MIND-BENDING DISCLOSURES

Document Type: 
Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP99-00498R000100110020-9
Release Decision: 
RIPPUB
Original Classification: 
K
Document Page Count: 
1
Document Creation Date: 
December 20, 2016
Document Release Date: 
August 20, 2007
Sequence Number: 
20
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
August 15, 1977
Content Type: 
OPEN SOURCE
File: 
AttachmentSize
PDF icon CIA-RDP99-00498R000100110020-9.pdf288.72 KB
Body: 
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP99-00498R000100110020-9 V r1C7=~ ~~=C~ TI h: CY i 15 AUGUST '077 Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his 1949 trial for treason in Budapest THE CIA PA" d-Sending isc9osures The agency :v search for the secret of brainwashing The apartments in New York City and San Francisco were tarted up with red draperies, dressing tables trimmed in black velveteen and Toulouse-Lautrec posters. At night, women lured men to the hideaways and fed them ISD or mar- ijuana, while other men watched the ac- tion through two-way mirrors and tape- recorded the sounds. Scenes from seamy bordellos? Havens for desperate voyeurs? No, these were tax- payer-financed operations of the CIA, which was experimenting with drugs dur- ing the 1950s and '60s in a project with the sophomoric code name Midnight Cli- max. The women, apparently moonlight- ing prostitutes, were paid $100 for each ? assignment by the CIA. The operation, conducted by CIA alchemists from 1954 until 1963, was part of a quarter-century hunt for a psychogenic philosophers' stone. The purpose was to discover the se- cret of brainwashing, to protect U.S. agents and gain control over enemy spies. Operation Midnight Climax was dis- closed last week at a Senate hearing, add- ing bizarre details to the story of CIA drug research exposed in 1975 and 1976 by Government investigations. Further rev- elations were provided by a cache of 8.000 heavily censored docunmentss Approved szenty's vacant stare and mechanical voice at his 1949 treason trial in Buda- pest. Drugs and mind-control techniques had long been used by intelligence ser- vices, but the CIA feared that the Com- munists had made some breakthrough. By 1953, the CIA concluded that its worries were unfounded; still the research con- tinued, despite some official misgivings. Drugs were sought to incapacitate en- tire buildings full of people, poison food to create "confusion-anxiety-fear," cause headaches and earaches, and produce am- nesia in foreign spies after interrogations or CIA agents who were about to retire. To administer the drugs surreptitiously, CIA experimenters developed pencil-like injectors and small spray guns. Much of the research was devoted to LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, which the CIA wrongly thought could be used to squeeze information from enemy agents and discredit them by disturbing their memories or changing their sex drives, making them either extremely over- or undersexed. CIA-paid researchers conducted LSD experiments on prisoners at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, -the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington. alcohol on mental patients and siaffthem- bers at the Butler Memorial Hospital in Providence. Other scientists tried out brainwashing techniques-including iso- lation and sensory deprivation-on pa- tients at McGill University's Allan Me- morial Institute of Psychiatry in Montreal. in the early 1950s, the CIA tried to put some of its new findings to use, send- ing special interrogation teams to Europe and Asia. One team gave intravenous in- jections of an unidentified. drug to three European agents of dubious loyalty and questioned them for eleven days before deciding that they were not turncoats- The CIA began winding down the ex- periments in 1964 and ended them alto- gether in 1973. At a Senate hearing last week, CIA Director Stansfield.Turner gave a final accounting: 149 projects for an un- disclosed amount of money at 80 U.S. and Canadian universities, research founda- tions, hospitals and prisons. At least 39 projects involved human subjects, often without their knowledge.. No one knows where they are now or what effects they may have suffered. Said Turner: "It is ab- horrent to me to think of using humans as guinea pigs. I assure you that the CIA is in no way engaged in eitherwitting or unwit- ting testing of drugs today." 1. 0 Turner had dmore on his mind last week than those mind-bending exper- iments. Soon after he became CIA di- rector, he began lobbying to consolidate all Government intelligence agencies un- der his aegis. The Pentagon, threatened with loss of control over the National Se- curity Agency and the individual service agencies, objected strenuously. President Carter has resolved the dispute with a compromise rejecting the notion of an overall intelligence czar: He gave Tur- ner authority over all intelligence bud- gets (estimated total: $7 billion). But he gave individual agency chiefs the right to appeal Turner's decisions and left them operationally independent . s,