This had the double utility of squelching the charges of germ warfare and also of justifying the Bluebird program. But the CIA’s response was to leak to favored reporters at Time, the Chicago Tribune, and the Miami Herald stories to the effect that the American POWs had been brainwashed by their Communist captors. An international commission in 1952 concluded that the charges had merit. Simultaneously, US POWs held in North Korea were being paraded by their captors, alleging that the US was using chemical and biological agents against the Koreans and the Chinese. These Bluebird interrogations continued throughout the Korean War. This operation was in total contravention of international protocols on the treatment of POWs. The POWs were shot up with barbiturates, allowing them to go to sleep, then abruptly awoken with injections of amphetamines, hypnotized, then questioned. Twenty-five North Korean prisoners of war were given alternating doses of depressants and stimulants. The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms. The CIA’s Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, developed a hypnosis project called Bluebird, whose object was to get an individual “to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”
DR WILLIAM EARMAN TRIAL
The CIA had followed the trial of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Budapest in 1949 and concluded that the Cardinal’s ultimate confession had been manipulated through “some unknown force.” Initially the belief was that Mindszenty had been hypnotized, and intrigued CIA officers conjectured that they might use the same techniques on people they were interrogating. “It was felt to be mandatory,” Gottlieb went on, “and of the utmost urgency for our intelligence organization to establish what was possible in this field.” He defined the mission as an investigation into how individual behavior could be “altered through covert means.” He gave this description in 1977 during the Kennedy hearings, testifying via remote speaker from another room. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. The code-name ULTRA may have been an echo from Helms’s and Dulles’s OSS days, when ULTRA (the breaking of the primary German code) represented one of the biggest secrets of World War II. MK-ULTRA was created on April 13, 1953, when CIA director Allen Dulles approved Helms’s proposal to develop the “covert use” of biological and chemical materials. Their house was a former slave quarters, and Gottlieb rose every morning before sunrise to milk his herd of goats.Īs was demonstrated in the Olson affair, Gottlieb had powerful friends inside the Agency, notably Richard Helms, at that time deputy director for covert operations. Gottlieb and his wife, a fundamentalist Christian, lived on a farm in the Shenandoah Mountains in northern Virginia. Despite his physical affliction he was an ardent square dancer and exponent of the polka, capering across many a dance floor and dragging visiting psychiatrists and chemists on terpsichorean trysts where appalling plans of mind control were ruminated amidst the blare of the bands. Born with a clubfoot and afflicted with a severe stammer, Gottlieb pushed himself with unremitting intensity. Sidney Gottlieb, a New York Jew who received his doctorate in chemistry from California Tech. Within Technical Services MK-ULTRA projects came under the control of the Chemical Division, headed from 1951 to 1956 by Dr. All of these activities made the Technical Services Division a vital partner of the covert operations wing of the Agency. Here also were developed surveillance equipment and kindred tools of the espionage trade.
In the division’s laboratories and workshops researchers labored on poisons, gadgets designed to maim and kill, techniques of torture and implements to carry such techniques to agonizing fruition. The whole enterprise was assigned the code-name MK-ULTRA and was run out of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, headed in the 1950s by Willis Gibbons, a former executive of the US Rubber Company. The death (or possibly murder) of Frank Olson was but a hint of the enormous secret CIA program of research into techniques of mind alteration and control.
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