The CIA Guide to Ruining Someone's Life: Part 1

"There must be no more secret contracts to conduct experiments on innocent people"

Pont-Saint-Esprit

On August 16, 1951, hundreds of residents in the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in France simultaneously suffered from a mysterious illness. A postman, Leon Armunier, was delivering mail on his route when he began to experience extreme hallucinations. “It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he recalled. Taken to a nearby hospital in Avignon, he was placed in a room with three teenagers, similarly experiencing strange symptoms and were forcibly chained to their beds. “Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly…screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down…the noise was terrible. I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.” All told, there were 300 reported as being affected that week, with 30 hospitalized and 5 deaths. The most common explanation that arose was ergot poisoning due to a naturally occurring fungus that could have infected the rye found in the bread of a local bakery.

A later CIA report from 1953 on a meeting between a confidential informant and an employee of the Swiss Sandoz Company, the latter of whom revealed: “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not bread at all. For weeks, the French tied up our laboratories with analyses of bread. It was not grain ergot, it was a diethylamide-like compound.” The informant then asked the obvious question: “If the material wasn’t in the bread then how did it get into the people?” The man replied, “I think the whole business was an experiment.”

At the same time as the outbreak of madness in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a group of scientists from the U.S. Army’s Camp Detrick happened to be visiting France. One of them was named Frank Olson.

The Scientist: Part 1

Olson’s experimental work at Camp Detrick for the U.S. Army could be especially grim. His early work mostly dealt with chemical experiments on animals, often on behalf of the CIA, who would use the Army’s facility to develop and test chemicals for biological warfare. His wife Alice became aware of his troubles: Once he returned home and told her, “All the monkeys died.” According to his colleague Henry Eigelsbach, “It was unavoidable not to become attached to some of the animals, especially the monkeys. You’re there almost constantly with them, and you begin to notice them, to look into their eyes, to see how they behave and react to you. You grow fond of them, as any normal person would. Frequently, it was no different than having to put the family pet to sleep. It was sad like that.” Camp Detrick’s aerosol “anthrax trials alone consumed more than 2,000 rhesus monkeys.”

Recently appointed as Special Operations Division (SOD) Chief of the Plans and Operations Branch of the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, Olson attended Chemical Corps conference in 1952 on “the use of psychochemicals as a new concept of warfare.” Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of the CIA’s Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS), listened with great interest to a presentation by Dr. L. Wilson Greene, the Chemical Corps’ Scientific Director. Gottlieb later conceded, “I was fascinated by the ideas Greene was advancing. He was convinced that it was possible to actually win a battle or larger engagement without killing anyone or destroying any property. While I found this to be a novel approach to war, I was somewhat skeptical about it, but I was intrigued by the potential applications of psychochemicals to much smaller conflicts and situations. There I saw tremendous promise.”

Dr. Greene shared the news of an “incredible discovery” of a new drug that “causes hallucinations and suicidal tendencies in man.” The drug was noted as being effective in “extremely small amounts” and could cause “uneasiness, vertigo, restlessness, difficulty of concentration, sight disturbance, a feeling of suffocation, hysteria, unsteady and uncertain movements of the arms and legs, and hallucinations.” He explained, “It is a derivative of ergot called lysergic acid diethylamide.” Researchers at the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland called it LSD-25.

Upon joining the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb became involved in a project already underway called Bluebird, soon renamed Artichoke, the goal of which was to experiment in interrogative methods and mind control research, often through the use of drugs. An early memorandum revealed the questions they were attempting to answer, which continued to be explored for over a decade in various forms:

1. Can we “condition” by post-H (hypnotic) suggestion agency employees (or persons of interest to this agency) to prevent them from giving information to any unauthorized source or for committing any act on behalf of a foreign or domestic enemy?

2. Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit? (Long range).

3. Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?

4. Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? (Short, immediate activity)

[…]

7. Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

8. Can we “alter” a person’s personality? How long will it hold?

[…]

16. Is it possible to find a gas that can be used to gain SI control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless: one shot, etc.?

17. What are full details on “sleep-inducing machine”?

18. How can sodium A [amytal] or P [pentothal] or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum water, aspirin tablets, common medicines, coke, tooth paste?

With the lack of success in testing hypnosis, sleep induction, and other drugs to obtain the results above, Gottlieb began to lead his own project under the cryptonym MKULTRA (the prefix MK was code for the work of Gottlieb’s TSS) and in a June 9, 1953 memorandum, he expounded on potential uses for LSD in CIA operations as part of TSS research: “Emphasis will be placed in this coming year on translating the basic [LSD] data to date into operationally pertinent material along the following lines: a) disturbance of memory; b) discrediting by aberrant behavior; c) alteration of sex patterns; d) eliciting of information; e) suggestibility; f) creation of dependence.”

To Gottlieb, the purpose of MKULTRA was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means” in pursuit of the goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” The scope of MKULTRA was incredibly wide-ranging, funding 149 subprojects. Some of these included:

• 4: A manual on deception by magician John Mulholland

• 5: Denver University Hypnosis

• 17: LSD Studies

• 45: Knockout, Stress, Cancer

• 54: Brain Concussion

• 59: Unwitting Drug Tests at University of Maryland

• 82: Hungarian Refugees

• 91: Drug Testing and Screening of Animals

• 93: Toxin Study—Cuba Chapter

• 97: Schizophrenics Psychotherapy

• 102: Adolescent Gangs

• 103: Children's Summer Camps

• 104: Sabotage of Petroleum

• 121: Witch Doctor Study—Dr. Raymond Prince—McGill University

• 136: ESP Research

• 137: Handwriting Analysis—Dr. Klare G. Toman

• 139: Bird Disease Studies at Penn State

• 148: Marijuana Research

While LSD failed to prove its worth as a truth serum in lab and field testing, it seemed to provide promise as a substance that would “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.” The Army’s SOD became officially linked to the CIA in 1952, through an agreement as part of the CIA’s MKNAOMI project. The CIA provided the Army with funding in exchange for access to its biological weapons and drugs intended for espionage: interrogation, mind control, or assassination. This relationship put Frank Olson in direct contact with the Agency’s methods and LSD, to disastrous results.

Olson’s supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Ruwet, knew there was something wrong after he and Olson attended a retreat hosted by the CIA in 1953. Ruwet and Olson became fast friends following their first meeting in July 1951, spending time together on a personal and professional level, which included visits to each other’s homes and family socializing. Ruwet expressed no complaints of Olson’s work: “As a professional man my estimate of his ability is that he was outstanding…the performance of his duties officially was satisfactory to outstanding,” he wrote. Everything seemed to go wrong for Olson after their colleagues at the CIA secretly drugged them at a retreat with LSD on November 19, 1953. Sidney Gottlieb had instructed his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, to dose a bottle of liquor with the hallucinogenic drug, which was then consumed by four of the meeting participants, ostensibly to test the substance in a social situation the Agency later claimed. Olson seemed to be most affected; he returned home despondent, telling his wife Alice: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Ruwet called it “the most frightening experience I ever had or hope to have,” especially given that they had been administered the drug unwittingly.

By Monday the 23rd, Olson told Ruwet he was ready to be fired or quit. “He stated that in his opinion he had messed up the experiment and did do not well at the meetings,” Ruwet recalled, later citing in Senate testimony that Olson had been “quite concerned about committing a security break.” Ruwet was able to calm him down and Olson reported back to his wife: “I talked to Vin. He said that I didn’t make a mistake. Everything is fine. I’m not going to resign.” However, Ruwet reported that the next days Olson’s doubts returned, with him admitting that he was “all mixed up,” incompetent, and had done something wrong. “When questioned closely he could not say exactly what he thought he had done wrong,” Ruwet noted. Ruwet in turn suggested psychiatric care and phoned Lashbrook, the very person who had dosed Olson with LSD. After informing his wife, Olson, Ruwet and Lashbrook left for New York City to visit with Dr. Harold Abramson, who was more of an allergist than a psychiatrist, but was a trusted resource of the CIA with a security clearance. On the trip over, Olson became anxious and “he had the feeling that someone was out to get him. He didn’t appear to be quite sure why,” Ruwet wrote. After meeting with Dr. Abramson for cocktails at the Statler Hotel, Olson cornered Ruwet to ask him in private, “What’s behind all this? Give me the low-down. What are they trying to do with me? Are they checking me for security?”

After visiting again with the doctor and attending a musical, Me and Juliet, on the night of November 25, Olson became convinced during the first act that “people were outside waiting to arrest him on his departure from the show.” When Ruwet woke up the next morning in their hotel room, Olson had disappeared. He was found downstairs, fully dressed in a hat and overcoat, informing Lashbrook and Ruwet that he had disposed of his identification, wallet, and money. His reasoning was unclear and Olson concluded “I must have been dreaming.” Flying back to Washington so that Olson could spend Thanksgiving with his family, upon arrival Olson requested instead that Ruwet “just leave him” and let him “go off by himself.” Ruwet refused and Olson asked him “to turn him over to the police since they wanted him anyway.” In what now amounted to holding him against his will, Olson was taken back to New York by Lashbrook to see Dr. Abramson and Ruwet stayed behind. On November 27th at 10:30 pm, Lashbrook phoned Ruwet to inform him that a reservation to institutionalize Olson had been made at the Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland for the next day. Ruwet jokingly asked if Olson was still speaking to him; Lashbrook relayed the message and Olson responded, “Why, yes, let me have the phone.” Ruwet reported the conversation as relaxed and Ruwet offered to visit him the next day. Olson declined “since that day was Saturday and he knew that I probably had work to do around the house,” Ruwet remembered. Ruwet insisted on meeting him and Olson replied, “Fine, I’ll see you the morning.” Next he spoke to his wife Alice on the phone: “It was a fine discussion,” she remembered. “Everything was ‘We will see you tomorrow’—it was not a goodbye.”

Lashbrook reported that Olson “spoke freely of the hospitalization the following day, and indicated he wanted books from home to study, and other things he wanted to do while hospitalized.” Olson said “he felt more relaxed and contented than he had since we came to New York. He asked the hotel telephone operator to call us at a specified time in the morning (so we could make our plane).” After 11:00 pm, the two went to bed and Lashbrook reported that “somewhere around 0230 Saturday morning I was awakened by a loud noise. Dr. Olson had crashed through the closed window blind and the closed window and he fell to his death from the window of our room on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel. Later in the day I officially identified the body for the New York authorities.”

Armand Pastore, the hotel’s manager who was one of the first to approach Olson on the street. “He was laying there looking at me,” he recounted, “trying to speak to me, a very earnest look in his eyes, wide open. But there was blood everywhere, blood from his nose, blood from his eyes, blood from his ears. There was a bone protruding from his left arm, sticking straight out…I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. And then finally, he died.” The situation never sat right with Pastore: “In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn. I mean, how the hell do you do that?” He was also shocked to discover that his roommate, Lashbrook, stayed in the hotel room rather than rushing down to see his near-death colleague.

Investigating further, Pastore asked the phone operator if she had connected any calls from Olson’s room: “The operator said, ‘Yeah, there was one call out of that room.’ I said, ‘Yeah? What was the conversation?’ She said, ‘Well, the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and he said, ‘Well, he's gone,’ and the man on the other end said, ‘Well, that's too bad,’ and they both hung up.”

In a report dated December 3, 1953, an agent sent to investigate Olson’s death overheard a conversation between Abramson and Lashbrook in which they expressed concern “as to whether or not the deal was in jeopardy” and “that the operation was dangerous and that the whole deal should be re-analyzed.” The two were further heard discussing a narrative regarding Olson later submitted as part of a CIA investigation, included in a memo sent to the CIA’s General Counsel by Abramson regarding his interactions with Olson in the week before his death, which read in part:

There was repeated discussion of his concern with the quality of his work, his guilt on being retired from the Army for an ulcer, and his release of classified information. He said that he had these feelings for a very long time and that they had not started the week before when he participated in an experiment and that, indeed, in March of 1953 his wife thought that he was so depressed and agitated that she thought that he should see a doctor. He said that he had been sleeping poorly since March of 1953 and amplified his difficulties with regard to poor memory and poor work. However, I could not harmonize what he said about his job performance with the attitude of his superiors since he had been offered a division. Nor did this check with repeated questioning of past events. I again attempted to get further information in regard to his feelings of persecution but at no time did he speak of anyone but with the highest regard for both friends and family. He stated explicitly that he wished to go back home and that arrangements had been made. I saw no way in which this could be prevented but plans were made for his return and further discussion.

Contrary to this narrative, Ruwet’s account lacks any mention of Olson releasing classified information and Olson’s wife Alice had been informed that Frank had been sent for psychiatric care due to the potential of him causing her bodily harm. Abramson further wrote of Olson’s feeling “that his inability to sleep was connected with his belief that the CIA group had been putting something like benzedrine in his coffee at night to keep him awake” and concluded that “Mr. Olson was in a psychotic state when hospitalization was decided upon with delusions of persecution.” Lashbrook’s notes indicated that Olson had said to him that “we shouldn’t bother with him, we should let him just ‘disappear.’”

The CIA’s general counsel in turn could not believe the cavalier response of the Technical Services Staff towards the death of Olson, writing to the Agency’s Inspector General on January 4, 1954: “I am not happy with what seems to me a very casual attitude on the part of TSS representatives to the way this experiment was conducted and to their remarks that this is just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation. I do not eliminate the need for taking risks, but I do believe, especially when human health or life is at stake, that at least the prudent reasonable measures which can be taken to minimize the risk must be taken and failure to do so is culpable negligence.”

The experiments continued unabated and three CIA employees, including Sidney Gottlieb, were given letters signed by Director Allen Dulles indicating they had exercised “poor judgment” in administering LSD to their colleagues unwittingly. The cover note stated the letters were to be hand delivered and were “not reprimands” and no notations were to be made in their personnel files. Though Olson’s family was initially not informed of the Agency’s involvement, what little they knew did not sit well with them regarding Frank Olson’s apparent suicide. “I knew this could not have been an intentional act,” Alice believed, “because he did not call up to say goodbye—it was I will see you tomorrow.”

The Tennis Player

On December 5, 1952, 42-year-old Harold Blauer, who had played tennis professionally as a career, checked himself into the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), seeking assistance with his depression resulting from a recent divorce. In the preceding two months, he had stayed at two other hospitals, Roosevelt and Bellevue. He was soon diagnosed at the NYSPI as suffering from pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia and was treated by a psychiatric resident. The talk therapy improved his condition such that he was scheduled for release in weeks. Unrelated to his treatment, he was subjected to injections of mescaline derivates, experiments performed under contract with the Army Chemical Corps. The purpose was ostensibly to test the compounds for their utility in chemical warfare; however, Blauer was not informed of the true nature of the “study” and written consent at the time was not required nor sought. Notes from the research scientist indicated that Blauer was “[v]ery apprehensive” about participating and required “considerable persuasion.” The first injection on December 11 caused him to feel pressure in his head and his right leg tremored slightly. Blauer was again “apprehensive” to continue before the second injection of a different chemical on December 18, which caused little reaction in his body. In advance of the third injection on December 23, Blauer was noted as becoming more disturbed about the experiments proceeding, asking a nurse to call the “drug study” floor and report to them he had a cold as the doctors would never believe him. “Why do you give this to me? I am going home tomorrow,” he pleaded. Rather than listen to his concerns, the doctor proceeded with the third injection and Blauer body began to shake. He then left the Institute for three days, spending Christmas with his daughter Elizabeth at a hotel on Long Island. “He seemed just fine,” she recalled. He had plans to leave the NYSPI within weeks and rented a place to live with Elizabeth.

On December 30, a few days after his return to the NYSPI, Blauer had reached a breaking point with the chemical “treatments” as the doctor prepared the fourth injection of the fourth distinct chemical to test on his body. He informed his psychiatrist that he did not want to continue with the injections and was told in turn that this refusal would place him back in Bellevue or Roosevelt, where his experience had been miserable. He retracted his protest and the injection caused a violent reaction on this occasion, his body tremoring, Blauer repeatedly sitting up and flopping back down. The fifth and final injection was slated as a repeat of the first, except this time sixteen times the original dose. Before it was administered on January 8, 1953, he complained of the injections to nurses and his psychiatrist. Regardless, between 9:53 and 9:57 am the experiment proceeded, with 450 mg injected of the drug, amounting to 6.47 mg/kg of his body weight. He immediately became restless, requiring restraint from the nurse, sweating profusely and flailing his arms. Four minutes later he “pulled up in bed,” stiffening his body with teeth clenched and frothing at the mouth. An hour later, he was still experiencing similar symptoms, and was talking and moving his legs in a random fashion. After another 30 minutes, he was in a coma and by 12:15 pm he was pronounced dead.

In another sign of the recklessness of the experimental regime, the same compound that killed Blauer (referred to in the files as EA 1298) was at the same time being tested on another patient. The reaction in this woman was more extreme and violent that the injection was halted one-third of the way through. The patient eventually recovered, remarking, “I’ve been in hell. Why did they put me in hell? They were supposed to make me feel good. I’ve never felt this bad before; I feel terrible.”

The cover-up began immediately following Blauer’s death. The doctor’s report submitted on January 9 to the medical examiner falsely claimed he had received a mescaline derivative “for diagnostic purposes,” and that “he had received this drug previously with no untoward reaction,” ignoring the immense increase in dosage between the two injections. This was the cover story Blauer’s wife Amy was also told. The Army took action to conceal their involvement, with a project officer travelling to the NYSPI the next day, who wrote in his report that the experiments had been useful up to that point to the Army and recommended their continuance, with $120,000 in funds having been allocated to the Chemical Corps. The report also indicated that the Army managed to convince the medical examiners “to place all the records [regarding Blauer] in a confidential file in the medical examiner’s office.” The psychiatrist who had treated Blauer attempted to learn the cause of his death and was blocked at every turn and told the matter would now be handled by others. Frustrated, he later obtained Blauer’s file, which was lighter than expected and appeared to have documents missing. Even with a lawsuit launched by his wife Amy Blauer in 1953, the Army’s involvement was not revealed and documents were completely hidden from the trial, not even referred to as classified or redacted, despite the NYSPI being required under court order to produce these documents. The Assistant Attorney General continued with the cover-up, agreeing with the Army that the matter should remain secret and postponing witness depositions according to the Army’s instructions, securing agreement with the plaintiff that the depositions would not occur. As payment for not admitting their involvement, the Army verbally offered to pay one-third of an out-of-court settlement. In 1955, Blauer’s estate received a settlement of $15,000, half of which was ultimately paid by the U.S. government, its role still concealed.

Blauer’s secret files were later discovered in a safe at Edgewood Arsenal in Mayland in 1975, with instructions for them to not be opened without prior authorization. Amy Blauer having since passed, her daughters Elizabeth and Belinda were informed by the Army of the Chemical Corps’ involvement in their father’s death more than 20 years after the fact. Elizabeth testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1975:

Not only is there no record of permission from my father to administer experimental drugs, but they were apparently forced upon him. I quote from the record—first day—first injection—first comment. “Very apprehensive, considerable persuasion required.”

Anyone who has been around mental institutions can tell you that means that my father was tied or held down. And prior to the third injection, my father pleaded, “Why do you do this? I have plans to go home tomorrow.”

It’s an outrage that this type of experiment has been permitted. There must be no more secret contracts to conduct experiments on innocent people. I cannot begin to express the dismay, fear, anger, pain that I feel.

A later court judgment in 1987 awarded Harold Blauer’s daughters $702,044 for lost support and inheritance, lost parental nurture and guidance, funeral expenses, and pain and suffering. The judge found that Blauer died “as a guinea pig in an experiment” and discovered that the Army’s interest in the compound given to him all along had been to test its usefulness in disturbing enemy populations. After his death, the Army requested testing of the same compound, EA 1298, through the University of Michigan on mice, rats, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys. The tests confirmed that this particular mescaline derivative was more toxic than the others, with the animals experiencing “tremors and…convulsions before death,” similar to the effects on Blauer.

The Criminal

State police surveilling career criminal James “Whitey” Bulger in Boston for long enough in the late 1970s and 1980s would be faced with an unbelievable sight: Bulger eating dinner at an FBI agent’s home off the books. John Connolly had on the surface cultivated Bulger as an FBI informant, but in fact Bulger received the larger benefit, with what amounted to protection from the local FBI office. Connolly’s FBI supervisor John Morris explained to Bulger their only condition: “you can do anything you want as long as you don’t clip anyone.’’ However, Bulger continued to commit murders with impunity. At dinners with Connolly, Bulger would regale those gathered with stories from his time in prison he was subjected to LSD experiments.

In 1956, Whitey Bulger had begun a 20-year-old prison sentence for a series of bank robberies. “I’m no angel but as you know I’ve got a twenty year sentence and I know if I don’t help myself and put this time to good use I will have no future. I can only help myself by an education and forming good habits and sensible outlook on life,” he wrote to a priest in Boston as he began his term in Atlanta Penitentiary. Seeking any means of reducing his sentence, in 1957 Bulger volunteered for a program pitched as searching for a cure for schizophrenia using LSD, a new drug completely unknown to the general public. With the promise of small cash deposits in his prison bank account and time off for good behavior, Bulger had stumbled into the CIA’s Project MKULTRA, which from 1953-1964 funded 86 universities and institutions in search of mind control drugs and techniques. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, Chair of the Pharmacology Department at Emory University, ran four MKULTRA subprojects on behalf of the Agency, administering drugs to inmates (test subjects referred to by Gottlieb “normal and schizophrenic human beings”) who were misinformed as to the true purpose of the experiments.

On August 6, 1957, Bulger signed a contract attesting to his understanding of “the potential benefits to humanity, and the risks to my health of participation in this study have been explained to me…and I hereby freely assume all such risks.” Once a week in the psychiatric ward of the prison for the next 15 months, Bulger received doses of LSD in exchange for $3 per instance and 54 days removed from his prison sentence in total.

In the early 1990s, Bugler described the experience: “We were in the room for 24 nightmarish hours. Given LSD in varying doses—sometimes light, sometimes massive.” The drug “would plunge me into the depths of insanity,” recalling one particular hallucination where he “looked down and saw a cockroach—he exploded into the size of an elephant and I shrunk to the size of an ant. Fear had me screaming and climbing the wall.” In 2017, Bulger again wrote of the experience of taking the LSD injections:

In minutes the drug would take over, and about eight or nine men — Dr. Pfeiffer and several men in suits who were not doctors — would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.

The men in suits would be in a room and hook me up to machines, asking questions like: Did you ever kill anyone? Would you kill someone? Two men went psychotic. They had all the symptoms of schizophrenia. They had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking and frothing at the mouth. They put them in a strip cell down the hall. I never saw or heard of them again.

A fellow inmate, Richard Sunday, confirmed that Bulger screamed and babbled incoherently while on the drug: “He was one crazy individual when he was on those drugs. He was a lunatic.” Sunday urged Bulger to drop out of the tests, but Bulger pressed on, despite the feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts. He went to the infirmary, asking to be relieved of work for a day to recover and the medical staff wrote, “Shook up from LSD project” in his file. Bulger was dropped from the study after 15 months on November 10, 1958 due to him “being persistently noisy and boisterous to a rather extreme degree” while on the drug. He later volunteered for a further six weeks the next summer to continue with the study. He described the long-term effects as as being forever plagued by insomnia and nightmares. He also witnessed two inmates becoming psychotic and sent to a federal prison hospital in Missouri. The records destroyed, their names forgotten by prison workers and remembered only by Bulger, who wrote, “The men were named Jennings and Benoit…one man from Atlanta prison said he was there in Springfield doing some electrical work, saw Benoit who was a friend of his in Atlanta and said he was in a catatonic state and couldn’t effect any response.”

Most of all, Bulger felt a sense of betrayal having been lied to as to the true nature of the study. “Carl Pfeiffer—he betrayed his oath, betrayed us,” Bulger wrote, “We were recruited by lies and deception. Encouraged to volunteer to be human guinea pigs in a noble humanitarian cause.” Bulger only discovered the truth behind the experiments after reading John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate in 1979. “They told us we were helping find a cure for schizophrenia,” Bulger wrote in 2017. “When it was all over, everyone would feel suicidal and depressed, wrung out emotionally. Time would stand still. I tried to quit, but Dr. Pfeiffer would appeal to me: ‘Please, you’re my best subject, and we are close to finding the cure.’” Following his release from prison, Bulger went on to terrorize Boston for decades as an organized crime boss who was protected from arrest by the FBI, going into hiding in 1994 following a tip from his former FBI handler John Connolly. He later was charged with several crimes, including 19 murders, and was killed by other inmates in prison in 2018. FBI supervisor John Morris was later granted immunity for testifying against Connolly, who was sentenced to forty years in prison for second-degree murder in 2008 and was granted medical release in 2021.

Under MKULTRA subproject 47, Dr. Pfeiffer had discovered on behalf of the CIA that LSD “produced a model psychosis…Hallucinations last for three days and are characterized by repeated waves of depersonalization, visual hallucinations, and feelings of unreality.” Sidney Gottlieb concluded, “We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments. The Agency learned that a person’s psyche could be very disturbed by those means.” Bulger wrote, “The project was a violation of my rights, using prisoners for dangerous tests. I was angry reading that because I’d never mentioned how I felt hallucinating. I kept silent because I thought they might commit me to a mental institution. I never slept more than two or three hours a night, waking up in cold sweats with side effects. The tests damaged my sleep and gave me nightmares. I had to sleep with the lights on and only for a few hours at a time. The government used us and never tried to help us out after injecting us with government LSD. I’ve had brain scans that told me I was damaged by the tests. The government did a number on us and walked. If anybody opened a shop selling LSD in my neighborhood he would have lost his life.”

The Mother

“Psychic driving is a potent procedure—it invariably produces responses in the patient, and often intense responses,” wrote Dr. Ewen Cameron in the American Journal of Psychiatry in January 1956. Cameron was perhaps the leading psychiatrist in the world and the head of the Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry in Montreal, Canada. After suffering from postpartum depression, Velma Orlikow was sent to the Institute under Dr. Cameron’s care. She was subjected to frequent electroshock treatments, 14 experiments with LSD and played tape recorded messages which were a key component of the psychic driving. The idea was to erase a person’s memory and implant new ideas into their mind. “The drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was an IV injection and things became very furry and very frightening,” Orlikow recalled, “and I had a lot of sensations that were difficult to recall. Nobody explained it to me, nobody ever asked me if I was willing to do it or anything.”

Listening to an endless tape loop of recorded instructions under her pillow, Orlikow was driven to suicidal thoughts. “I thought this was the coldest and most impersonal treatment that anybody could give to anybody in the world. And I became more and more despondent and more and more angry. I just became so despondent that I thought I can’t live like this any longer and I thought I would just go out and throw myself underneath the cars on McGregor. I stood on the curb of that street…and I thought, OK go. OK go. And then I thought, What if you’re not killed? What if you’re just maimed? What if you don’t die and you live and you can’t even talk anymore? And I couldn’t do it.” Her experience was not uncommon. “A number of patients do run away,” Cameron wrote in 1958, “but practically every one comes back on the persuasion of his relatives.” Orlikow managed to avoid the sleep room, where patients were subjected to the more intense treatment of “depatterning,” with higher voltage electroshock treatments and drug-induced comas lasting weeks. Cameron later described the effects of depatterning: “there is not only a loss of the space-time image but a loss of all feeling that should be present…in more advanced forms [the patient] may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself, and he may show double incontinence.”

From this MKULTRA subproject 68, the CIA learned that while total amnesia in a patient could be produced, human behavior afterwards could not be controlled in the way they had hoped. The ultimate effects of the treatment were described by another former patient, Linda MacDonald: “I had to be toilet-trained. I was a vegetable. I had no identity, I had no memory, I never existed in the world before—like a baby, just like a baby that has to be toilet-trained.” In 1966, Dr. Cameron received a Mental Health Award for “the outstanding contribution which he had made to the mental health of the Canadian people.” Upon his death in 1967, his obituaries mention nothing of his psychic driving work or anything relating to his work with the CIA for which he would later become infamous. He is estimated to have ruined the lives of over a hundred Canadians through his experimental research and treatments.

Orlikow was devastated upon discovering the true nature of her ordeal at the Allan Memorial Institute: “It was an awful feeling to realize,” she said, “when I found this out, that the man whom I had thought cared about what happened to me didn’t give a damn. I was a fly, just a fly.” She and eight other former patients sued the CIA, which settled out of court, paying them each around $83,000 in 1988 without admitting guilt.

In 2022, a further 55 families filed a lawsuit against the Canadian institutions involved in Cameron’s experiments. A former staff psychologist and colleague of Cameron summarized Cameron’s approach, which could be analogized more broadly to the recklessness nature of experiments funded by the CIA: “He abhorred the waste of human potential…For him, the end justified the means, and when one is dealing with the waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this stance.”

Part 2—to follow