Brave New World

MK-Ultra, the CIA’s infamous “mind-control” program, was developed from the behavior control research project coordinated by the Tavistock Institute, along with the Scottish Rite Masons, and other British, American, Canadian and United Nations agencies, and was derived from the eugenics practices of the Nazis and their psychiatric studies of schizophrenia brought to the US through Operation Paperclip. At Nuremberg, Rudolf Hess was apparently preparing to make what he referred to as a “great revelation” that appears to betray a connection to the CIA’s own attempts at “mind-control” through the use of various psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD. Prisoner liaison Gustave M. Gibert discovered what this may have been in Hess’ British medical records, where he presented his doctor with a list of world leaders he believed had been hypnotized by a secret Jewish drug that would put them in a mental state where they would do things they normally would not. Included in the list were Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his deputy Anthony Eden, Umberto II of Italy, Claus von Stauffenberg who was one of the leaders of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to assassinate Hitler, and Hess himself.[1] Umberto II of Italy—the great-grandson of Victor Emmanuel II and a member of the House of Savoy and Carbonari conspirator—was a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and claimant of King of Jerusalem. Following the March on Rome in 1922, Umberto II’s father, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister but later deposed him in 1943 during the Allied invasion of Italy during World War II.

Ultimately, MK-Ultra had its basis in the occult, inspired by Huxley’s A Brave New World, a dystopia where citizens are made to “love their servitude.” The notion was derived from the occult, and an interpretation that ancient shamans used the “Soma” of the Vedas—the Haoma of the Magi—to achieve “divine madness,” trance states that provided communication with the spirit world, or demonic possession: identified with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), or schizophrenia. MK-Ultra truly began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond who was brought in by Allen Dulles to play a prominent role in the project. The man who introduced both Osmond and Huxley to LSD was “Captain” Alfred Hubbard, who had worked for the OSS during the war as a “Special Investigative Agent.” Martin Lee, author of Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond, reports that according to Captain Al Hubbard, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD, was part of a small group connected with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy in the early 1930s, who set out to make a “peace pill” to help mankind. Seeing the beginnings of the Nazi regime, they consciously set out to make something like LSD, after which they did, they kept it secret from the world.

In Vichy France, Huxley—who was also in contact with Jean Coutrot, leader of the Synarchic Empire Movement (MSE) and purported author of the Synarchist Pact—frequented the Thursday salon of Paris editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Louise Bousquet, who was married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet, and which were attended by attended Pablo Picasso, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger, a leading figure of the German Conservative Revolution.[2] Jünger also frequented the George V luxury hotel, where a roundtable of French and German intellectuals gathered, including Jean Cocteau and Carl Schmitt.[3] Jünger was also was a long-time friend and correspondent of Swish scientist Albert Hofmann who discovered LSD. Around 1949 to 1951, Hofmann arranged a number of LSD sessions at his home with Jünger.[4]

Like Crowley, Huxley’s conception of the possibilities of mind-altering substances was shaped from his interest in William James. With the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience, James introduced the study of “religious experience,” and incepted the confusion that confounds mystical experience with rational religious impulse. James suggested that the intense varieties of experience should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind. James went so far as to try to induce the equivalent of a “religious” experience by experimenting with chloral hydrate, amyl nitrite, nitrous oxide, and even peyote. James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel.[5]

According to Crowley, in his autobiography, it is thanks in part to William James that he got the idea of employing the methods of Yoga to produce “genius at will” by attaining Samadhi. In Crowley’s Book of the Law, in a verse that certainly inspired generations after him, the demon Aiwass commands:

To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this.[6]

Crowley undertook a study of drugs and their effects upon the body and mind, experimenting widely himself. Many of his conclusions are present in his semi-autobiographical Diary of a Drug Fiend, in which his recreational drug use and also his personal struggle with drug addiction, particularly heroin, is well documented. After “poisoning” himself with “every drug in (and out of) the Pharmacopoeia” in search of the above preparation, Crowley came to believe that this substance was a “sublimated or purified preparation of Cannabis Indica.” Crowley further claimed that this mysterious herb was one of the prohibited trees in the Garden of Eden.

Huxley was first introduced to Crowley under H.G. Wells’ tutelage.[7] Crowley is reputed to have introduced the young Huxley to mescal in a pre-Hitler Berlin Hotel room, as well as introducing H.G. Wells to hashish.[8] According to his Jewish homosexual lover Victor Neuburg, Aleister Crowley confided to Huxley that Hitler was a practicing occultist, and also claimed that the OTO used mescaline to help the Nazis to gain power. Neuberg wrote of an account of an after-dinner conversation between Crowley and Huxley in Neuburg’s Berlin apartment in 1938:

“You know Hitler has taken the stuff [mescaline],” Crowley observed. “I heard it from a reliable friend in the OTO.”

“OTO?” Inquired Huxley.

“The Ordo Templi Orientis. My local branch, you might say. And their connections with the Nazis are nobody’s business. They almost founded the party, or at least subverted it. Do you know that two of their chief men personally trained Adolf Hitler? Before, he was a stuttering Austrian oaf, a shoddy Bohemian and a pervert to boot. They taught him oratory, rhetoric and, under the influence of this drug that will shortly, my dear Aldous, set your eyes on fire, gave him his daemon.”

“Then,” Huxley said, “all the disparate romanticism that, in its waning found expression in the irrational in secret cults, has made its kingdom here. Fascism, is, after all, the triumph of decadence, the final madness of Bohemia.”

“So that carnage of Ahriman may be complete, precisely” Crowley replied.[9]

In 1953, Osmond gave Huxley a supply of mescaline for his personal consumption. The next year, in The Doors of Perception, a title drawn from a poem by William Blake, Huxley proclaimed that hallucinogenic drugs “expand consciousness.” Huxley makes the typical comparison of likening the mystical experience to schizophrenia: “The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away . . . [and which] scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate of countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other.”[10]

Dementia Praecox

In 1924 the Kraepelin Institute came under the umbrella of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911 in order to promote the natural sciences in Germany, by founding and maintaining research institutions formally independent from the state and its administrations. Funding was ultimately obtained from sources internal and external to Germany. External to Germany, the Rockefeller Foundation granted students worldwide one-year study stipends, for whichever institute they chose, some studied in Germany. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and its research facilities were involved in weapons research, experimentation and production in both the First World War and the Second World War.

Heading the Rockefeller-funded Kaisser Wilhelm institution in Münich was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin (1874 – 1952), who worked at the University of Munich as assistant to Kraepelin. Rüdin returned to the Institute in 1928, with an expanded departmental budget and new building financed primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation. The institute soon gained an international reputation as leading psychiatric research, including in hereditary genetics. In 1931, a few years after Kraepelin’s death, Rüdin took over the directorship of the entire Institute as well as remaining head of his department.[11] In 1932, Rüdin was designated president of the worldwide International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO) at the Third International Eugenics Congress in New York. When Hitler came to power, his regime appointed him head of the Racial Hygiene Society. Rüdin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the Nazi sterilization law. It is estimated that between 220 000 and 269 500 individuals with schizophrenia were sterilized or killed. This total represents between 73 percent and 100 percent of all individuals with schizophrenia living in Germany between 1939 and 1945.[12]

In its early years, and during the Nazi era, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was strongly associated with theories of Nazi eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz, its first director, and Eugen Fischer, a friend of Martin Heidegger, and by its second director Otmar von Verschuer (1896 – 1969). Fischer didn’t officially join the Nazi Party until 1940. However, he was influential with National Socialists early on. Adolf Hitler read his two-volume work, Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (1921) and co-written by Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz, while incarcerated in 1923 and used its ideas in Mein Kampf.[13] Fischer also authored The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans (1913), a field study which provided context for later racial debates, influenced German colonial legislation and provided scientific support for the Nuremberg laws.[14]

The Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Ernst Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Münich, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered the founding fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia respectively, as well as Franz Josef Kallmann (1897 – 1965) who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[15] Rüdin had been a student of Emil Kraepelin, who believed the chief origin of psychiatric disease to be biological and genetic malfunction, and is best known for devising the Kraepelinian dichotomy, which reduced the complex psychiatric terminologies of the nineteenth century by dividing them into two classes: manic depressive psychosis and dementia praecox (“premature dementia” or “precocious madness”), now referred to as schizophrenia.

Rüdin developed the concept of “empirical genetic prognosis” of mental disorders, having worked as assistant to Eugen Bleuler, a psychiatrist renowned for his work on schizophrenia.[16] As sitters in Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing’s psychical research seances, Bleuler and his assistant Carl Jung confirmed reports of paranormal phenomena previously observed with medium Willi Schneider’s brother Rudi and his predecessors. Records of the sittings with Rudi were compiled by Gerda Walther after Schrenck-Notzing’s death and published, with a foreword by Bleuler, by his widow.[17] Following his interest in hypnotism, Bleuler became interested in Freud’s work.[18] In Freud’s own admission, it was Bleuler who did more for the early acceptance of his theories than anyone.[19] Inspired by Freud’s work, Bleuler was one of the first to apply psychoanalytic principles in treating psychotic clients. Bleuler is noted for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and for coining the terms “schizophrenia,” as well as “schizoid” and “autism.”

Rüdin has been cited as a more senior and influential architect of Nazi crimes than the infamous Josef Mengele who had attended his lectures and been employed by his Institute. In 1943, Mengele, an assistant of Otmar Verschuer, was made medical commandant at Auschwitz. Before the war, Mengele had received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service in early 1943 and assigned to Auschwitz, where he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects. He performed deadly human experiments on prisoners and was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers. His experiments focused primarily on twins, in part intended to prove the supremacy of heredity over environment and thus strengthen the Nazi premise of the superiority of the Aryan race.[20] The experiments he performed on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures, and those who survived the experiments were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected once Mengele had no further use for them.[21] A grant was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), at the request of von Verschuer, who received regular reports and shipments of specimens from Mengele.[22]

Dr. Miklós Nyiszli (1901 – 1956), a Hungarian Jewish pathologist who arrived in Auschwitz on 29 May 1944, performed dissections and prepared specimens for shipment in this laboratory.[23] Nyiszli was a member of the Sonderkommandos (“special unit”), work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. After the war, Nyiszli wrote about the many atrocities witnessed Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Historian Gideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's writings as among the “myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts” of the Sonderkommando that was then possible in the absence of first-hand testimony by surviving Sonderkommando members.[24]

After the war, Mengele was a famous target of Nazi-hunters pursuing him to South America, but Verschuer was saved from prosecution by Kallman, who testified at his denazification proceedings. Kallmann fled Germany in 1936 for the United States because he was discovered to be of Jewish heritage. Rüdin was released from internment in the US, in 1947 after a “denazification” trial where he was supported by Kallmann. In the United States, with Verschuer and other ex-Nazis, Kallmann created the American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the “Human Genome Project.” Kallman also became director of research in the New York State Psychiatric Institute, attached to Columbia University in New York, home to MK-Ultra experiments.

The director of the Psychiatric Institute was Dr. Nolan D. C. Lewis (1889 – 1979), of the Scottish Rite Freemasons, who joined the Rockefellers in sponsoring the study of psychiatric genetics beginning in 1934. In 1936, Lewis, as the Scottish Rite’s Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox, reported to the Scottish Rite Northern Supreme Council “on the progress of the fourteen research projects being financed by the Supreme Council.”[25] Dr. Lewis was the first practicing American psychoanalyst, and Freud authorized him to practice analysis without undergoing a personal analysis. Lewis was one of the first American psychiatrists, if not the first, to experiment with mescaline.[26] In 1945, Lewis and Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, and Dr. Ewen Cameron, of the infamous MK Ultra experiments at McGill University, were invited to the Nuremberg Trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolph Hess.[27]

Scottish Rite strategist Dr. Winfred Overholser ((1892 – 1964), the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a federal mental hospital in Washington DC, provided overall leadership for the Rite’s psychiatric research. In 1942, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, then head of the OSS, assembled a team of prestigious American scientists and asked them to develop a “truth serum.” Dr. Overholser was appointed chairman of the research committee, which used facilities and staff at St. Elizabeth’s hospital to study the effects of numerous drugs, including alcohol, mescaline, barbiturates, caffeine, peyote and scopolamine. Eventually, marijuana was chosen as the most effective. OSS documents reported that smoking a mix of tobacco and marijuana brought about a “state of irresponsibility, causing the subject to be loquacious and free in his impartation of information.”[28]

Macy Conferences

In 1948, Dr. Overholser was the “Chairman for Discussion” of an International Congress on Mental Health at the Ministry of Health in London attended by the world’s psychiatric and psychological leaders. The congress was gathered by the National Association for Mental Health, founded in 1944 by Nazi sympathizer Montagu Norman, after he resigned from the Bank of England. At this congress, a World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) was formed, for which Norman picked as president Brig. Gen. Dr. John Rawlings Rees (1890 – 1969) with Carl Jung serving as his vice-president. Rees succeeded Hugh Crichton-Miller of the Tavistock Clinic as director when he resigned in 1932. Rees was a member of a group who referred to themselves as the “invisible college,” in reference to the seventeenth-century precursor to the Royal Society.[29]  This group orchestrated “Operation Phoenix,” making plans for Tavistock to rise from the ashes of war. After the war, this group, including Rees and five others, formed the Interim Planning Committee of the Tavistock Clinic. Although Rees’ plans for the Institute of Medical Psychology were never realized, the group went on to found the Tavistock Institute, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.[30]

During World War II, Rees had been appointed to the War Office and arranged to train officers of the OSS in psychological warfare. Together with Henry Dicks, a fellow member of the Tavistock Clinic group, Rees was charged with the care of Rudolf Hess at the secret prison locations where he was held following his capture. Hess’ diaries record many meetings with “Colonel Rees,” when Hess accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug, and “mesmerize” him.[31] Such claims, however, were used by Rees as confirmation of his diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The two UN agencies with which the WFMH works most closely are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Eugenics strategist Sir Julian Huxley, brother to Aldous Huxley, was the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. The permanent co-director of the WFMH would be Fremont-Smith, who was also the medical director of the CIA front, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.[32] The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation had close links with the Rockefeller Foundation, which according to Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War (1999), served as a front for the CIA. The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, or Macy Foundation, was founded in 1930 by Kate Macy Ladd (1863 – 1945), a friend John D. Rockefeller Jr., in honor of her father, Josiah W. Macy Jr.. Much of the family firm, known as Josiah Macy and Sons, had been bought by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Corporation.[33]

The Cybernetics Group was unofficially launched in 1942 at a conference in New York, sponsored by Fremont-Smith. Cybernetics is a discipline that was firmly established by Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Arturo Rosenblueth and others, such as W. Ross Ashby, mathematician Alan Turing, and W. Grey Walter. The term was coined by Norbert Wiener, a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, borrowing from the ancient Greek word “cyber,” which is related to the idea of government or governing. Cybernetics evolved out of the intersection of mathematics and engineering in US military research during World War II.[34] The goal of the Cybernetics Group was to develop a science that makes it possible to predict and control human behavior.

Rees, along with Margaret Mead, Lawrence K. Frank, Fremont-Smith and Frankfurt School director Max Horkheimer, who were all in Paris together in the summer of 1948 to launch the WFMH, formed the core of the Cybernetics Group. The Cybernetics Group was preceded by the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, sponsored by the Macy Foundation and organized by Frank Fremont-Smith, the permanent co-director of the WFMH. It was attended by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904 – 1980), his wife Margaret Mead, Warren McCulloch and other members of the later Cybernetics Group. The topic was “physiological mechanisms underlying the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and hypnosis as related to the problem of cerebral inhibition.”[35] The Cybernetics Group conferences were eventually held between 1946 and 1953. They were chaired by Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist who contributed to the study of artificial intelligence. Conference attendees also included the Tavistock Institute’s Kurt Lewin and Paul Lazarsfeld.

According to Bateson, cybernetics is “the biggest bite out of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2,000 years.”[36] Bateson was hired by the OSS as an expert in “applied” anthropology, due to his work on the subject of “schismogenesis,” the study of how societies become divisive and dysfunctional. In other words, the strategy of “divide and conquer.” As a “psychological planner” in Southeast Asia, Bateson spent much of his wartime duty designing and carrying out “black propaganda” radio broadcasts from remote, secret locations in Burma and Thailand, and also worked in China, India, and Ceylon. It was Bateson who provided the rationale for the creation of the CIA in a letter to his boss, Bill Donavan.[37]

LSD

In October 1942, the US National Research Council, alerted to the possibility that both Russians and Germans were using truth drugs, activated a committee to investigate the feasibility of their use in the interrogation of prisoners of war that was placed under the OSS. Bill Donovan reached out to Stanley P. Lovell, who thought it would be fun. “What I have to do,” he told Donovan, “is stimulate ‘Peck’s Bad Boy’ beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him “Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here’s a chance to raise merry hell. Come, help me raise it.” In 1942, when the OSS asked Lovell to look into the possibility of a truth drug, he was enthusiastic. “The mission,” he responded, “was most urgent… everyone wanted it, and quite properly so.” The elusive substance was codenamed “TD,” for “truth drug.[38]

According to a memo written by Dulles in December 3, 1955, it was through Dr. L. Wilson Greene, Technical Director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at the Army Chemical Center, that the CIA became interested in psychoactive substances called psychochemicals, particularly LSD, following his report produced in 1949 entitled titled “Psychochemical Warfare, a New Concept of War.”[39] Greene’s report followed on his reading of a cache of files of the Ahnenerbe, founded by SS member Heinrich Himmler, who was one of the main architects of the Holocaust. In 1961, French writer, Christian Bernadac, would use the same files to expose the horrors that took place of Dachau. Bernadac reveals that the Ahnenerbe performed extensive experiments at Dachau and other camps with “a Mexican plant, a tiny thornless cactus, peyotl, [combining] the required properties and potentialities” and another Mexican plant that he said was “[an auditory hallucinogenic], which robbed those who assimilated it of their memory.”[40]

As recounted by H.P. Albarelli Jr.’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, after he had been altered to the discovery of LSD by scientists at Sandoz, Dr. Greene read of the potential usefulness of the drug when he explored documents retrieved from the Ahnenerbe. In April 1945, American troops discovered a massive cache of Ahnenerbe files hidden in a dark, dank cave called Kleines Teufelslock (the Little Devil’s Hole) near the Bavarian village of Pottenstein. For the next four years, American intelligence officials closely studied the captured documents, eventually sending many to the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal and Camp Detrick. Greene was amazed to read that expeditions funded by the Ahnenerbe were sent around the world in search of hallucinogenic substances and plants. Documents revealed that numerous samples had been collected from the Amazonia, South America’s Amazon rainforest. Another expedition to the Himalayas and the forbidden city of Lhasa in Tibet also collected large amounts of mind-altering substances. Of particular interest to Greene were reports which detailed Nazi experiments with psychedelics at the Dachau concentration camp, including mescaline and various compounds drawn from ergot, from which LSD is derived, and noted the proximity of the camps to Sandoz in Basel.[41]

Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, had been developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman (1906 – 2008), working as a chemist at Sandoz AB, a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg. However, LSD was first synthesized by Hoffmann in 1938 from ergotamine, a chemical derived by Arthur Stoll from ergot, a grain fungus that typically grows on rye. As Martin Lee discovered, Sandoz was linked through cartel agreements to IG Farben, which throughout the 1930’s, maintained a special secret division devoted to research on psychedelic agents, and Nazi mind control experiments with mescaline were carried on by Nazi doctors at Dachau, which was only a few hundred miles from Sandoz. Lee concludes that, therefore, “we can be certain that the Nazi high command was already aware of these substances.”[42]

During World War II, Dulles was chief of the OSS and stationed in Berne, and one of his one of his OSS assistants was James Warburg. Dulles had visited Sandoz in Basel to gain direct knowledge of the uses and range of effects that could be gained from LSD.[43] On April 20, 1950, the CIA under Dulles approved a project for the intelligence service to evaluate the use of LSD in a secret operation known as Bluebird. On April 13, 1953, Dulles ordered Richard Helms, head of the Office for Scientific Intelligence, to begin the research program under Sidney Gottlieb for “research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.”

Thus MK-Ultra was spawned, supposedly in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on US prisoners of war in Korea.[44] The published evidence indicates that Project MK-Ultra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[45] Declassified MK-Ultra documents indicate hypnosis was studied in the early 1950s. Experiments were conducted with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of various drugs. Experiments were often conducted without the subjects’ knowledge or consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code, which put limitations on the kind of scientific experimentation that the Nazis had become notorious for, and that the US agreed to follow after World War II.

MK-Ultra experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. Subjects were usually unwitting. While Dr. Overholser had conducted tests on criminals from the Mafia, the CIA thought it imprudent to further tamper with the organization. Instead, they chose “the borderline underworld,” prostitutes, drug addicts, mentally ill patients, and other fringe types who would be powerless to defend themselves if they ever found out what the CIA had done to them.[46]

Operation Midnight Climax was an operation initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Narcotics Bureau in Boston, Massachusetts with White under the pseudonym of Morgan Hall, for the CIA as a sub-project of Project MK-Ultra. The project that started in 1954, consisted of a network of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin County, California, and New York City. They were established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were secretly supplied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass.[47] The CIA’s secret projects ultimately involved at least two known deaths: that of tennis pro Harold Blauer, and Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, who threw himself through a window of the twelfth floor of New York’s Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium.

These experiments were outsourced to Canada when the CIA recruited real-life mad scientist, Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron (1901 –1967), creator of the “psychic driving” concept. During the 1950s, Cameron served as President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. In 1945, because of his worldwide reputation, Cameron had been invited to Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess’ psychological state. Prior to that, Cameron had written a paper titled The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German society would have to be transformed and reorganized. In his analysis, Germany was made up of people who had the need for status, who worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and were deeply xenophobic. The paper continued to state that German culture and its people would have offspring that in 30 years from 1945 would be the biggest threat to world peace. As a consequence, the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society.

Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953, and became the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. Despite a career of honors and leadership in early 1950s psychiatric circles, Cameron had been heavily criticized in some circles for his administration of disproportionately-intense electroshock therapy, experimental drugs and LSD to his patients without their consent and causing some to become comatose. Cameron had the maniacal idea that instead of using therapy to correct schizophrenia he could “erase” existing memories and then reprogram the psyche. Cameron worked out of the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University created by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1943. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroshock therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time, while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.[48] His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents.[49]

Edgewood Arsenal

Dr. L. Wilson Greene’s report called for a search for compounds that would create the same debilitating mental side effects as nerve gas, but without the lethality. “Throughout recorded history, wars have been characterized by death, human misery, and the destruction of property; each major conflict being more catastrophic than the one preceding it,” Greene argued. “I am convinced that it is possible, by means of the techniques of psychochemical warfare, to conquer an enemy without the wholesale killing of his people or the mass destruction of his property.”[50] Of particular interest to Greene were reports which detailed Nazi experiments with psychedelics at the Dachau concentration camp, including mescaline and various compounds drawn from ergot, from which LSD is derived, and noted the proximity of the camps to Sandoz in Basel.[51]

Greene and his colleague Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffman became the center of a growing partnership between the Chemical Corps and the CIA, through their work together at Fort Dietrick and Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Hoffmann, a chemist who synthesized poison gases and toxins for the Luftwaffe’s Technical Research Institute, Berlin, was the fourth Paperclip scientist to arrive at Edgewood Arsenal in 1947. Hoffmann’s experience researching truth serums and nerve gas for the Nazi SS made him a highly valued recruit. Hoffman came to be respected for “his voluminous knowledge about hallucinogenic and other mind-altering drugs with agency chemists.”[52]

American and British officials discovered a huge cache of tabun (a sarin-like chemical) while searching the IG Farben laboratories on the German-Polish border. In 1945, 530 tons of tabun were shipped to various locations in the United States, including Edgewood, where it was used for testing by Greene and Hoffmann. Hoffmann continued his experiments refining lethal sarin and tabun gases, making use a specially built gas chamber similar to those at Dachau, put together along with Edgewood Arsenal research chief Dr. Seymour Silver, within which countless animals were destroyed, and at least 25 supposed “volunteer” American servicemen were experimented on. Reports that several servicemen died in these experiments have persisted for decades, but the Pentagon refuses to release any documents related to the experiments.[53]

Greene, however, was pleased with the results. Though the soldiers were “partially disabled” for one to three weeks, they eventually recovered. Thus, he concluded, nerve agents and hallucinogenic drugs could serve as more “gentle” weapons, immobilizing the enemy but, Greene hoped, avoiding the “wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.” As reported by Annie Jacobsen, in Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Greene then envisioned new possibilities which he outlined in “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.”

In 1947, Greene was proposing to use other kinds of incapacitating agents, drugs that could immobilize or temporarily paralyze a person, “hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic drugs… whose effect mimic insanity or psychosis.” “There can be no doubt that their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue,” Greene explained. Greene proposed that an immediate search be made for a stable chemical compound which would cause mental abnormalities of military significance.” Greene provided a list of 61 compounds to be studied and requested a budget of $50,000, roughly half a million in today’s dollars, which was granted, and Greene assigned Hoffman to the job of researching a multitude of toxins at Edgewood. Soon, Hoffman went in search throughout the world on behalf of the Chemical Corps for a multitude of toxins for potential military use, including mescaline used by Native American Indians, fly agaric, a hallucinogenic mushroom used by the shamans of Mongolia, piruri, a toxic vegetable used by Australian aboriginals; yaxee and epena from Venezuela, Columbia and Brazil, which caused hallucinations.

At about the same time, Hoffmann ordered a large supply of LSD-25 from the Sandoz. Hoffmann would also meet several times with officials of Sandoz Chemical company, including Albert Hofmann and his supervisor at Sandoz, Dr. W.A. Stohl, Jr., and would on at least two occasions also meet with Dr. Henry K. Beecher, a noted Harvard University professor, who in turn had also met often with Sandoz officials Hofmann and Stohl, as well as with the covert operative who had secretly worked since 1946 for U.S. Army intelligence in the Sandoz laboratories.[54]

One of the projects being conducted at Edgewood at the time was BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE, a CIA project started in 1951, that researched interrogation methods. Another MK-Ultra program carried out in 1952 at Edgewood was coded-named Project 112. 254 different biological and chemical agents were tested on more than 6,000 soldiers. The substances included 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate (BZ), a chemical weapon developed in 1952 by the chemical company Hoffmann-La Roche, and ranged from mustard gas to LSD in extremely high dosages. During a later Senate hearing on the human experiments, Allan Lawson, a former prisoner and subject, testified that “any claim of voluntary participation… in human experimentation is a cruel hoax.”[55]

Hoffmann would also arrange for hundreds of rhesus monkeys from Latin and South America to be shipped by a CIA front-company to Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, Frederick, Maryland, where the animals would be supplied a steady diet of psychotropic drugs with the aim of studying various stages of induced “psychotic behavior.” These experiments would quickly evolve into human experiments conducted among U.S. service personnel at Edgewood Arsenal, and several federal prisons. According one former Detrick researcher, “I don’t know which was more frightening, one of the monkeys pumped-up on a cocktail of psychedelics or one of the drugged, out-of-control inmates at Atlanta’s federal penitentiary.” [56]

In 1952, “oxygen deprivation experiments” were also conducted on American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal under the direction of Hoffmann and Dr. Karl Tauboeck, an IG Farben chemist who had also researched truth serums and nerve gases for the Nazi SS. Albarelli notes that, although the results of the experiments remain secret, he cites a CIA memorandum (April 11, 1952) where its effects were described: “… affects the higher brain centers, resembling alcoholic inebriation. Some subjects became exhilarated, talkative, or quarrelsome, with emotional outbursts or fixed ideas. Some complained of headache or numbness. Voluntary coordination and attention are impaired… burns and bruises are not noticed.” [57]

Eventually, in the mid-1950s, Hoffmann joined the staff of a specially created CIA front-organization called Chemrophyl Associates. The company had Sidney Gottlieb among its primary corporate officers. Chemrophyl soon evolved into another CIA front called the Amazon Natural Drug Company, or ANDCO as it was commonly known. Joseph Caldwell King, the CIA’s former Western Hemisphere chief, who had been a major participant in the Agency’s early assassination programs, oversaw the company’s operations. Closely assisting King was Garland Williams, the former head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau’s New York branch and a former officer with the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, who became deeply involved in the interrogation of Korean POWs. Williams was very close to George Hunter White, who headed Operation Midnight Climax. [58] In the late 1950s, Dr. Hoffmann’s work for the CIA and Fort Detrick also evolved into intensive research regarding the development of lethal chemical agents to be used as weapons in Vietnam. One of these weapons initially became known as Agent White, then Agent Blue, and eventually and infamously as Agent Orange.[59]

Sacred Mushroom

Fritz Hoffmann would also rendezvous with pioneer mycologist Gordon Wasson (1898 – 1986) in Mexico.[60] Wider interest in psychedelics was ignited with Wasson’s 1957 article, published in Life magazine titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” which brought knowledge of the existence of psychoactive mushrooms to a wide audience for the first time. Wasson, who was a vice president of JP Morgan and served as a chairman to the CFR, had close ties to Allen Dulles. Wasson and Henry Luce—Skull and Bones member and creator of Life magazine—were also long-time members of the Century Club, a CIA front, along with John Foster Dulles, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan.[61] Recently, it has come to light that Aldous Huxley was also a member of the Century Club.[62] Time-Life was created by Henry P. Davison Jr, also a member of Skull and Bones, who was Wasson’s boss at J.P. Morgan. Another Bonesman behind the establishment of Time-Life was Briton Hadden, who worked with Davison and Luce in setting up the organization. In 1946, Davison and Luce then made C.D. Jackson vice-president of Time-Life. Jackson was the key agent of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird for the infiltration of the media. The list of Bonesmen directly connected to Wasson is extensive, also including people like Averell Harriman, who worked with Wasson at the CFR[63], where he was a director.[64]

Among the first people to hear of Wasson’s discovery were English poet Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) and his friend Dr. William Sargant (1907 – 1988) of the Tavistock Institute who worked on MK-Ultra. Graves is known for this analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life, and I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which were turned into a very popular BBC television series shown in both Britain and United States in the 1970s. Graves was also a close friend at Oxford of T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia.” In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. Graves was the author of The White Goddess, a key book for modern Pagans and Wiccans, in which he proposes the existence of a European deity, inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, and which is the origin of the goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies.

Sargant often worked with Ewen Cameron who often sought his advice and on one occasion Sargant sent Cameron a note saying: “Whatever you manage in this field, I thought of it first.”[65] Graves helped Sargant edit Battle for the Mind, one of the first books on the psychology of “brainwashing,” and which lauded by Aldous Huxley. “In a bizarre turn,” Dominic Streathfield writes in Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, “the war poet and the psychiatrist had struck up a friendship and agreed to collaborate on a book about brainwashing; two years later Battle for the Mind was a bestseller and had cemented Sargant’s fame. Sargant provided the opinions, Graves the structure and layout to ‘make the saliva flow,’ as he put it.”[66] According to Sargant:

Various beliefs can be implanted in many people after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger, or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and tightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of “herd instinct,” and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility.[67]

It was allegedly Graves’ tip that sent the Wassons down to Mexico in 1955. In 1952, Graves had sent Wasson a clipping from a pharmaceutical company’s newspaper mentioning an article that Richard Evans Schultes (1915 – 2001) had published in a journal over ten years earlier, in which he reported on the use of psychoactive mushrooms by native peoples in the mountains of southern Mexico. It was this information that brought the Wassons together with Schultes, and eventually the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. Wasson went on a study the use of the mushrooms among Mazatec shamans in 1955.

Sargant often worked with Ewen Cameron who often sought his advice and on one occasion Sargant sent Cameron a note saying: “Whatever you manage in this field, I thought of it first.”[69] Graves helped Sargant edit Battle for the Mind, one of the first books on the psychology of “brainwashing,” and which lauded by Aldous Huxley. “In a bizarre turn,” Dominic Streathfield writes in Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, “the war poet and the psychiatrist had struck up a friendship and agreed to collaborate on a book about brainwashing; two years later Battle for the Mind was a bestseller and had cemented Sargant’s fame. Sargant provided the opinions, Graves the structure and layout to ‘make the saliva flow,’ as he put it.”[70] According to Sargant:

Various beliefs can be implanted in many people after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger, or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and tightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of “herd instinct,” and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility.[71]

It was allegedly Graves’ tip that sent the Wassons down to Mexico in 1955. In 1952, Graves had sent Wasson a clipping from a pharmaceutical company’s newspaper mentioning an article that Richard Evans Schultes (1915 – 2001) had published in a journal over ten years earlier, in which he reported on the use of psychoactive mushrooms by native peoples in the mountains of southern Mexico. It was this information that brought the Wassons together with Schultes, and eventually the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. Wasson went on a study the use of the mushrooms among Mazatec shamans in 1955.

Schultes is considered the father of modern ethnobotany, and was soon to become Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum. Schultes also contributed to the discovery of the potency of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) as a hallucinogenic. The Spanish friar Ramón Paul, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World, was the first to record native use of “kohhobba” to communicate with the spirit world. DMT was first synthesized in 1931 by the British chemist Richard Manske. In the 1950s and 1960s some researchers experimented with tryptamine hallucinogens injected intramuscularly. The first to publish in English on this subject seems to have been the Hungarian investigator Stephen Szara while working for the US National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C.. Szara published on DMT as early as 1956, and produced a series of at least twelve papers on the pharmacology of the alkylated tryptamines during the next eleven years. Writing in 1961 Szara said:

I became interested in the possibility of hallucinogenic action of alkylated tryptamine derivatives in 1955, when I read about the chemical analysis of a snuff powder prepared by Haitian natives from Piptadenia peregrina seeds which they used in religious ceremonies to produce mystical states of mind which enabled them to communicate with their gods. . .[68]

When Aldous Huxley learned of Wasson’s discovery, Wasson’s office at the Morgan bank became a regular stop. After the 1957 publication of Wasson’s article in Life magazine, he and his wife were accompanied on a follow-up expedition by French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified several of the mushrooms as Psilocybe species. Heim cultivated the mushrooms in France, and sent samples for analysis to Albert Hofmann, who isolated the active principle psilocybin from the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana. Hofmann was aided in the discovery process by his willingness to ingest mushroom extracts to help verify the presence of the active compounds. Hofmann’s employer Sandoz marketed and sold pure psilocybin to physicians and clinicians worldwide for use in psychedelic psychotherapy.

Wasson is thus considered the founder of Ethnomycology, the study of psychoactive mushrooms used for spiritual purposes, inspiring later researchers such as Terence McKenna and John Allegro. A Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, Allegro achieved infamy as a pseudo-scientist when he wrote the bestselling The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which argued that Christianity was founded on the mushroom cult. Wasson wrote in Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Review that the magic mushroom “permits you to see more clearly than our perishing eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even to know God.”[69] In 1967 Wasson would publish Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, which proposed that the ancient Vedic intoxicant Soma was the magic mushroom.

Psychedelics

In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception, which according to Steven J. Novak redefined taking mescaline and LSD as a mystical experience with possible psychotherapeutic benefits. The word “psychedelic” was then championed by Huxley’s protégé, the American psychologist, Timothy Leary, who became one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s. Leary apparently first became interested in psychedelics when he read Wasson’s Life article. Between 1954 and 1959, Leary was director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, where he devised a personality test, “The Leary,” which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. Leary became associated with CIA contractor Frank Barron who in 1960, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology. Barron administered Leary some CIA-supplied psilocybin and LSD, after which Leary began experimenting regularly with psychedelics and also studied their effects on others in controlled experiments.

Sometime in 1960, psilocybin became the subject of a series of psychology experiments as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, conducted by Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert. Leary later admitted to knowing at the time that “some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.”[70] In his own words, Leary said, “I wouldn’t be here without the foresight of the CIA scientists. It was no accident. It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence, and I’m all in favor of Central Intelligence.”[71] Leary’s Harvard associates included numerous known CIA contractors, like Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA, and former chief OSS psychologist Henry A. Murray, a disciple of Carl Jung who helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss Bill Donovan, in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Dr. Ernst Kris of the New School for Social Research, and Dr. Bertram D. Lewin of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Murray had monitored the early OSS “truth serum” experiments, and his testing methods were employed by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality study.

From the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Murray was responsible for the ethically questionable, CIA-sponsored MK-Ultra experiments in which twenty-two undergraduates were used as guinea pigs. Among other purposes, Murray’s experiments focused on measuring people’s reaction under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks.[72] Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the vehicle used to cause high levels of stress and distress. Among them was 16-year-old Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later crimes.

The founding board of the Harvard Psilocybin Project consisted of Leary, Aldous Huxley, John Spiegel (later president of the American Psychiatric Association), Leary’s superior at Harvard University David McClelland, Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, and two graduate students who were working on a project with mescaline. To assist in their discovery of the “Other World,” Barron brought from California a small library of mystical texts. “I think you should start with the William James,” he advised, and proceeded to recommend Swedenborg, George Fox, and the French surrealist Rene Daumal, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the Sufis the Tantric psychologists of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. [73]

Leary, who would William James as a divine influence, would embark on experiments that continued James’ hypothesis that drugs could produce religious experiences.[74] Under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Leary conducted the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. The experiment was designed to evaluate whether psilocybin combined with psychotherapy could inspire prisoners to abandon their antisocial behavior once they were released. As part of the Marsh Chapel Experiment, graduate degree divinity student volunteers from the Boston area were randomly divided into two groups. In a double-blind experiment, half of the students received psilocybin, while a control group received a large dose of niacin. Almost all of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences, thus supposedly providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences.

After first experimenting with psilocybin mushrooms in the summer of 1960, Leary was given a copy of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which he believed corroborated what he had experienced, “and more too.”[75] Leary soon met with Huxley and the two became friends. Huxley instructed Leary, according to his autobiographical account of the Harvard University Psychedelic Drug Project, Flashback: “Your role is quite simple, Timothy. Become a cheerleader for evolution,” he said, forewarning him however that, “These are evolutionary matters. They cannot be rushed. Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans, painters, rich bohemians and they’ll initiate the intelligent rich. That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.”[76] Leary also quoted Huxley as saying: “These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.’’[77]

Kinsey Reports

Closely associated with trauma-based mind control is the sexual abuse of children, a practice which received endorsement through another important influence in the rise of the Sexual Revolution. Alfred Kinsey (1894 – 1956), a professor of zoology at the Indiana University, was influenced by his colleague, Dr. Hermann Muller (1890 – 1967), a lifelong friend of Julian Huxley, and who worked with eugenicists in Nazi Germany prior to World War II.[78] Muller was an American geneticist and Nobel laureate, best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (Mutagenesis) as well as his outspoken political beliefs. Muller, who had begun receiving Rockefeller funding from the National Research Council in 1925, received a Guggenheim grant in 1932 to pursue his work in the genetics department of the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Brain Research Institute in Berlin. Muller studied under Ernst Rüdin. Muller claims to have also had a close relationship with Freiherr von Verschuer, whose assistant was Joseph Mengele. Muller also mentions meeting and working with the well-known German scientists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, all three authors of a major 1921 volume on racial hygiene widely used by the Nazis.[79]

Still on leave from the University of Texas at Austin, Muller worked in Russia as a senior scientist until 1937, where he continued to receive Rockefeller Foundation support. He also worked as an adviser to the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he moved to Indiana University and in 1946 Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “for the discovery that mutations can be induced by x-rays.” Muller and Kinsey, explains Judith Reisman, agreed on the need to replace religion with scientific belief and sexual restraint with sexual license. They also shared an enthusiasm for “positive eugenics,” the elimination of defective genetic stock by mass sterilization. [80]

Kinsey is generally regarded as the first major figure in American sexology.[81] In New York, through the well-known American gynecologist R.L. Dickinson, sometime around 1945, Kinsey met the sexologist Dr. Harry Benjamin, the sex-change pioneer involved in the Fabian society’s World League for Sexual Reform. Like Kinsey, Benjamin along with fellow sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld and Albert Moll were friends with George Sylvester Viereck, a close friend of Aleister Crowley, who collaborated with him on black propaganda for The International and The Fatherland, during World War I.[82] In 1948, in San Francisco, Benjamin was asked by Kinsey to see a child who “wanted to become a girl” despite being born male, as the mother wished for help that would assist rather than thwart the child. Kinsey had encountered the child as a result of his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was published that year. Kinsey and Benjamin had seen nothing of the like previously. This child eventually led Benjamin to understand that there was a different condition to that of transvestism, under which adults who had such needs had been classified to that time.[83]

In 1947, Kinsey founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Kinsey obtained research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to inquire into human sexual behavior. He achieved celebrity with the publications of the Rockefeller-funded Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality. During this work, he developed a scale measuring sexual orientation, now known as the Kinsey Scale, which ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual. A rating of X, for asexual, was added later by Kinsey’s associates. According to Rene Wormser, legal counsel for the Reece Committee investigating tax-exempt foundations in 1954:

The Rockefeller Foundation’s statement file with the Committee explained its connection with the Kinsey studies in this way. In 1931 it “became interested in systematic support for studies in sexual physiology and behavior.” … Its work in these areas was chiefly in connection with the “committee for research in sex problems of sex of The National Research Council,” to which by 1954, the Foundation had granted $1,7555,000 in annual grants running from $75,000 to $240,000. Beginning in 1941, a considerable portion of these funds was supplied to Dr. Kinsey’s studies, and one grant was made direct to Dr. Kinsey… The work of the NRC produced some results of truly noteworthy importance… [However] the much-publicized “bestseller” Kinsey studies base an advocacy of criminal and social reform on the very unscientific material which Dr. Kinsey had collected and permitted to be widely disseminated.”[84]

Kinsey and his team interviewed more than 18,000 Americans on their sexual behavior, including Beat poets Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the world’s first sex-change patient Christine Jorgensen, and Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams.[85] Kinsey also filmed sexual acts which included co-workers in the attic of his home as part of his research. Kinsey collected sexual material from around the world, which brought him to the attention of U.S. Customs when they seized some pornographic films in 1956.

Researchers into Kinsey’s methods have noted that his conclusions about American sexuality were skewed to the absurd, because he loaded the ranks of his test subjects with an inordinately high number of persons imprisoned for sex deviancy, prostitutes and child molesters, and criminals, estimated by one researcher as providing as high as one third of his overall subjects. Kinsey entered them into his database as normal examples of the population.[86] James H. Jones, author of Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, and British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, among others, have speculated that Kinsey was driven by his own sexual needs.[87] Kinsey was bisexual, and he and his wife agreed that both could have sex with other people as well as with each other. He himself had sex with other men, including his student Clyde Martin. Kinsey was also a masochist. As a young man, he began inserting objects into his urethra, initially drinking straws before moving on to pipe cleaners, pencils and finally a toothbrush, to punish himself for having homoerotic feelings, and inserting toothbrushes continued throughout his adult life. After becoming accustomed to the pain of urethral insertions, he circumcised himself without anesthesia.[88]

Kinsey’s sex research included observation of and participation in sexual activity, encouraging his staff to also engage in a wide range of sexual experimentation. Kinsey’s research included observation of child sexuality, the manual and oral stimulation of children’s genitals, and the timing of child orgasms with stopwatches. Part of Kinsey’s collection of sex films included films of children in sex acts and adult-with-child sex. Kinsey wrote about pre-adolescent orgasms, reporting observations of “orgasms” in over three-hundred children between the ages of five months and fourteen years. Kinsey said he also interviewed nine men who had sexual experiences with children.[89] Where Kinsey had gained this information began to be questioned nearly forty years later, when it was revealed that Kinsey used data from a single pedophile and presented it as being from various sources.[90]

Table 34 of Kinsey’s book includes the following data: an 11-month-old baby experienced an alleged “orgasm” ten times in one hour; a 4-year-old child and a 13-year-old boy experienced 26 such alleged “orgasms” in a 24-hour period. In his deranged masochistic view of “pleasure,” Kinsey interpreted child “orgasms” as “sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children)… extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting…,” “pained or frightened” expression, and “violent attempts to avoid climax…” Yet, in spite of these reactions, Kinsey concluded that children, “derive definite pleasure from the situation.”[91] Kinsey even suggests that children need “help” from adults in discovering their sexuality, especially effective methods of masturbation.[92]

Kinsey believed that there were “only three kind(s) of sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.”[93] In Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Kinsey writes, “It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contact… Adult contact… are not likely to do the child any appreciable harm if the child’s parents do not become disturbed.” In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey, states that bestiality, (human sex with animals) is a “normal” part of life, and that therapists should “reassure” people who practice bestiality that it is a normal sexual behavior.[94] In 1949, in Kinsey’s testimony before the California Subcommittee on Sex Crimes, he stated, contrary to extensive research showing the high incidence of repeat sex crimes by sex offenders, that the research conducted by the Kinsey Institute confirmed that sex offenders do not re-offend. He then called for full parole for all sex criminals without exception.

The Kinsey Reports, which led to a storm of controversy, are regarded by many as a precursor to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Kinsey’s claim that children can and should be sexual from the earliest ages has become the basis for virtually all modern sex education programs around the world.[95] Since its founding, the Kinsey Institute has been a strong advocate for legalizing and mainstreaming what are still recognized as abnormal sexual behaviors in society. Their sexual ideologies are carried forward by other likeminded organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), an organization to create and promote sex education programs worldwide and co-founded by a former Kinsey Institute director. A 1980 Time magazine article called “Attacking the Last Taboo” quoted the Kinsey Institute’s Wardell Pomeroy, who had accepted a position with SIECUS, as saying: “It is time to admit that incest need not be a perversion or a symptom of mental illness.” He added, “Incest between… children and adults… can sometimes be beneficial.” The article referred to Pomeroy as being part of the “pro-incest lobby.”[96] Additionally, the sex education guidelines published by both UNESCO and the World Health Organization (WHO) have been influenced by the Kinsey Institute’s view of human sexuality. UNESCO’s guidelines were coauthored by Nanette Ecker, a former director of SEICUS.

[1] Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial. BBC Documentary (2006).

[2] Susan Ronald. A Dangerous Woman: American Beauty, Noted Philanthropist, Nazi Collaborator - The Life of Florence Gould (2018).

[3] Ernst Junger. A German Officer in Occupied Paris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). p. xvi.

[4] “High Times Greats: Interview With Albert Hofmann, The Man Who First Synthesized LSD.” High Times (July, 1976). Retrieved from https://hightimes.com/culture/albert-hofmann-lsd-interview/

[5] William James. “Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide.”

[6] Book the Law, Chapter II: 22.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Francis King. Tantra: The Way of Action: A Practical Guide to Its Teachings and Techniques (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Book, 1990), p. 138; Rowan Robinson. The Great Book of Hemp: The Complete Guide to the Environmental, Commercial, and Medicinal Uses of the World’s Most Extraordinary Plant (Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 1996) p. 92.

[9] Cited in Paul Roland. The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich (Arcturus Publishing, 2018).

[10] The Doors of Perception (1954),

[11] Wolfgang Uwe Eckart. Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006).

[12] E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken. “Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin (Volume 36, Issue 1).

[13] A. E. Samaan. From a Race of Masters to a Master Race: 1948 To 1848 (A.E. Samaan, 2013). p. 539.

[14] Judith Tydor Baumel. The Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 420.

[15] Wolfgang Uwe Eckart. Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), p. 73.

[16] Müller A, Hell D. “Eugen Bleuler and forensic psychiatry.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2002; 25) pp. 351-360.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Andreas Mayer. “Introspective hypnotism and Freud’s self-analysis: procedures of self-observation in clinical practice”. Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 5 (2) 2001: p. 171–96.

[19] George Makari. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Melbourne University Press, 2208) p. 256.

[20] Sybille Steinbacher. Auschwitz: A History (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2005), p. 114.

[21] Robert Jay Lifton. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 351.

[22] Gerald L.Posner & John Ware. Mengele: The Complete Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 33.

[23] Ibid., pp. 33–34.

[24] Gideon Greif & Andreas Kilian. “Significance, responsibility, challenge: Interviewing the Sonderkommando survivors.” Sonderkommando-Studien (April 7, 2004). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110905053041/http://www.sonderkommando-studien.de/artikel.php?c=forschung%2Fsignificance

[25] Anton Chaitkin. “British psychiatry: from eugenics to assassination,” Executive Intelligence Review, V21 #40, (30 July 2002)

[26] A. Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D. “Dr. Nolan D.C. Lewis 1889-1979” Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Volume 9 2nd Quarter p. 151-152.

[27] Anonymous (1946). “Current Comment: Psychiatric Examination of Rudolf Hess”. Journal of the American Medical Association 130 (12): 790.

[28]   John Marks. The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control (London: Penguin Books, 1919) p. 6.

[29] Henry V. Dicks. Fifty years of the Tavistock Clinic (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970). p. 107.

[30] Ibid.

[31] B. K. Eakman. Push Back!: How to Take a Stand Against Groupthink, Bullies, Agitators, and Professional Manipulators (Simon and Schuster, 2014).

[32] Chaitkin. “British psychiatry: from eugenics to assassination.”

[33] C. Tudico. The History of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 2012).

[34] P. Galison. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 21 (1994). p. 228–66.

[35] “LSD, Mind Control, and the Internet: A Chronology” http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/SLS.htm [accessed March 21, 2004).

[36] Erik Davis. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpents Tail, 2004) p. 151.

[37] Arthur B. Darling. “The Birth of Central Intelligence.” Adapted from a history of the CIA to 1950 completed by the author in 1953. For a preceding portion, devoted principally to the OSS, see Studies VIII 3, p. 55 ff. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol10no2/html/v10i2a01p_0001.htm

[38] Dominic Streatfeild. Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (Macmillan, 2008).

[39] Central Intelligence Agency, Executive Registry, Job 80–B01731R, Box 15. Secret. Retrieved from https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d244

[40] H. P. Albarelli Jr.. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiment (Waterville, OR: 2009).

[41] H. P. Albarelli Jr.. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiment (Waterville, OR: 2009).

[42] R.U. Sirius. “The CIA, LSD and the Occult.” Interview by with Martin Lee (High Frontiers, issue #4   1987)

[43] Dieter Hagenbach & Lucius Werthmüller. Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD, cited in Dieter Hagenbach “The Search for a Truth Serum.” (April 18, 2014).

[44] Church Committee; p. 390.

[45] Dick Russell. On the trail of the JFK assassins (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), p. 273.

[46] Marks. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, p. 88.

[47] Ibid., pp. 106–7.

[48] Ibid., pp. 140–150.

[49] Diane Turbide, (1997-04-21). “Dr. Cameron’s Casualties.”

[50] Raffi Khatchadourian. “Operation Delirium.” The New Yorker (December 9, 2012). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delirium

[51] H. P. Albarelli Jr.. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiment (Waterville, OR: 2009).

[52] Hank P. Albarelli Jr. “CIA Denial of Coddling Nazis Far From the Truth,” Part 2, Voltaire Network (December 7, 2010). Retrieved from https://www.voltairenet.org/article167692.html

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Dieter Hagenbach & Lucius Werthmüller. Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD; cited in Dieter Hagenbach. “The Search for a Truth Serum”, Reality Sandwich.

[56] Hank P. Albarelli Jr. “CIA Denial of Coddling Nazis Far From the Truth,” Part 2, Voltaire Network (December 7, 2010). Retrieved from https://www.voltairenet.org/article167692.html

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Jan Irwin. “The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms.” Gnosis Media. Retrieved from http://www.gnosticmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject

[62] Gordon Wasson presenting to the Century Club, The Century Club, 04-01-1971. Audio.

[63] The CFR archives, Princeton University, Mudd Library: MC104, box 451: folder 1 – Mikoyan

[64] CFR Historical Roster of Directors and Officers. Retrieved from http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/appendix.html

[65] Gordon Thomas. Journey Into Madness (London: Bantam Press, 1988), pp. 189–190.

[66] Dominic Streathfield. Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (Macmillan, 2008), p. 79.

[67] Cited in Jim Keith. Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2003), p. 31.

[68] S. Szara. Experientia, 12 (1956) p. 114.

[69] R. Gordon Wasson. “The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico,” The Psychedelic Review, vol. 1, no. 1, (June 1963), p. 30.

[70] Mark Riebling. “Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy: Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?”

[71] Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond (Grove Press, 1985), p. 7.

[72] Alston Chase. Harvard and the Unabomber The Education of an American Terrorist (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). pp. 18–19.

[73] Jay Stevens. Storming Heaven: LSD & The American Dream (Perennial Library, 1988), p. 158.

[74] Dwight Garner. “Tune In, Turn On, Turn Page” The New York Times (January 7, 2010)

[75] Timothy Leary. High Priest, (New World Publishing 1968), p. 65.

[76] René Daalder. “A New Mind for an Aging Species,” C-Lab. Retrieved from http://c-lab.columbia.edu/0002.html

[77] Timothy Leary. Flashbacks: a personal and cultural history of an era: an autobiography (Putnam, 1990) p. 44.

[78] Bill Landis. Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (1995)., pp. 88–90.

[79] Judith A. Reisman. Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences (Crestwood, Kentucky: The Institute for Media Education, 2003) p. 303-304.

[80] Ibid., p. 298, 303-304.

[81] Landis. Anger, pp. 88–90.

[82] Carlson. Under Cover, pp, 457-460.

[83] “The Transatlantic Commuter.” Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft. Hu-Berlnin.de Retrieved from http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/TRANS_B5.HTM

[84] Keith. Mass Control, p. 50.

[85] Mick Brown. “Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried.” Esquire (March 1, 2014).

[86] Vern L. Bullough. “Book Review ‘Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography’”. Journal of Sex Research (August 1, 1999). 36: 306–315

[87] James H. Jones. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1. ed. ed.) (New York: Norton, 1997).

[88] Ibid., p. 610.

[89] Alfred Charles Kinsey & Clyde Eugene Mart. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Indiana University Press, 1948) pp. 178–180.

[90] Gary Pool. “Sex, science, and Kinsey: a conversation with Dr. John Bancroft – head of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.” Humanist (Sep–Oct 1996).

[91] A. Kinsey. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

[92] Ibid.

[93] Statement of C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD, Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Service and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Before the Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, (February 10, 1987).

[94] A. Kinsey. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

[95] D. J. Flynn. Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (New York, NY: Crown Forum, 2004).

[96] “Attacking the Last Taboo.” Time, 115, 72 (1980, April 14).

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio