The Nightmare Factory

The CIA's Weird Years in the Game of Nations

“The corruption of human beings and the covert manipulation of men, women, and institutions is not an attractive business; while Intelligence work (as Copeland portrays it) may not be bloody; it is no career for a sensitive conscience.”

-New Yorker review of ‘Without Cloak or Dagger,’ September 23, 1974

Early on in CIA history, the Agency adopted the polygraph or lie-detector test as a means of weeding out candidates who posed a security risk to the organization. While some employees objected to this invasion of privacy into the personal aspects of their lives, the CIA viewed the method as essential. “If you don’t want to give up your right to smoke cigarettes,” counterintelligence chief James Angleton argued, “don’t take a job in an explosives factory.” Within a year of the practice being established, according to Copeland, the polygraph managed to prevent the hiring of over one hundred “practicing homosexuals, drug addicts (and at least one drug pusher), former Communists, and persons who admitted to having passed top secret information to Congressmen, newspapermen, businessmen seeking Government contracts, and other outsiders.”

The CIA security team apparently had little regard for privacy in the weeks after the polygraph program was established, with an official revealing to Copeland: “Do you know that over 10 percent of the unmarried men and 15 percent of the married men in this Agency habitually masturbate?” He was also offered details on how many current CIA officers “patronized prostitutes, maintained illicit sexual liaisons, and were engaged in affairs with their secretaries or their colleagues’ spouse.” The reason that these activities did not present a security risk to the Agency was that one needed to feel shame for these acts in order to be subject to blackmail. In addition, the Agency had implemented a measure such that employees could report blackmail attempts, further reducing the risk. Copeland recalled their head of security, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, as saying: “At last, we now have a better understanding of what constitutes a normal human being.”

There were other anecdotes from Miles Copeland’s CIA career that he never got to tell. One involved how he “once dumped a whole plate of potato salad over the head of ‘Gentleman Sam’ Giancana in a Harlem whorehouse.” Another involved an MI-6 officer shooting a French intelligence officer in front of him who was about to “blow the whistle on a small ‘co-operative’ the three of us had going in Libya.” Taken out of his memoir The Game Player by a “hypersensitive legal adviser,” Copeland could not understand why the text had to be removed, believing it to be “good clean fun.” There would never be a completely truthful book on intelligence activities, he believed, since there were “too many high-powered toes to be stepped on.” When it came to the Iranian coup plot of 1953, however, he had few qualms or legal obstacles to reveal what he knew.

The Easiest Coup

When Copeland’s boss Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, who happened to be the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, was first asked about Iran, he pretended he knew what he was talking about. In September 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor three months away, then head of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, asked: “Kim, what do you think of happenings in Iran? That’s going to be an important part of the world for us.” Not having any knowledge or information to contribute, Roosevelt simply replied: “It looks serious.” He then went home to look up Iran on an atlas and read up on the country in an encyclopedia. “Thereafter,” he wrote, “I kept myself better informed.”

The early CIA also lacked “the most basic intelligence on Iran” but “two elements drove American foreign policy” in the post-World War II region of the Persian Gulf, according to a later Agency study: “oil and the fear that political instability might jeopardize Western access to oil.” Mohammad Mosaddegh, appointed Prime Minister by the Shah of Iran on April 29, 1951, had already advanced a bill as a member of the Iranian Parliament to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and then he signed the bill into law three days later on May 1. The CIA referred to Mossadegh as an “impractical visionary and a poor administrator” and Laurence Paul Elwell-Sutton, a British scholar who had worked for the AIOC in the 1930s and the British Embassy in Tehran in the 1940s, wrote of British attitudes at the time: “Really, it seemed hardly fair that dignified and correct western statesmanship should be defeated by the antics of incomprehensible orientals.” In parallel, Mossadegh was immensely contemptuous of the British, telling a U.S. envoy, W. Averell Harriman, in 1951: “You do not know how crafty they are. You do not know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch.”

In response to AIOC dispute, the British first introduced the idea of a coup against Mossadegh and waited for U.S. concurrence, which was not forthcoming under the Truman administration. Secretary of State Dean Acheson criticized “the unusual and persistent stupidity of the [Anglo-Iranian Oil] company and the British Government in their management of the affair,” which in his view aided Mossadegh’s position. Similarly, President Harry Truman wrote: “We tried...to get the block headed British to have their oil company make a fair deal with Iran. No, they could not do that. They know all about how to handle it—we didn’t according to them.”

After Dwight Eisenhower’s election victory in 1952, MI-6 Chief of Station in Tehran C.M. Woodhouse traveled to Washington to meet with State and CIA officials, arguing once more for a coup, saying that conditions in Iran made a Communist takeover a possibility. “He did not stress the oil issue,” the later CIA study reported. Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, then head of the CIA, assessed their chances of success: “You may be able to throw out Musaddiq, but you will never get your own man to stick in his place.” Allen Dulles was more supportive and after he became DCI in 1953, he warned that Iran was becoming a “slowly disintegrating” situation.

The CIA considered several candidates as a replacement for Mossadegh. One name floated was General Fazlollah Zahedi, an Iranian military officer who had been arrested by the British in 1942 for working with a Nazi agent. The CIA landed on Zahedi as the preferred candidate, despite the fact that the Agency believed that “like all Iranians on the public scene [he was not] noted for honesty, consistency, reliability and strength of convictions.” A State Department memo described how the U.S. would support whomever was ultimately selected: according to the plan, U.S. officials would publicly pretend they were against interfering in the internal affairs of another country, while privately they would assure the Shah and new prime minister that they would be prepared to assist with military aid behind the scenes.

The responsibility for planning the coup fell on the shoulders on Kim Roosevelt, who was at the time responsible for the CIA’s Near East and Africa (NEA) Division. Copeland recognized that his bosses in the hierarchy above him, Roosevelt, Frank Wisner, and Allen Dulles, were suddenly silent on his main focus, Egypt, where he hoped to become a management consultant. Roosevelt eventually explained why they had been so distracted: “Sorry to delay your move to Egypt, but you’re needed for a bit of reconnaissance.” Roosevelt asked Copeland to explore whether they should remove Mossadegh to benefit U.S. and British interests. Copeland checked with the Iran desk at headquarters, the CIA Station Chief in Tehran, and the Deputy Chief of Station, John Waller. The answer he received was resounding agreement from those he consulted: “The objective of the action should be to remove Mossadegh from office,” he came away thinking, “make a laughingstock of him, jail his principal supporters, and give the Shah any assistance he might need in launching a public relations program to show the Iranian people what a narrow escape they had had, and how extremely lucky they were to have had it.”

On June 25, 1953, the CIA and State Department met to discuss project TPAJAX, the Agency’s codename for the plan to overthrow Mossadegh. After Roosevelt gave a briefing, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles polled opinion in the room. DCI Dulles and Beetle Smith, now Undersecretary of State, were both “strongly in favor of proceeding.” Smith, in his typical surly manner, stated: “We should proceed. Of course!” Most around the room, according to Roosevelt, “simply grunted, signifying consent with the least possible commitment.” Roosevelt was shocked at the superficial way in which the decision had been treated: “On the one hand, it was good to have our project approved...On the other hand, this was a grave decision to have made. It involved tremendous risk. Surely it deserved thorough examination, the closest consideration, somewhere at the very highest level. It had not received such thought at this meeting. In fact, I was morally certain that almost half of those present, if they had felt free or had the courage to speak, would have opposed the undertaking. But perhaps that is the way government works and why from time to time it fails.”

One afternoon, the Shah was relaxing outside with friends when a butler approached, whispering a message in his ear. “Tell him to come in,” the Shah replied. A man in a dark-colored suit sent by Kim Roosevelt entered, handing the Shah a document. The Shah asked if anyone had a pen. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, a member of Iranian nobility, offered him his. The Shah explained how the pen would now be worth a lot more money. “A fortune?” Farmanfarmaian joked. “Perhaps,” the Shah responded. “Perhaps it will bring us all luck as well.” The signed document appointed General Zahedi as the new prime minister; according to the U.S. State Department, the message read:

View of fact situation of nation necessitates appointment of an informed and experienced man who can grasp affairs of country readily, I therefore, with knowledge I have of your ability and merit, appoint you with this letter Prime Minister. We give into your hands duty to improve affairs of the nation and remove present crisis and raise living standard of people.

A letter sent on June 29 from Eisenhower to Mossadegh denying U.S. foreign aid to Iran made it into newspapers ten days later. Secretary of State Dulles was asked a planted question at a press conference about communist activity in Iran, to which he responded: “The growing activities of the illegal Communist Party in Iran and the toleration of them by the Iranian government has caused our government concern. These developments make it more difficult to grant aid to Iran.”

Before midnight on August 15, Nematollah Nassiri, an Iranian military officer, arrived with two trucks of soldiers at Mossadegh’s home to arrest him and deliver the message from the Shah. Instead, Nassiri was surrounded by troops loyal to Mossadegh and taken into custody. Radio Tehran announced the foiled coup attempt by 5:45 the next morning. The Shah flew from his summer palace in Tehran to hide for the time being in Baghdad. In retrospect, the Shah pretended that fleeing to Baghdad had been part of the plan all along, writing in his memoirs: “following a pre-arranged plan, the Queen and I had left Tehran...I had decided upon this move because I believed that it would force Mossadegh and his henchmen to show their real allegiances, and that thereby it would help crystallize Persian public opinion.” In reality, according to the CIA, his flight from the failed coup attempt was due to “his temperament and his inability to withstand any kind of psychological pressure.”

Within days, the Shah moved on to Rome, arriving at the Excelsior Hotel on August 18. Kim Roosevelt’s boss Frank Wisner called John Waller in a panic with what he felt to be terrible news about the Shah: “He’s gone to Rome. A terrible, terrible coincidence occurred. Can you guess what it is?” Wisner was reluctant to discuss a sensitive matter on an open telephone line. Unfortunately, Waller had no idea what the coincidence was. “Well,” Wisner continued, “he went to the Excelsior Hotel to book a room with his bride, and the pilot, there were only three of them, and he was crossing the street on his way into the hotel. Guess...can you tell me, I don’t want to say it over the phone, can you imagine what may have happened? Think of the worst thing you can think of that happened.”

Waller threw out an idea that he thought fit the bill: “He was hit by a cab and killed.” Wisner was becoming impatient, excitedly referencing DCI Allen Dulles: “No, no, no, no. Well, John, maybe you don’t know, that Dulles had decided to extend his vacation by going to Rome. Now can you imagine what happened?” Waller decided to combine the two ideas: “Dulles hit him with his car and killed him.” Wisner was not amused by this response and finally gave up, clarifying what happened: “They both showed up at the reception desk at the Excelsior at the very same moment. And Dulles had to say, ‘After you, your Majesty.’”

Roosevelt now shifted the CIA action from a military coup to “a political action,” with a strategy to move the Iranian military support from Mossadegh to the Shah using an “improvised psychological warfare campaign.” Roosevelt believed that if he could publicize the theme that Zahedi was the rightful prime minister, Mossadegh would not last long. Copeland, for his part, had been tasked with finding out how best to conduct the coup. For this assignment, he sought out “the real CIA,” the most helpful American source in all of Iran, who happened to be known within the Agency as the Cat Lady.

W&W Projects

During his time with the CIA, Copeland had discovered and participated in a fair number of what he termed “weird and wonderful” (W&W) projects that were, in his words, “all great fun,” costing “little or no money” with “no lasting harm.” While the Agency explored the potential operational field use of new drugs and chemicals, they took to experimenting on unwitting U.S. citizens: “an experimenter at his university sent his team captain home smelling so bad that his own wife and children couldn’t bear to be in the same house with him.” In addition, “a Baptist preacher had been induced to babble impious obscenities in his Sunday sermon instead of the routine inanities which were his custom.”

In the international realm, when it came to President Sukarno of Indonesia, the Agency had no shortage of plots against him, ranging from faking a pornographic film featuring an actor playing Sukarno and an actress playing a Russian spy, to a plot involving giving him a sexually transmitted disease, to a proposal involving seducing him with his favorite celebrity, Marilyn Monroe. Additionally, Copeland claimed an OPC staff member on his team dropped “a hallucinogen into the mint tea of Indonesia’s President Sukarno as he was about to make a speech,” derisively noting that the drug made “perfectly rational” in lieu of his normal mode in which “he would have babbled nonsense.” He also contradictorily claimed the drug was placed in Sukarno’s “lemonade” and that U.S. Senate investigators later asked him if the anecdote was true. This approach from the Church Committee was in the era when they were discovering past CIA activities such as preparing poisoned cigars intended to be sent to Fidel Castro. “Castro and Sukarno?” Copeland thought. “Who cared?”

ESP

Also in the W&W early years of the Agency, the CIA carried out experiments in extrasensory perception (ESP). Copeland reported that a Mr. and Mrs. Brown were engaged to exchange messages sent through “mental telepathy” between Richmond, Virginia and Istanbul, Turkey. The same message would also be sent through regular channels to the CIA Chief of Station in Istanbul to compare against the telepathic message, which were said to have arrived early “with reasonable accuracy.”

A 1966 “special” CIA report indicated that Russian ESP research has progressed from “official toleration to considerable official support.” Similar to Copeland’s anecdote, the Soviets were reported as having conducted in 1966 a "successful telepathy transmission of 12 out of 12 pictures [from] Moscow to Novosibirsk (6 of which were satisfactorily received and 3 very good).” Soviet scientists were cited as speculating that “in the future, machines on the moon or in the ocean will be controlled by thought.” The CIA report writer believed that “such ideas are not mere idle speculation...Experiments carried out by Jule Eisenbud, M.D. in the United States and Dr. Bernard Grad of Canada tend to substantiate the theory that such energy exists.” A contact reported in November 1962 that “research in the field of telepathy is being conducted from the point of view of defense quite actively, particularly in the problem of transmission of information and in the problem of guiding the movement of intercontinental rockets (using) pigeons.”

Thought control was another area in which the Soviets were reportedly seeking to employ ESP, to ultimately “influence world attitudes as well as those of their own citizens.” Another contact reported the Soviets as extending “Pavlovian experiments to individual human beings to groups and even to societies. They are utilizing electronic computers in their experiments at giving them control of entire populations.”

The CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS) conducted its first ESP research in 1961. Its work in this regard began in earnest in the 1970s, with contracts issued exploring the “talents” of two subjects who claimed to be able to “cause a change in temperature” and “reproduce information in a sealed envelope,” as well as a third later hired who purported to have an “ability for ‘remote viewing.’” A renewal of the contract was declined in 1973 by Agency senior management as it was deemed to be “too sensitive and potentially embarrassing.” The report recommended that it was “incumbent upon NSA to determine the precise current communications security threat posed by Soviet ESP capabilities as well as their communication intelligence implications.” By 1975, OTS had “effectively” ended their research into ESP but it was then picked up by the U.S. military.

The U.S. government continued to invest for decades in the investigation of psychic phenomena, including the U.S. Army’s Stargate Project, which began in 1977 and centered on remote viewing, the purported psychic ability to see sites or information from a great distance. By 1995, the project had been passed on to the CIA, which shut down the project, based on the conclusion from the American Institutes for Research that “even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated.”

In Copeland’s telling of events, other W&W operations of the early CIA involved infiltrating two religious movements founded by Americans, using the women of the CIA to seduce foreign officials, and even running an overseas brothel.