those who knowingly participate in such behavior, because they, too, may be being duped – and are unaware of it. No one likes being fooled by this psychopathic insanity and self-appealing ad vericundiam (authority) fallacy. But if you catch it, laugh it off. Don’t fight it. Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
If you deny that you were duped, you’re far more likely to be duped again. You can hate on me for exposing this, or you can take the honest, mature approach, and verify my citations and know the truth for yourself.
And contrary to places like China where people often know they’re censored and told they have to edit a book or publication before they can publish it, here in the United States (the “Land of the Free!”), and in the West in general, government utilizes the “free market of ideas” system to flood the market with so much confusion that, without the proper tools for critical thinking, such as the trivium method, it can be nearly impossible to wade through.
We’ve seen how public and social relations are used to misguide the public’s perception on just about everything they think they know. As Edward Bernays famously wrote in the introductory paragraph to his book Propaganda:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[182]
~ Edward Bernays
And of course Bernays is using propaganda in the above paragraph to justify this assault on humanity. And, aside from Gordon Wasson and Bernays, we should also consider the likes of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Bowart, Peggy Hitchcock, Gregory Bateson, John D. Marks, and the many others whom we’ve discussed here and in prior articles. We also shouldn’t forget those yet-to-be revealed. And, unfortunately, in all too many cases, we’ve woken up long after these destroyers of humankind have passed.
In this exposé we’ve seen a glimpse of how intelligence cells work with David Black; and how a “pyramid-of-pyramids” set-up works from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress –an important concept and can likely be further understood with a study of Buckminster Fuller’s work.
Some of the cells we’ve exposed in this, and in prior articles, include: Prof. Carl A.P. Ruck, R. Gordon Wasson, et al; and Wasson with Charles McLain Andrews and Allan Nevins, et al. We’ve also seen Peter T. Furst, Barbara Myerhoff and Carlos Castaneda – exposed by Prof. Jay Fikes. We saw that it appears that John Marks created his own cell: again with Wasson, Sydney Cohen, Albert Hofmann, James Moore, and Martin Lee, et al. And from there it appears that Marks, Bowart, Lee and Jay Stevens may form yet another cell – each cross-citing and perpetuating the official myths, knowingly or not. And it’s clear that most of them had to be willful participants. I’ll let you decide which ones.
We also saw what appears to be a general rule of about 70% facts and 30% deception, though it’s also clear that some of the authors push their tests of our credulity to the limits, always pushing for a new low.
With John G. Fuller and Andrija Puharich, and again with Walter Bowart, we saw the constant use of media stunts:
After the newspaper and television publicity, I became somewhat of a pseudocelebrity in the town, which was helpful in getting to know the tradesmen, the bartenders, the villagers more quickly.[183]
~ John G. Fuller
We also saw Fuller utilizing UFOs to create media spectacles, and UFOs as a method of creating mass hysteria to control the population:
The Orson Wells “invasion” in the late thirties, a single dramatized radio program resulted in mass hysteria. Would the same thing—or worse—happen if official government sources announced blandly that we definitely had visitors from another planet?[184]
~ John G. Fuller
It is also highly likely that the military has regularly used tactics such as UFOs as a cover for new developments and technology. If you double wrap the lie, it’s even harder to figure out. And no doubt this statement will send the “true believers” in UFOs up in arms. But it’s not a religion (or is it?), so I hope that they at least consider this evidence deeply, along with Fuller’s association to MKULTRA.
Recent history documents the fact that the CIA, as the whipping boy of the cryptocracy, covers up and routinely lies about its activities, heaping one lie on another, in a labyrinth network of falsehood. It stretches credibility to believe, therefore, that the CIA and especially lower-profile members of the cryptocracy have terminated the mind-control research and development that has been going on for thirty years.[185]
~ Walter Bowart
And although Bowart’s above statement is correct, with him, and John Marks, we saw blatant conflicts of interest and a failure to disclose information regarding their backgrounds: Bowart’s marriage to Peggy Hitchcock, and her and Billy Hitchcock’s funding much of the movement and supplying the LSD. And Marks failed to mention that he was the assistant to a director of an intelligence agency.
All they wanted was a hole they could crawl down and sleep for a few weeks. And it was then that Peggy Hitchcock mentioned an estate her twin brothers, Tommy and Billy, owned in Millbrook, New York, a village ninety miles north of New York City.[186]
~ Jay Stevens
However, by cross-citing each of these books, as well as pulling material from outside, including primary sources, we’ve been able to stitch together a far more accurate understanding of MKULTRA and the psychedelic revolution, and, subsequently, how disinformation works in all areas of our lives.
In the work of Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, and again with Jay Stevens, and David Black, we found what, in my opinion, appear to be intentional omissions, obfuscations and misrepresentations, and even the inclusion and ridicule of important citations.
Furthermore, with Marks we saw the creation of fables and myth making by “the group,” creating numerous myths that have been accepted as fact and repeated for decades, as a blueprint, though hold no bearing in truth whatsoever. These myths include:
1) MKULTRA being mainly about a Manchurian candidate.
2) The origins of the psychedelic revolution being “blow back”.
3) Frank Olson’s murder as suicide.
4) James Moore’s infiltration of Wasson’s group when all were agents.
5) Albert Hofmann’s “discovery” of LSD and the origins of “bicycle day”.
6) Hofmann’s isolation of psilocybin.
7) Tim Leary’s learning of mushrooms from Wasson’s Life article.
8) That Leary went rogue.
Throughout this essay we’ve covered, repeatedly, the evidence which overturns the official claims. And hopefully, if you’ve made it this far, it was worth your while and has greatly expanded your awareness of how the world is really run.
In nearly all of the books we’ve found loaded and misleading language.
In private, though, Tim admitted that his chances of forestalling prohibition were slim.[187]
~ Jay Stevens
We’ve seen the use of Hegelian dialectics and creating media spectacles to achieve the opposite of what the public was told. As I wrote:
It appears from the evidence that Weil’s “exposure” was just an old trick using the Hegelian dialectic: problem, reaction, solution; – or thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Without Leary having been fired from Harvard he’d never have been able to create the appearance of the hippie guru he’d later use to promote the psychedelics to the youth for the CIA and Huxley and Osmond. Weil’s so-called “exposure,” and Leary’s subsequent “firing” (along with Dr. Richard Alpert), created the illusion, in my opinion, that Harvard, et al, were trying to suppress Leary’s “spiritual message”. This gave Leary and the CIA the psychological advantage they’d need to use against the public.
We’ve seen the use of ridicule:
[T]hey even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot.[188]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
And hypnosis:
The aim is to get at the words and phrases, heard by the patient at moments of lowered consciousness, and accepted by him as obsessive commands, like post-hypnotic suggestions. The sub-conscious seems to take these verbal commands literally and unreasoningly, without regard to their context. The result can be disastrous, both mentally and physically.
~ Aldous Huxley - 10 December, 1950:
And the employment of misleading questions:
“But in what way could LSD be utilized to manipulate an individual, let alone a subculture or a social movement?”
~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.[189]
~ Thomas Pynchon
Not to mention scapegoating, better known as “throwing under the bus,” to cover a larger operation:
A better question, for the present, might be: Who was James Moore, and why had he been so eager to accompany Gordon Wasson into the Mexican outback in the summer of 1956?[190]
~ Jay Stevens
Carlos Castaneda, James Moore, Tim Leary, and Andrija Puharich, were all “thrown under the bus” to mislead researchers and to cover the larger operation – and to help perpetuate the official storyline.
And we’ve also seen the radicalization of the other’s position:
In a sense, Kesey stood in relation to Leary as Leary did to Huxley: each represented a radicalization of the other’s position.[191]
~ Jay Stevens
We’ve seen stalling and personal attacks:
Huxley and MK/ULTRA: a pipe-dream on your part. Wasson was not CIA. I challenge you to document that.[192]
~ Hank Albarelli
And of course we’ve seen intentionally avoiding and ignoring primary citations – throughout.
And so the intelligence community’s mantra is repeated:
The CIA is not an omniscient, monolithic organization, and there's no hard evidence that it engineered a great LSD conspiracy. (As in most conspiracy theories, such a scenario vastly overestimates the sophistication of the alleged perpetrator.)[193]
~ Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain
Clearly the Agency has violated its charter each and every day since its inception. And as they operate under a cloak of secrecy, they’re not an organization that the public can ever trust. And now it’s clear that the CIA and intelligence community has not only performed this deceptive operation overseas, but right here at home.
The Agency has covered up, for more than four decades now, the true ramifications of Project MKULTRA and the psychedelic revolution and counterculture movements. With this information we can learn to identify cells and counterintelligence disinformation operations and, not only protect ourselves from them, but expose them.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned through all of this research, it’s that the intelligence community hates primary citations. Always check them if you want to know the truth. Trust your five senses. Learn to look things up and go all the way down to the primary citations – and know exactly what someone or something says and in what context. These counterintelligence folks like to avoid primary citations at all costs, preferring to cite only themselves, or to name call. Once you get the ball rolling it becomes easy to spot them, and to find the truth.
Read all of the books, and study them for yourself. Learn to check the citations and fact check what they claim – on any topic. Remove the fallacies and contradictions, not only in the information, but within your own mind, and come to the truth. Truth does exist – and that understanding is what the social relations experts fear most. Otherwise they wouldn’t use so many lies to obfuscate the truth. They work by using fallacies against you, so study logic and memorize the fallacies to protect you and yours.
Once you realize that a contradiction is an error or a lie, your pace will quicken. Furthermore, grasp the concept of “the onus of proof,” and that when someone fails to present evidence of their own claims it’s known as “arguing the arbitrary” –and is dismissed automatically.
One of the most important ways that the intelligence community operates is via occultation and mysticism. And though this idea may upset many, learn that “mysticism is the tool of tyrants”. Nearly all of this MKULTRA business was sold to the public as magic, religion, and spirituality – tools that have been used for social control since, at least, the time of the Mahabharata.
We must stop staring at the shadows on the cave wall, pretending that they’re reality.
And no doubt the cyber terrorism will be ramped up in retribution for publishing this exposé. But without their attacks, we wouldn’t have been able to come this far. So for that, at minimum, I must thank the intelligence community. What will their attacks and spin reveal next? No doubt it will be exciting to find out. But such tactics are just about all they have.
So let them bring on the slander and ad hominem attacks, the straw man arguments and red herrings, and the appeals to ridicule, because that’s how they identify themselves – and it’s a great way to know where to look.
Steven Hager, the former Chief Editor of HighTimes magazine, who launched attacks on me soon after my 2012 article on Gordon Wasson was published, admits:
But that’s the way spooks play their games. If there’s going to be a social movement against whatever you’re doing, it’s best if you secretly create and orchestrate that movement against yourself right away so that it never does any unintended damage to your personal fortunes.[194]
~ Steven Hager
They're mocking you, and laughing like school girls at your credulity. So let’s strip their academic clothing off, and expose them for what they are. – Now’s the time to mock them.
Somewhere within the United States the technology for the creation of the perfect slave state is being perfected. Whether or not the mind-controlled state becomes a reality depends not so much upon the efforts of the cryptocrats, but upon the free will, determination, and strength of character of the American people. [195]
~ Walter Bowart
It’s ok to get angry. But more importantly, use that anger to act – now. Your freedom is at stake. And your free will, determination, and strength of character, will determine how this battle ends. Do you want to be free, or a slave? Choose.
Endnotes:
[1] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, The New Press, 1999, P. 245, citing the Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976
[2] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005, pp. 555ff
[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, The New Press, 1999, P. 105-106, citing the Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976
[4] Ibid, pp. 105
[5] Jay Courtney Fikes, Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties, Millenia Press, 1993. ISBN: 0-0696960-0
[6] http://www.jayfikes.com/Home_Page.html
[7] Jan Irvin, “Entheogens: What’s In a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelics, Social Control, and the CIA,” Gnostic Media, November 11, 2014.
https://logosmedia.com/Entheogens_WhatsinaName_PsychedelicSpirituality_SocialControl_CIA
[8] Carol Quigley, The Anglo American Establishment, New York: Books in Focus, 1981, pp. 114 (or 96-pdf)
[9] Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 255
[10] This quote is apparently falsely attributed to George Orwell/Erik Blaire, but in original form it appears to be from William Randolph Heart, Lord Northcliffe, or Alfred Harmsworth. The original states: “News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst
[11] John G. Fuller, The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, Macmillan Co, 1968, pp. 289
[12] Albert Hofmann, LSD My Problem Child, J. P. Tarcher, Inc., see footnote on pp. 6. ISBN: 0-87477-256-7
[13] Regarding Ergometrine, Wikipedia, notes: “Possible side effects include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, tinnitus, chest pain, palpitation, bradycardia, transient hypertension and other cardiac arrhythmias, dyspnea, rashes, and shock. An overdose produces a characteristic poisoning, ergotism or "St. Anthony's fire": prolonged vasospasm resulting in gangrene and amputations; hallucinations and dementia; and abortions. Gastrointestinal disturbances such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, are common.”
[14] Ibid, pp. 290
[15] Ibid, pp. 294ff
[16] Ibid, pp. 295
[17] Ibid, pp. 294
[18] Ibid, pp. 295
[19] Ibid, pp. 296
[20] Ibid, pp. 296
[21] Hank Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009. pp. 53ff
[22] Ibid, pp. 352
[23] Uri Geller interview, The Secret Life of Uri Geller, Red Ice Creations, March 10, 2014. http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2014/03/RIR-140310.php
[24] John G. Fuller, Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974. pp. 11ff
[25] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by Grover Smith, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, pp. 634
[26] Ibid. pp. 738
[27] Ibid. pp. 757ff
[28] Andrija Puharich, The Sacred Mushroom, Doubleday & Co., 1959, pp. 118
[29] Ibid. pp. 25
[30] Ibid. pp. 45
[31] Ibid. See photos section – film strips.
[32] Ibid. pp. 120ff.
[33] Ibid. pp. 206
[34] John G. Fuller, The Interrupted Journey, The Dial Press, New York, 1966, pp, xii
[35] John G. Fuller, Incident at Exeter, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1966. pp. 7
[36] Ibid, pp. 110
[37] Ibid, pp. 18
[38] Ibid, pp. 21
[39] Ibid, pp. 85
[40] Ibid, pp. 86
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid, pp. 87
[43] Ibid, pp. 57
[44] Ibid, pp. 34
[45] Ibid.
[46] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 80.
[47] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 160. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[48] In 1965, Bowart, along with Ishmael Reed( who named the paper, Sherry Needham, Allen Katzman, and Dan Rattiner founded the East Village Other (EVO). EVO offered a newsprint medium for the rants, artwork, poetry and comics of such 1960s icons as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Crumb, Marshall McLuhan, Spain Rodriguez, and The Fugs. In 1966, Bowart testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency about banning LSD. He drew national attention with his recommendations.
[49] Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs interview from 2 May, 2010. From 13:00ff, http://halkinnaman.com/ed/audio_rr/bob_dobbs_2_may_2010_walter_bowart.mp3
[50] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 9ff
[51] Ibid. pp. 10
[52] Ibid., pp. 79ff
[53] Aldous Huxley, Moksha, ed. by Michael Horowitz, Inner Traditions, 1977/1999, pp. 181. ISBN: 978-089281758-0
[54] Jan Irvin, “Entheogens: What’s In a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelics, Social Control, and the CIA,” Gnostic Media, November 11, 2014, citing CIA MKULTRA Subproject 47 letter of March 25, 1964 on Humphry Osmond letterhead. Declassified June 1977.
[55] Walter Bowart, “Lords of the Revolution: Timothy Leary and the CIA. . .The Spy Who Came In From the (Ergot) Mold” http://www.whale.to/b/bowart8.html
[56] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 150. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[57] Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Orb Books (June 15, 1997), pp. 78-79 : ISBN-10: 0312863551
[58] Jan Irvin, “Entheogens: What’s In a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelics, Social Control, and the CIA,” Gnostic Media, November 11, 2014
[59] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 10. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[60] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 10.
[61] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 97. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[62] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 156. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[63] Ibid. pp. 201.
[64] Ibid. pp. 191.
[65] B.H. Friedman, Tripping: A Memoir, Provincetown Arts Press, 2006, pp. 48ff. ISBN: 0-944854-48-6
[66] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 21. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[67] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 79ff
[68] In the reunion video “A Conversation on LSD, 1979, around 34 minutes Timothy Leary states of Ginsberg: “Well, Of course we have to mention Ken Kesey. and of course Allen Ginsberg was a, Allen Ginsberg was an indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs, and the, uh, uh, so they…”
[69] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 341. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[70] Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs interview from 2 May, 2010. From 21:30ff, http://halkinnaman.com/ed/audio_rr/bob_dobbs_2_may_2010_walter_bowart.mp3
[71] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 80.
[72] Leary in The Narcotic Rehabilitation Act of 1966. Hearings before a special subcommittee, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session. [89] Y 4.J 89/2:N 16/3. pp. 246, 250
[73] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 80.
[74] Louis Jolyon West (Louis Jolyon West (1975) in Hallucinations: Behaviour, Experience, and Theory by Ronald K. Siegel and Louis Jolyon West, 1975. ISBN 978-1-135-16726-4. P. 298 ff.)
[75] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 80.
[76] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 320. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[77] University of Richmond Virginia website: “Dr. Timothy Leary Defends Responsible Use of LSD, May, 1966”
https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5257
[78] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 80.
[79] John Cloud, When the Elites Loved LSD – Time Magazine, April 23, 2007
[80] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 99.
[81] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979, pp. 121. ISBN: 0-8129-0773-6
[82] Ibid.
[83] Jan Irvin, The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity, Gnostic Media, 2008.
[84] CIA MKULTRA document titled Institutional Notifications
[85] In “Manufacturing the Deadhead,” 2013, I wrote: “Wasson goes on to discuss a paper he read on 15 November 1956 to the American Philosophical Society. CIA MK-ULTRA documents reveal that “10. National Philosophical Society” was a “Subproject 58 – Cosponsor,” but then go on to say “Unable to locate – not sent.” Why would the CIA be unable to locate the National Philosophical Society, unless the name is wrong? I think it’s highly likely that this reference to the National Philosophical Society is actually referring to the American Philosophical Society. There doesn’t appear evidence of a National Philosophical Society ever existing, and there is much for an “American Philosophical Society” – which was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. So was the American Philosophical Society also behind MK-ULTRA Subproject 58? Online searches for a “National Philosophical Society” automatically pull up the “American Philosophical Society” – where Wasson gave his lecture on this very topic in 1956 – during the height of his MK-ULTRA activities.” See also Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, North Atlantic Books, 2008. pp. 22
[86] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979, pp. 111. ISBN: 0-8129-0773-6
[87] Ibid. pp. 114
[88] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by Grover Smith, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, pp. 678ff
[89] Jan Irvin, "R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,and the Psychedelic Revolutio," Gnostic Media, May 13, 2012 at https://logosmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject#R.%20Gordon%20Wasson
[90] Mind Control, ABC News Closeup, ABC Television, 1979
[91] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979, pp. ix. ISBN: 0-8129-0773-6
[92] Jan Irvin, R. “Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology, and the Psychedelic Revolution.” May 13, 2012
[93] Andrews archive, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 37: folder 419.
[94] Ibid., Box 40: folder 441.
[95] Ibid., Box 42: folder 460.
[96] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979, (see ch. 5) pp. 73ff. ISBN: 0-8129-0773-6
[97] Ibid. pp. 3 – Marks’s book was published on 2/1/1979, before Albert Hofmann’s book. Hofmann assisted Marks with the writing of his book.
[98] Ibid. pp. ix
[99] Ibid. pp. 115
[100] Ibid. pp. 117
[101] Ibid. pp. 121 – “CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary, Kesey, and Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men were, and they, along with many of the lesser-known experimental subjects, like Harvard's Ralph Blum, created the climate whereby LSD escaped the government's control and became available by the early sixties on
the black market.”
[102] Ibid. pp. 115-116
[103] Ibid. pp. 117
[104] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 73. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[105] Allan Richardson in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, ed. by Thomas Riedlinger, 1990, p. 203.
[106] Hank Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009. pp. 359 ISBN: 978-0-9777953-7-6
[107] Ibid. pp. 355
[108] Jan Irvin, Manufacturing the Deadhead, Logos Media, May 13, 2013. At: https://logosmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/. See also St. Peter’s Snow by Leo Perutz, 1933.
[109] Willis Harmon in Beyond the Mechanical Mind, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 1977, pp. 101
[110] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 286. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[111] Ibid. See References section: Ch. 1 "Don't worry … won't work" O Nick Bercel, comments at LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979. Ch. 2 "Cost me a couple of thousand dollars" O Hubbard, remarks at LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979. And also: "We waited for him like the little old lady" O Dr. Oscar Janiger, remarks at LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979. Ch. 3. "We rode out to his place" O Humphry Osmond, remarks at the LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979. "The whole thing was just moving geometrically" O Oscar Janiger, remarks at the LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979. Postscript: Acid And After "The American people today are quantum jumps more" O Timothy Leary, remarks at the LSD Reunion in Los Angeles, February 16, 1979.
[112] Ibid. pp. 293.
[113] Ibid. pp. 286.
[114] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, 1979, pp. ix. ISBN: 0-8129-0773-6
[115] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 44. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[116] Ibid. pp. 199.
[117] Ibid. pp. 198.
[118] Ibid.
[119] Ibid. pp. 229.
[120] Walter Bowart, “Lords of the Revolution: Timothy Leary and the CIA. . .The Spy Who Came In From the (Ergot) Mold” http://www.whale.to/b/bowart8.html
[121] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 73. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[122] Ibid. pp. 160.
[123] Ibid. pp. 216.
[124] Sydney Cohen in Organization and Coordination of Federal Drug Research and Regulatory Programs: LSD. Hearings, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session. May 24, 25, and 26, 1966. [89] Y 4.G 74/6:L 99. pp. 157
[125] Marlene Dobkin de Rios, A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy, Preager, 2008, pp. 16. ISBN: 978-0-313-34542-5
[126] David McClelland in Michael Hollingshead, The Man Who Turned on the World, Abelard-Schuman, pp. 34. ISBN: 0-200-04018-9
[127] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 48. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[128] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by Grover Smith, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, pp. 824
[129] Louis Jolyon West (Louis Jolyon West (1975) in Hallucinations: Behaviour, Experience, and Theory by Ronald K. Siegel and Louis Jolyon West, 1975. ISBN 978-1-135-16726-4. P. 298 ff.)
[130] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. xvi. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[131] Ibid. pp. 80-81
[132] Ibid. pp. 41
[133] Ibid. pp. 18
[134] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by Grover Smith, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, pp. 807 – Letter 756 to Humphry Osmond, 23 September, 1956.
[135] Ibid. pp. 604ff – Letter 572 to George Orwell, 21 October, 1949.
[136] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 51ff. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[137] Ibid. pp. 52
[138] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by Grover Smith, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, pp. 798ff – Letter 747 to Humphry Osmond, 29 June, 1956.
[139] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 57. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[140] Ibid. pp. 58
[141] Ibid. pp. 81
[142] Ibid. pp. 62
[143] Ibid.
[144] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 43. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[145] Laura Huxley, letter of December 8, 1963, to Julian and Juliette Huxley, available from: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/03/most-beautiful-death.html
[146] Ibid. pp. 7-8
[147] "CIA: Maker of Policy, or Tool?". The New York Times. April 25, 1966. p. 20, column 3. Retrieved 2011-09-16.
[148] Jay Stevens, introduction to The Invisible Landscape, 1993 edition, by brothers McKenna, p. XII.
[149] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 85. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[150] Ibid. pp. 132
[151] Ibid. pp. 142
[152] Ibid. pp. 127
[153] Ibid. pp. 78ff
[154] Ibid. pp. 79
[155] Ibid.
[156] Ibid. pp. 236
[157] Ibid. pp. 246
[158] Ibid. pp. 249
[159] Ibid. pp. 265
[160] Ibid. pp. 284
[161] Ibid.
[162] Ibid.
[163] Ibid. pp. 311
[164] Ibid. pp. 369
[165] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 205. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[166] Ibid. pp. 59
[167] Council on Foreign Relations archives, Princeton, Mudd Library: “To meet His Excellency Marshal Josip Broz Tito, President of the Republic of Yugoslavia, Friday, September 30, 1960”. MC 104, Box 455, Folder 1. –Henry Luce and R. Gordon Wasson were in attendance. See also “Round Table Meeting and Dinner for Hon. W. Averell Harriman, Monday, September 14th, 1959,” with Allen Dulles and R. Gordon Wasson in attendance. MC 104, box 443.
[168] Jan Irvin, "R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,and the Psychedelic Revolutio," Gnostic Media, May 13, 2012 at https://logosmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject#R.%20Gordon%20Wasson
[169] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 189. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[170] Ibid. pp. 132.
[171] Ibid. pp. 152.
[172] Ibid. pp. 153
[173] Colin Ross, The C.I.A. Doctors, Manitou Communications, Inc., 2006, pp. 132ff. ISBN: 0-9765508-0-6
[174] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, The New Press, 1999, p. 105.
[175] David Black, Acid, Vision Paperbacks, 1998/2001, pp. 61. ISBN: 1-901250-30-x
[176] In a conversation with Jan Irvin on February 22, 2013.
[177] Allan Richardson in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, ed. by Thomas Riedlinger, 1990, p. 203
[178] Documents and letters from the CIA archives on R. Gordon Wasson – FOIA request, February 2012. Approved for release 2003/05/05 : CIA-RDP80R01731R000700100003-5
[179] Allan Richardson in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, ed. by Thomas Riedlinger, 1990, p. 203
[180] Hank Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009. pp. 359ff ISBN: 978-0-9777953-7-6
[181] Carol Quigley, The Anglo American Establishment, New York: Books in Focus, 1981, pp. 114 (or 96-pdf)
[182] Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, Ch. 1, P. 1.
[183] Ibid, pp. 295
[184] Ibid, pp. 87
[185] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 276.
[186] Ibid. pp. 201.
[187] Ibid. pp. 265
[188] Ibid. pp. 229.
[189] Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 255
[190] Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, pp. 78ff. ISBN: 0-87113-076-9
[191] Ibid. pp. 236
[192] In a conversation with Jan Irvin on February 22, 2013.
[193] Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 286. ISBN: 0-8021-3062-3
[194] Steven Hager, located at: https://stevenhager420.wordpress.com/tag/eliphas-levi/
[195] Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, William Collins Sons & Co., 1978, pp. 284.
Articles in this series:
1) R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,and the Psychedelic Revolution. By Jan Irvin, May 13, 2012
2) How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes. By Jan Irvin, August 28, 2012
3) Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering, by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin, May 13, 2013
4) Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA, by Jan Irvin, November 11, 2014
5) Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%, by Jan Irvin, May 13, 2015
31 comments for “Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%”