Spies on acid
Mitch Perry
The vast majority of early LSD research was sponsored by
the CIA’s MKULTRA program – acting through the Macy
Foundation among others.
"[LSD] had no potential whatsoever as a truth drug, but they continued to use it and even use it today at Guantanamo and other black sites mainly to frighten people and scare the hell out of them and throw them off balance."
Beginning after World War II and escalating through the early 1950s, the U.S. government launched a multimillion-dollar series of experiments in mind control and behavior modification.
It wasn't until the mid-1970s that Americans learned of such programs, which went by the names of Bluebird, ARTICHOKE and, most notably, MK/ULTRA. That's when a commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and a subsequent Senate investigation revealed what our government had been up to.
In December of 2000 in this newspaper (then known as Weekly Planet), reporters H. P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly published a lengthy investigation that went beyond government reports. "The Strange Story of Frank Olson" explored the fate of a biochemist working for the U.S. Army who reportedly fell from a hotel window in New York City in November of 1953, after he had been dosed with LSD by the CIA.
Now, nearly a decade later, H.P. "Hank" Albarelli Jr. has published a book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, that he says was inspired by the positive reaction to the Planet story.
In the book, the author -- a resident of Indian Rocks Beach -- weaves a fascinating tale about the CIA's mind control programs. Albarelli told CL last month that he was inspired to write about Olson by the 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, in which author John Marks used data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to document the CIA's use of LSD on unwitting subjects.