1977 News Article on CIA experiments in 1950s

Approved For Release 2007/10/19 : CIA-RDP99-00498R000100110020-9

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ON 2AGE 15 AUGUST 1977

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Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his 1949 trial for treason nin ‘Budapest

THE CIA

iWiind-Bending Disclosures

The agency’s search for the secret of brainwashing

T he 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 LSD or mar-
jjuana, 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 USS.
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 documentss Approved For Release 2007/10/19 : CIA-RDP99- 00498R0001001 10020- 9

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.

ClA-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 siaff inem-
bers at the Butler Memorial Hospital in
Providence. Other scientists tned 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 CYA 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 §0 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. J assure you that the CIA is in
no way engaged in either witting or unwit-
ting testing of drugs today.”

mw.

Turner had more 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. . 8

STAT