Subliminazis
From Tavistock to Woodstock
Taking Stock
In Colonial America, to keep them in line, the unruly were put in medieval stocks and pillories as a relatively mild form of punishment and humiliation. The public display was part of a social spectacle designed to encourage conformity and suppress the individual thinker and those committing misdemeanors. Those condemned to the stocks were subject to a variety of abuses.
Today, our minds can be tortured, directed and contained through subtler but more nefarious means. We are still put in mental stocks by megamedia and Big Pharma, and their combination – pharmaceutical adverts. Chemical straightjackets range from Ritalin, to antidepressants, to hormones, prescriptions and recreational drugs.
Paradoxically, there is an alleged War on Drugs by the very governments and agencies who are accused of profiteering on Black Market importation and distribution. CIA has been implicated in the infamous Golden Triangle heroin importations in the Viet Nam era, cocaine running during Iran Contra, the crack epidemic in American ghettos, poppy production in Afghanistan (largest crop ever in 2006), and in promoting Orange Sunshine LSD through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to derail and discredit the peace movement in the 1960’s.
This follows an older tradition, an aspect of psychological warfare. British profiteers grew narcotics in India and forcibly sold them to China during the Opium Wars. Even tea was notorious during the American Revolution. Black Ops have a history of being supported via illicit drug trade. Anyone who is the end-user drives the karmic chain of supply and demand. And, it’s a bloody trail.
All drugs, even alcohol, tobacco and sugar are big business. It’s all part of The Spectacle, whether the source is nation-states, megacorporate drug companies (Big Pharma), global drug rings, or designer independents. Humans are hardwired with a “craving for ecstasy.” Social issues include suppression of direct mystical experience (religious experimentation vs. “pharmacratic inquisition”), pleasure/pain axis, sexuality, and self-determination (individual freedom vs. state control).
Drugs rule, or he who controls the drugs rules and controls by means of drugs and the enormous cash slush funds they generate. Destruction of the real economy and the replacement of development with looting on a global scale is already in an advanced stage throughout the world.
Psychological Warfare
We’ve developed even more cruel and unusual punishment for would-be “free thinkers,” and dissidents since the era of MK Ultra, the CIA mind control programs. During the Cold War, the CIA attempted to outdo Soviet and Asian brainwashing techniques and close the “mind control gap.”
With the Manchurian Candidate, they tried to secretely manufacure the perfect assassin – a cyborg. Then the agency experimented with a variety of drugs designed to neutralize or disable the enemy, or to use as truth serums. They also used electroshock, sensory deprivation, psychotronics, and radical hypnosis.
Though it was a leading candidate, LSD was determined no good for mind control, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be an influential social control. Once the drug became associated with the counterculture, it was banned (1967), which only made it more attractive. Yet it still worked its magic by deflecting energy and attention into hedonistic druggie lifestyles instead of confrontational political activism.
Through its Psychological Warfare Division, CIA-controlled media used CIA promoted drugs to discredit the peace movement. It used CBS, The New York Times, Associated Press, United Press International, even The National Enquirer, and other major United States media to maintain its control over sensitive subjects. This gave new meaning to the phrase, “the medium is the message” – infowars.
DeWitt Poole became president of the CIA's largest single propaganda effort of the WWII era, the National Committee for a Free Europe. Another prominent board member of Public Opinion Quarterly was CBS executive Frank Stanton. He was also a longtime director of both Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Fund.
This CIA-financed organization was established to conduct political advertising campaigns in the United States and to launder CIA funds destined for Poole's National Committee for a Free Europe. This influence over the POQ editorial board and editorial content of the field's most prestigious academic journal was only a symptom of a deeper and more organic bond. The primary nexus between government and social science is an economic one so pervasive it makes any crisis of relations with the government a crisis for social science as a whole.
Facts about the CIA's PSYWAR propaganda and censorship relationship with certain American media executives came to light in the1975 hearings of the Church Cimmittee: United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by U. S. Senator Frank Church, (D) Idaho (Hansen).
Carl Bernstein reported that in addition to The New York Times, "CBS was unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship (with the CIA). Over the years, the CBS network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied out takes of news film to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS news film library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA."
The New York Times reported March 24, 2001, that at the time of Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the CIA had a relationship with the Associated Press and the UPI wire services so that the CIA could actually place propaganda stories directly onto the international wires through those agencies. In other words, the CIA could literally write propaganda stories for willing distribution globally by the wire services.
Cultural Cold War
CIA in academia was another way to make inroads in social engineering. The Central Intelligence Agency has long-developed clandestine relationships with the American academic community, which range from academics making introductions for intelligence purposes to intelligence collection while abroad, to academic research and writing where CIA sponsorship is hidden.
Generally, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. Although the numbers are not as great today as in 1966, there are no prohibitions to prevent an increase in the operational use of academics. The size of these operations is determined by the CIA.
For years some members of the academic community and the CIA joined together in a secret relationship to turn many of America's university and college campuses into virtual espionage centers. A number of professors and administrators were secretly working for the CIA, recruiting prospective agents among students, spying for the agency while overseas, sometimes helping to spy on "troublemaking" students, and using the cover of research institutes and other projects to gather intelligence.
Some have suggested CIA “rules” the Harvard and Yale campuses. The CIA's Yale is the Yale of secret societies, like the infamous Skull and Bones, whose alumni fill the Agency. A story lurking between the lines of Cloak and Gown is the intellectual origin of the cold war. The use of the singular in Winks's subtitle -- Scholars in the Secret War 1939-1961 – is a tip-off: Germans, Russians, Iranians, American radicals are mere instances in a protracted war of Us against Them.
Cloak and Gowns
Bonesman, James Jesus Angleton stayed with CI (OSS) after the war, running the Agency's counterintelligence operation until he was forced out in 1974 by his longtime nemesis, William Colby. The ostensible reason was the revelation of the CIA's extensive domestic spying operations, directed by Angleton, which were uncovered in a series of articles by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times. But Colby never liked Angleton and thought that his CI empire had grown inappropriately large for a trade now dominated by gadgetry.
Counterintelligence is one of the spookier aspects of the espionage game. Its aim is to undo the enemy by analyzing his intentions, neutralizing his agents, scrutinizing the bona fides of defectors -- and examining one's own ranks for traitors. (Winks)
Yale alumni have figured heavily in the history of American espionage. The Office of Strategic Services was founded in 1942 with"Wild Bill" Donovan as first Director. The heart of OSS, and the home of most of its academics, was the Research and Analysis branch, or R&A. Other branches handled the nastier, novelistic end of the business, like counterintelligence, black propaganda and sabotage.
It was agreed from the outset that R&A's mandate was broad and long-term; the academics in R&A -- social scientists, historians, linguists and even literary critics were instructed to study friends and enemies, real and potential, present and future. OSS researchers began to turn their attention to the Soviet Union well before the war was over, though, as Winks notes, some of the leftish academics performed this new task with a decided lack of enthusiasm.
Because of its tweedy aura, R&A was usually called the campus -- a name that stuck to its organizational offspring, the CIA, and to the Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Winks) R&A lives on in the interdisciplinary area studies departments in American universities, lending its tweedy image to spycraft.
McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, which encouraged the development of these departments, said: "In very large measure the area of study programs developed in American universities in the years after the war were manned, directed, or stimulated by graduates of the OSS -- a remarkable institution, half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting." The transformation of universities into regional offices of the American Imperium's executive committee had begun.
Subliminazis
CIA admits throughout its history it has explored any and all means for the control of human behavior. Spying on student activists and the student movement was conducted in the late 60s, under Operation CHAOS. The Agency receiving FBI reports on antiwar activities. With the rise of international conferences against the war, and student and radical travel abroad, information also flowed in from the Agency's overseas stations.
Raw data on individuals from FBI was analyzed by CIA to create watchlists. The mail and phone activity of 300,000 individuals was watched and network names extracted and computer indexed in the Hydra system. 7,200 separate personality files were developed on citizens of the United States. Operation CHAOS also maintained nearly 1000 "subject" files on numerous organizations. Because it wasn’t legal, this activity ceased in late 1974..The Rockefeller Commission Report revealed it in 1975, but naturally members of the committee had tight CIA connections themselves.
Although the CIA recognized (in a memo of August 14, 1963) that "research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical," they managed to assemble what a recent New York Times article called "an extensive network of nongovernmental scientists and facilities," almost always without the knowledge of the institutions where the facilities were situated. http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/behavior.html
Science became politicized, Most researchers did not realize they were covertly funded by CIA money. Spooky funding also started the field of international studies. Psychologist and social scientists were kept under surveillance to smoke out radicals. American Anthropological Association and American Psychological Assn. conferences were surveilled and recruited. Their boards secretly gave the CIA a cross-indexed roster of memberships detailing individuals' backgrounds and areas of expertise.
A tiny but varied sample of social scientists touched by the project include several notables. They did research on hypnosis, coercion and persuasion, sleep therapy, nonverbal communication, class structure, telepathy, electromagnetics and more.
The psychologists include Carl Rogers of the Center for the Study of the Person, La Jolla, California, Edgar Schein of MIT's Sloane School of Management, Martin Orne (also a psychiatrist) of the University of Pennsylvania and Charles Osgood of the University of Illinois. Interviews were also conducted with psychiatrist Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell Medical Center, sociologists Jay Schulman of the National Jury Project, Richard Stephenson of Rutgers University, and anthropologist Edward Hall, retired from Northwestern University. (Greenfield)
Hypnosis was found relatively ineffective for controlling behavior. In an interview, Orne said he would only be disturbed about CIA attempts to use hypnosis for the control of agent behavior if they were successful. “I know too much about hypnosis for me to be disturbed about this; because, as is made clear in umpteen papers and umpteen lectures, hypnosis is an extremely ineffective way of controlling behavior.” But its propaganda value remained a useful belief to disseminate throughout the American class structure.
The insidious side of propaganda is that it is the product of total culture in action, creating an invisible environment. Counterenvironments arise to bring new realizations to consciousness. Self-inquiry, self-reflection and self-confrontation are part of the process of separating oneself fom cultural propaganda. We all have an internal map of reality based on our beliefs.
In the wake of the failure of techno-utopia, Marshall McLuhan alerted us that new cultural conditioning would arise at the empirical level of consciousness due to shifts in communication media. Their appeal is polysensory, emotional, and mental. Their fallout includes consumerism, faddism, pop culture, groupthink, propaganda. The counterpoint of cultural conditioning is the spark of creativity necessary for new developments, new metaphors, and new paradigms to arise consciously.
Counterculture and Counterintelligence
In forming counterculture, the whole self disengages from cultural currents, the electronic environment and corpo-political propaganda and Agit Prop. What happens when an entire generation questions social norms? This ‘spiritual’ quest might be alienating if it wasn’t something shared with most of one’s generation. It became the American psychedelic underground, and many subculture lifestyles followed it.
A drug culture that began as a narcissistic dissociation from the world devolved into a polydrug abusing culture of self-medication by the early 70s. The CIA bait-and switch tactic, starting with LSD, created the 1970s cocaine fad and made liberalism synonymous with depravity. Any hope of controlling economies or cultures or unfolding events is doomed to suboptimize the results and yield only nasty unintended consequences.
The subversively indoctrinated counterculture failed to realize that in adopting the hedonistic ‘spiritual’ drug, they were inadvertently “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA. The therapeutic promise of the drug was lost on the conservative government and research stopped cold.
Nevertheless, many of the wold’s greatest minds were inspired by psychedelics. For example, Francis Crick was on 50mcg. of LSD when he came up with the double-helix structure of DNA. Others include Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and the notorious Timothy Leary.
Pychedelics gave rise to the Human Potential movement, “Californian” ideology, mind spas like Esalen, and the so-called Aquarian Conspiracy which has blossomed into New Age thought. All have a root in CIA experiments in extraordinary human potential, parapsychology, and creativity. As with many alchemical panaceas, the substance is both a cure is a poison – a dream to some, a nightmare to others.
Acid Cult: Weapon or Sacrament?
CIA’s favorite stepchild was LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), developed at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. CIA was their biggest customer because thy thought they could weaponize it. Later, acid was manufactured for the government by Eli Lilly. Lilly has been featured as one of the most unethical of all drug companies by the Wall Street Journal. Daddy Bush has run both CIA and Lilly during his career.
In 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a synthesized batch of LSD, which they patented (US Patent for Lysergic Acid Amides, Serial No. 473,443, issued February 28, 1956) and promoted heavily.
In 1955, Aldous Huxley (Britain’s “Timothy Leary,” who wrote the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World) had his first LSD trip and published Heaven and Hell. He had written The Doors of Perception in 1954 detailing his experiences with mescaline. He contributed to the debate on “Paradise-engineering,” and issues of universal happiness, biotechnology, post-genomic medicine, peak experiences and designer drugs. Hedonism and the state-sanctioned sugarcoating the Four Horsemen of Pain, Disease, Unhappiness, and Death. Consumption of mass produced goods and beliefs.
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modelled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. http://www.huxley.net/
Former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)—along with the Washington Post (1985) and the New York Times (1988)—reported an amazing story about the CIA and psychiatry.
A lead player was psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Cameron was curious to discover more powerful ways to break down patient resistance. Using electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was able to produce severe delirium. Patients often lost their sense of identity, forgetting their own names and even how to eat.
The CIA, eager to learn more about Cameron’s brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project code-named MKULTRA. According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army of the CIA’s LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA get its LSD? Marks reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was uncomfortable relying on a foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to the CIA. http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levinepr0504.html
Need To Know
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that throughout history the smartest people were directed into specialties that kept them from getting the “Big Picture” so kings and the elite remained unthreatened by them in their power. The church did much the same. They began losing control when the Freemasons sowed Enlightenment thought. Academia still forms and directs our thinking processes and what kind of opportunities are open to us.
Those whose imaginations range into the areas of suppressed science quickly find out it is neither supported nor tolerated. Funding and careers are at stake, and in some cases lives. Are there some things we should not know? Dangerous subjects? Forbidden subjects?
In these days thick with conspiracy theories, it isn’t hard to imagine yet another one. But perhaps the most useful approach is to take a look backward to find the taproot of forces manipulating our society today. Are sinister forces shaping our moral, educational, political, economic, and cultural lives? Is the fruit of that poisoned tree coming to fruition?
The answer is a hearty, “Yes.” In fact, insiders say that no pop culture phenomenon since the 50’s is an accident. Once TV entered virtually every home, some mind control experiments came to a rather abrupt halt; they weren’t needed. Mass mind control from the cradle to the grave had been accomplished. The era of Madison Avenue, stylish fads in possessions and beliefs, had begun. Recent political propaganda, spin doctoring, and agit-prop have become painfully obvious even to the uninitiated.
But the antecedents of programmed consumerism go back much further to the time of Freud and fomenting political forces in Great Britain. The mother of all propaganda machines can be found in The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and its forerunner Tavistock Clinic or Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, which has tremendously influenced both left and rightwing thinking and put itself in the service of the “racket of war.”
A great game is being played on us unawares, and we are pawns in that game. Call it “Global Architectronics.” Public opinion cannot only be manipulated, it can be created --a perception not a reality. But, who or what would want to shape and control public opinion? We can ask ourselves like Parcival in the Grail Castle, “Who do these things serve?” and/or follow the modern investigative imperative to “Follow the Money.”
Synthetic Religion
Since civilization began, monarchs and their militaries have sought to control their own populations and those who threatened them. Elitists with overarching ambitions have existed in all eras. One of the most effective means of social control predates civilization, arising in the superstitious world of neolithic period.
By healing, birth and death rites, and oracles shamans gained a stranglehold on the minds of their followers with magical medicine and mysterious incantations. They told the people what to expect in the future and what fearsome and mysterious forces were operating out of view in nature. Their rites controlled the food supply, the weather, and tribal beliefs. Myths were imposed on fresh minds.
Drugs were also a staple in the medicine kit, both to kill pain and to provide pleasure and communion in tribal celebrations. These mind expanding drugs revealed a separate reality, populated by fabulous and fearsome creatures of the imagination. After these close encounters, naturally, their shamans claimed to placate the demonic and serve the greater good.
Shared beliefs bound groups together in common cause with a groupthink worldview. They “belonged.” But shamanism and sorcery are centered truly around illusion and power, not spirituality. It is an attempt to define the reality – to impose a pre-scientific definition of reality.
Shamanism finds its modern counterpart in psychology/psychiatry but also in the cultural fad of the New Age movement, a nostalgic, if self-absorbed, spirituality. And the founding of Tavistock is rooted in the careers and theories of many of the most imminent mind doctors of the last century: Freud, Jung, Laing, Bateson, and more.
Headshrinking
Further, these “headshrinkers” then teamed up with the master manipulators of the intelligence services to compare notes and create bleeding edge projects in mind control and global orchestration. Among other phenomena, this eventually gave rise to wholesale brainwashing, mass mind control, the human potential movement, New Age thought, and global power plays.
English anthropologist Gregory Bateson had a lifelong commitment to reprogram a humanity which he deeply despised. He had an explicit drive to destroy the religious basis of Western civilization by replacing God with Nature. The Whole Earth project was born in the back-to-nature mentality of the 60s. It was literally the beginning of a new religion, ecosophy, with Nature at its center and mankind portrayed as the dangerous ape threatening to destroy it all. The “Inconvenient Truth” is perhaps the fruit of this seed.
Bateson's British (and American) intelligence sponsored takeover of the nascent field of cybernetics in the 1950's from its creator, Norbert Wiener, led directly into Bateson's LSD-driven experiments on schizophrenia and creativity in Palo Alto, which in turn, were the origins of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and their house band, the Grateful Dead.
Stewart Brand's own career as a publicist, for what was first conceived of as drug and then computer-based techno-utopian revolution, owes much to Bateson's cybernetics guidance. Brand was among the first to recognize that personal computers and computer networks might have even greater potential to reprogram the humans who "used" them than the psychedelics which fueled his earlier efforts.
Based on Brand's success at promoting LSD at his Trips Festivals, he was hired by Doug Engelbart to stage the first mass demonstration of the mouse and windows system which Engelbart had invented at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Bateson is the psychological and tribal Godfather of psychedelic San Francisco. Captain Al Hubbard (no relation to L. Ron), is the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He was born in Kentucky but by the 1950's had renounced his U.S. citizenship and sailed to Vancouver, British Columbia, to become a commodore in their very English yacht club.
That's where he set up the world war-room to target the destruction of Western culture (through San Francisco). Like the process of ego death and rebirth, a relentless cycle was set in motion. Before the New Age rose from the ashes many fires burned out of control.
From this base that he joined forces with Humphrey Osmond (English military psychiatrist, lead English MK-ULTRA researcher and the originator of the term "psychedelic") and Aldous Huxley (English black-sheep godson of the original techno-utopian, H.G. Wells) to spread LSD among the intelligentsia to achieve the world revolution. To be sure, San Francisco's cultural scene was shaped by its close association with English intellectuals and social engineers to achieve Utopian goals. (Stahlman).
Anglo-American Enterprises (AAE)
Tavistock shenanigans are at the root of both World Wars and the Cold War, and New World Order. No stranger to imperialistic machinations, the British fostered foment. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was born in England to create an economic and ideological enemy to capitalism for the benefit of the war machine.
When the Bolshevik Revolution got out of control, British and American elites, including the Bush family stepped up to fund a buffer from Stalin, named Hitler. Both Communism and Fascism were funded by London banker fatcats of the industrial revolution. The Third Reich rapidly got out of control, too, but there was money to be made from all sides by stirring up trouble. Resources, such as fuels took on global importance, and those who wanted it took it from those who had natural resources.
Exploitation of the colonial era carried on in a new form, under new names like today’s World Bank and other corpoglomerate neocon organizations that are virtual nations unto themselves, or think they are like Halliburton. International corporate raiders now plunder nations with easy credit like they used to do to the individual consumer. And they are currently doing it to US citizens via the mortgage industry, Wallstreet, and the Federal Reserve.
The same folks who brought you the coopting of fundamentalism in the U.S. also brought you Utopianism, Zionsim and its reactionary counterpart, Wahabbism and terrorism. In fact, it is the source of virtually every well-established “-ism” to visit itself upon our belief systems by creating false belief structures. It seems no one is immune to persuasion..
Tavistock is the prototypical thinktank, futuring, social-engineering organization for reprogamming humanity. Social psychology and psychological warfare were nurtured there by modern day robber barons and Brain Lords who wrestled with the lager context. Mind expanding drugs paved the way for a mind-bending escalation of user-driven technology, starting with the PC.
MK-ULTRA
The intense potency of LSD - d-lysergic acid diethylamide – made it ideal for the intelligence community to administer covertly. The euphoria, disorientation and hallucinations encouraged free flowing information – the rational censor was asleep at the wheel. Some believed the very state of am individual’s being could be rewired, even converting their loyalties, distorting and reprogramming their memories and thoughts, and manipulating behavior. Mind manipulation became the Agency’s deepest Cold War secret. Only those with “need to know” were aware of activities and contractors.
On April 13, 1953 Allen Dulles approved the project. The program was to be known as "Project MKULTRA. The “ULTRA” hearkened back to the most closely guarded American-British secret of the Second World War: the breaking of Germany’s military codes. The “M-K” identified the initiative as a CIA Technical Services Staff (TSS) project. This was the division within the Agency responsible for such things as weapons, forgeries, disguises, surveillance equipment and the kindred tools of the espionage trade. Within the TSS, MKULTRA was assigned to the Chemical Division (TSS/CD), a component with functions few others – even within the Technical Services Staff – knew about.
This unit was, , the agency's most far-reaching drug and mind-control program at the height of the Cold War, designed and headed by Sidney Gottlieb (1918-19 ), then a 34-year old Bronx native with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A brilliant biochemist, Gottlieb was a remarkable, if totally eccentric, man. A socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult, he was on a constant search for meaning in his life. He found some of it in an unrelenting passion for his clandestine labors.
Gottlieb did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. He would do virtually anything if he believed it to be in the American interest. Overcoming a pronounced stutter and a clubfoot to rise through the ranks of the CIA, he would later describe himself as the Agency’s “Dr. Strangelove.” Others were less kind. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair termed him America’s “official poisoner.”
Though the super-secret MK-ULTRA was ended in 1964, a streamlined version called MK-SEARCH was continued—with Gottlieb in charge—until 1972. MKULTRA itself was technically closed out in 1964, but some of its work was transferred to the Office of Research and Development (ORD) within the DS&T under the name MKSEARCH and continued into the 1970s. In 1994, a report concerning the MKULTRA program was issued:
"In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA engaged in an extensive program of human experimentation, using drugs, psychological, and other means, in search of techniques to control human behavior for counterintelligence and covert action purposes. According to Bowart, the CIA was the world's largest consumer of Sandoz LSD; that they'd worked with the Bureau of Narcotics, the NIMH, LEAA and other agencies to covertly give LSD to unwitting persons in "real life settings."
"In 1973, the CIA purposefully destroyed most of the MKULTRA files concerning its research and testing on human behaviour. In 1977, the agency uncovered additional MKULTRA files in the budget and fiscal records that were not indexed under the name MKULTRA. These documents detailed over 150 subprojects that the CIA funded in this area, but no evidence was uncovered at that time concerning the use of radiation.
The Church Committee found some records, but also noted that the practice of MKULTRA at that time was 'to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs'. "The CIA worked closely with the Army in conducting the LSD experiments. This connection with the Army is significant because MKULTRA began at the same time that Secretary of Defense Wilson issued his 1953 directive to the military services on ethical guidelines for human experiments.
In experimental test situations, people were given acid without their knowledge, then interrogated under bright lights with doctors sitting in the background taking notes. Threats would be made. The test subjects were told that their LSD "downer trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their closely-guarded military secrets. The people being interrogated in this way were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel and, abroad, agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term severe debilitation and several documented deaths resulted. (Jon Rappaport)
"Throughout the course of MKULTRA, the CIA sponsored numerous experiments on unwitting humans. After the death of one such individual (Frank Olson, an army scientist, was given LSD in 1953 and committed suicide a week later), an internal CIA investigation warned about the dangers of such experimentation. The CIA persisted in this practice for at least the next ten years.
Dr. Robert Lashbrook was number two in the MKULTRA experiments which consumed tens of thousands of unwitting human guinea pigs, causing at least one known death to a non-volunteer victim. Lashbrook was given immunity to testify before Kennedy's congressional committee investigating the CIA's mind control operations. (Bowart).
After the 1963 IG (Inspector-General) report recommended termination of unwitting testing, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms (who later became Director of Central Intelligence) continued to advocate covert testing on the ground that 'positive operational capability to use drugs is diminishing, owing to a lack of realistic testing. With increasing knowledge of state of the art, we are less capable of staying up with the Soviet advances in this field'.
Helms attributed the cessation of the unwitting testing to the high risk of embarrassment to the Agency as well as the 'moral problem'. He noted that no better covert situation had been devised than that which had been used, and that 'we have no answer to the moral issue'."
They did have the answers to the moral questions on human experimentation but chose to ignore them, destroy the records, hide the truth and still continue in their efforts. Nothing has changed as each participating organization, using national security laws, avoids disclosure and accountability.
The records which were destroyed contained the evidence necessary perhaps to send some participants to jail for society's version of behaviour modification. Once again, there was no accountability and no recognition of the rights of the individuals damaged by these experiments. (Begich, 2006)
Once they were done with unwitting individuals, CIA let the LSD genie out of the bottle into the general population with their own choice of High Priest, who they had already initiated in their trial by fire. Was “the Pope of Dope” a “tool” of the cryptocracy?
What's New with My Subject?
Tim Leary, “Pope of Dope,” CIA’s High Priest of the Drug Culture?
Leary (1920-1996) has been called, tongue in cheek, the “Spy Who Came in From the Mold,” an allusion to the fact LSD is manufactured from ergot mold—ergotamine. Insiders say, at the inception of the psychedelic revolution, Leary seemed more compelled by power than spirituality, though his rhetoric was laced with spiritual references. Perhaps there was too much Lephraucan in this guru to e too serious. He seemed best suited to his late-life role – stand up philosopher.
Beginning in the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named Project MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge.
The MKU project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report. When former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner was asked whether or not the CIA supported Timothy Leary or gave Leary LSD, he replied only, “The CIA gave it to those who were doing the research.”
Prior to October 6th, 1966, LSD was available legally in the United States as an experimental psychiatricdrug. LSD "apostle" Al Hubbard actively promoted the drug between the 1950s and the 1970s and introduced thousands of people to it. The US Federal Government classified it as a Schedule I drug according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Whether offical or not, Leary qualifies as an agent provocateur. He was an "inciting agent", a person who secretly disrupts a group's activities from within the group. Agents provocateurs typically represent the interests of another group, or are agents directly assigned to provoke unrest, violence, debate, or argument by or within a group while acting as a member of the group.
Was the Summer of Love a summer of mind control, too? Was the entire counterculture “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA, by taking LSD trips? “Go ask Alice” was an invitation down the hyperdimensional rabbithole for a whole generation.
The unwary CIA victims got no such invitation, and their toxic reactions to being dosed unawares mimicked psychotic breaks. The first scientifically conducted trips were often “bad trips.” Was the entire Baby Boom unwittingly vicimized?
LSD produced by Eli Lilly was released into an ocean of war protest with the specific agenda to distract and discredit this youthful peace movement. The war between liberals and conservatives has been carefully engineered to deflect attention into self-indulgence and provincial religiosity. The conservatives were locked and loaded against the Flower Children and Hippies.
The coup took place from within with the seemingly willing cooperation of influential leaders, who while they weren’t “in” on the plot, certainly popularized and fostered it. And the High Priest at the top of the list, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, certainly fit the old Tavistock mold. Early in his career he wrote an exemplary psychological test that was used for profiling prisoners, and choosing CIA employees. In an interview for High Times magazine in February 1978, Leary said:
“If you look back, many things that we thought were accidents turned out were not accidents. The entire LSD movement itself was sponsored originally by the CIA, to whom I give great credit. I would not be here today if it had not been for the foresight and prestige of the CIA psychologists, so give the CIA credit for being truly an intelligence agency. ”
Mind control researcher Walter Bowart interviewed Leary in the 1970s, and the acid guru had some interesting things to say about his association with the CIA. Asked, “Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?” Leary responded, “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people… I like the CIA! The game they’re playing is better than the FBI. Better than the Saigon police. Better than Franco’s police. Better than the Israeli police. They’re a thousand times better than the KGB. So it comes down to: whom are you going to work for? The Yankees or the Dodgers?”
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’, the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
Bowart reports finding stronger evidence of Leary/CIA links:
While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom ( IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program. (Bowart)
When Bowart asked, "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" He reports, ithout hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.”
Leary admitted to Bowart that even in the 60s he knew he was being wittingly used by intelligence agencies. He claimed from 1962 forward he operated as an intelligence agent aware of the world struggle for the control of minds – of consciousness. He wanted to be on the winning side.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" Bowart asked, disbelieving everything he said.
"I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..." “…nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA..."
Then he back-pedalled, again declaring that CIA sponsored his and all other personality assessment research, inluding that used to assess those for CIA employment and other intelligence agencies. They also supported J.B. Rhine’s ESP experiments at Duke University. He was relatively clueless about other LSD researchers, such as Walter Pankhe and Stanislav Grof.
The whole question is muddied by the possibility Leary was trying to make money as a writer on MK Ultra, and wanted to increase his journalistic credibility. Many thought he was just lying, which was a frequent passtime for him on which his best friends give him a mixed review.Others contend he himself was a victim of chemical and electronic mind control in prison, designed to break and “turn” him. Did he turn state’s evidence for a “get out of jail, free card?” FBI records indicate it is so. [ .]
Either way, wittingly or unwittingly, truth or lie, the “king of the hippies” was a pawn in CIA’s Great Game of global manipulation. “Why not indeed?” Isn’t the REAL question just WHO is directing the Skull and Bones “retail outlet,” CIA?
Close to his death, Leary said, “Everybody gets the Timothy Leary that they deserve.”
Wilderness of Mirrors
In September 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime precursor to CIA, began searching for a drug that forces subjects of interrogation, such as captured Nazi U-boat crews, to reveal secrets. As project director Dr. Stanley Lovell wanted a"truth drug.
Mary Meyer is deeply connected to CIA, and dispensing LSD to the President of the United States. Kennedy was no stranger to drugs taking pain pills for his back and amphetamines for endless campaign tours. But Mary was "brainwashing" him, according to directions of Harvard psychologist, Dr. Timothy Leary who had designed a personality test used by CIA. Many of his colleagues were CIA sponsored.
Cord Meyer joined CIA late in 1950, working in its International Relations Division, which he soon managed. This division covertly financed, infiltrated, and encouraged noncommunist liberal-left movements and institutions, such as labor unions, creative-academic societies, and student groups. He lectured Leary about communism, and the importance of liberal resistance to it. Leary later credits Meyer with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."
April 13, 1953: CIA launches Operation MK/ULTRA, a major drug and mind-control program. Through a front organization called The Society For Human Ecology, CIA begins sponsoring $25 million in research into the effects of mind-altering drugs -- LSD, psilocybin and mescaline -- at Harvard University and in the San Francisco-Oakland area, including Stanford and Berkeley.
1954-59: Leary is director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland. He devises a personality test, "The Leary," which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. He has also become a close friend to Frank Barron, a graduate school classmate who has been working for CIA since at least 1953. Barron works at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary will later acknowledge is "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists."
In 1960-61, Barron founds the Harvard Pyschedelic Drug Research Center. Leary follows Barron to Harvard and becomes a lecturer in psychology. After Barron administers to him some CIA-supplied psilocybin and LSD, Leary begins tripping regularly. He also studies the effects of psycheledics on others in controlled experiments.
He later admits to knowing, at the time, that "some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research." In addition to Barron, Leary's associates and assistants during this period include former OSS chief pyschologist Harry Murray, who had montiored military experiments on Truth-Drug brainwashing and interrogation, and Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA.
Leary also consults British philosopher Aldous Huxley, author of the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. He concocted a sort of psychedelic “domino theory.”
Huxley urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for the purposes human betterment. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on," Huxley tells him. "Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich."
In Spring 1962, Mary Meyer, recently divorced from her CIA husband Cord, visited Leary at Harvard, telling him she has a "friend who's a very important man, who wants to try LSD for himself." At the time, Leary did nott know about Mary’s affair with President Kennedy, which included more than thirty visits to the White House, confirmed by Presidential Secretary Kenneth O'Donnell.
Mary told Leary that the government wass studying ways to "use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing." She asks him to "teach us how to run [LSD] sessions, use drugs to do good." Leary agrees. He provides her with drug samples and "session" reports, and is in touch with her every few weeks, advising her on how to be a "brainwasher." She swears him to secrecy.
In Fall 1962, Leary meets Mary Meyer in a room at Boston's Ritz Hotel. She alludes to her "hush-hush love affair," and tells him that "top people in Washington are turning on." According to Leary's recounting, she also says: "Do you remember the American Veterans Committee, that liberal veterans group you belonged to after the war? The CIA started that."
She confides that "CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents.... dissident organizations in academia are also controlled." When Leary asks her how she knows all this, she explains: "I knocked you with those facts to get your attention. It's a standard intelligence trick."
She confides that CIA has not only been running left-wing groups as fronts, but has been sponsoring more psychedelic research than he will ever know. "You are doing exploratory work the CIA tried to do in the 1950s. So they're more than happy to have you do their research for them. Since drug research is of vital importance to the intelligence agencies of this country, you'll be allowed to go on with your experiments as long as you keep it quiet,"
She gives him, for his experiments, a bottle of "the best LSD in the world," from the National Institute of Mental Health. She takes countersurveillance precautions, and says: "We had eight intelligent women turning on the most powerful men in Washington. And then we got found out.... I made a mistake in recruitment. A wife snitched on us... I've gotten mixed up in some dangerous matters."
December 1, 1963: Around this time Mary calls Leary, who had been "expecting a phone call from [her]... ever since the Kennedy assassination." According to Leary, she says: "They couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast. They've covered everything up.... I'm afraid. Be careful."
October 12, 1964: Mary Meyer is shot to death, execution-style, at 12:45 p.m., on a park towpath by the Georgetown Canal in Washington, D.C. Her body is identified by Ben Bradlee, Cord Meyer's brother-in-law, editor of the Washington Post. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton confiscates and later burns the diary in which Mary has recorded her liaisons with JFK
1965-66: FBI agents openly surveil Leary's drug experimentation compound at Milbrook. January-August 1967: Ramparts, a radical magazine, exposes CIA sponsorship of the National Student Association, a Cord Meyer project. Meyer's best friend, James Angleton, assigns CIA officer Richard Ober to begin a leak investigation into the Ramparts story. Ober's probe is soon expanded into a spy program on the countercultural and student-protests movements, code named CHAOS.]
September 1967: Just as CHAOS is launched, Leary moves from the isolation of upstate New York, where he has been philosophically contemplating the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and becomes a gregarious, media-hounding fixture of the Southern California countercultural scene, telling young people to "Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out." While Leary's position does constitute a rejection of the corporate world, it also embraces private property and the profit motive.
1969: Leary critics will eventually point with suspicion to his close connections during this time to an international LSD-smuggling cartel, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which is rumored to be a CIA front. The Brotherhood is controlled by Ronald Stark, whom an Italian High Court will later conclude has been a CIA agent since 1960, and the Brotherhood's funds are channeled through Castle Bank in the Bahamas, a known CIA "proprietary."
Ironically, the CIA, during its MKULTRA experimentation, initiated the 1960s' psychedelic explosion. This may have been unwitting but it may also have been a deliberate effort to undermine the anti-establishment protest culture of the time. In the late 1960s and early 70s, New York biochemist Ronald Stark was one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD (which he produced at his illicit laboratories in Europe); Stark was widely suspected (as he himself claimed) of being attached to the CIA project later to be revealed as MKULTRA.The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie religious organisation based in Laguna Beach, California, supplied ample quantities of LSD to the local hippies and eventually acquired a sophisticated network of smuggling hashish and LSD to the whole United States.
Billy Hitchcock served as banker for the Brotherhood, maintaining an account with Castle Bank, which had been set up by the CIA as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations (see DEALING IN DEATH: The CIA and the Drugs Trade). Hitchcock also poured the sum of $5 million into "litter stocks" which were associated with Mary Carter Paint Company (known later as Resorts International), which was suspected of having links to organised crime. When the company constructed a casino in the Bahamas, the star guest on opening day was none other than Richard Nixon, who was about to run for president. Strange bedfellows indeed for influential figures involved in the psychedelic movement. (In 1970 Resorts International formed a private intelligence corporation called Intertel, which was staffed largely by ex-CIA, NSA, Interpol and Justice Department officials. Intertel rented its services to a wide range of corporate clients, including ITT, McDonald's and Howard Hughes' Summa Corporation).
Ronald Stark later took over Hitchcock's position of banker for the Brotherhood of Etemal Love and was involved in overseeing their LSD operation. For someone who was just known as a person helping the hippie movement, Stark kept a mysterious profile. He travelled to all the drug factories and hippie communes across the U.S., and stayed in rich hotels and private clubs, mingling with the rich and famous. He also operated a cocaine ring in the Bay Area. Since Stark took over the running of the Brotherhood, it became the single most productive manufacturer of LSD in the United States. 50 million doses (20 kilos) of the drug were mostly sold in the U.S. Stark was imprisoned in Italy from 1975 to 1979, following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. While in jail in Bologna, he received a vast number of visitors from the British and American consulates. According to the judge who released him from prison in April 1979, "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" showed that "from 1960 onwards, Stark belonged to the American secret services."
For two years Leary lives at Brotherhood headquarters, located on a ranch in Laguna Beach. During this period, the Brotherhood corners the U.S. market on LSD and begins distributing only one variety of the drug, "Orange Sunshine." Stark says he plans to distribute the product to CIA-backed guerillas fighting Chinese occupation; he reportedly knows a high-placed Tibetan close to the Dalai Lama, and wants to provide enough LSD to dose all Chinese troops in Tibet.
In the U.S., meanwhile, Stark provides enough Orange Sunshine to dose the hippie culture and radical left many times over. This is the "bad acid" on which Charles Manson's followers murder Sharon Tate, and on which Hell's Angels stab to death a black man during a concert by the Rolling Stones.
The Summer of Love has been supplanted by a Season of Hate. Because of this, many countercultural insiders -- including William S. Burroughs, White Panther leader John Sinclair, and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey -- theorize that Stark, Leary, and Orange Sunshine are all part of CIA plot to discredit and neutralize the radical left.
According to former radicals Martin Lee and Bruce Shalin, widespread use of Orange Sunshine "contributed significantly to the demise of the New Left, for it heightened the metabolism of the body politic and accelerated all the changes going on. In its hyped-up condition, the New Left burned itself out."
Fall 1969: According to declassified government documents, CIA now has a CHAOS agent with "particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community," who is providing "extremely personal data." It is decided to send this agent to infiltrate the overseas headquarters of the Black Panthers, but this will not be accomplished for many months.
In the meantime, CIA will debrief him for purely domestic information about his associates, in part because he does not "wish to deal with the FBI." This description perfectly fits Leary. No one has better "entree" than Leary, who has recently been helicoptered in as the guest of honor at Woodstock.
Working for CIA complicated, but ultimately did not preclude, Leary’s prosecution for a pot bust. He wasn’t exactly chained to the wall in a dark cellar. In Lompoc, a plush minimum-security, white-collar "joint," Leary is still able to get acid. Because he can provide valuable intelligence to the U.S. government, he is "liberated" from Lompoc in Sept. 1970 by members of the Weather Underground, an SDS offshoot.
According to Angleton's deputy, Scott Miler, in ealy October 1970, CIA is busy trying to answer the question: "What was Eldridge Cleaver doing in Algeria?" Curiously, Leary now flies to Algiers and joins up with Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Leary's travels, and the operation to spring him from jail, have been financed by Stark and the Brotherhood. By October 21, 1970, a CIA memo reports prized CHAOS source is now overseas.
From November 1970 -May 1971, Cleaver grows suspicious of Leary, searches Leary's apartment "for documents proving that Leary and his wife were CIA operatives, and imprisons him in the Panthers' Algerian compound as "white slaves."
Leary and his wife escape to Switzerland with the assistance, according to Leary, of an "Algerian bureaucrat named Ali," who "made no bones about his connection to the CIA." "Are you sure you can trust him?" Leary's wife asks him. "He's liberal CIA," Leary says, "and that's the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century." The escape operation is financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, though checks drawn on CIA's Castle Bank.
1973-78: After two years of "jet-setting" in Switzerland, Leary returns to the U.S. By his own account, this occured through the machinations of CIA. Leary says they have "kidnapped" him. Leary comes into the open as a government informant. Under the code-name CHARLIE THRUSH, he turns State's evidence against the Weather Underground. Freed from prison, he is taken into protective custody for fear that radical revolutionaries have marked him for execution.
1978-93: After his last offical contacts with security agencies, in 1978, Leary distances himself both from the government and the "movement" that no longer really exists. Out in the cold, he becomes a sophist in the true sense, a wise-man for rent or hire. Leary seems to the Left a lightweight, a one-man Madison Avenue scam, a functional part of the Establishment he once swore to subvert.
He also publishes Flashbacks: An Autobiography, recounting obliquely his dealings with Cord and Mary Meyer and his work as a government informant, touching only in passing on CIA's funding of LSD resarch. He designs computer software and hails the coming of the Information Superhighway. Though lacking family wealth, or any gainful employment since 1962, he has nevertheless managed to become a rich man.
In his “stand-up philosopher routine,” he said he would "brainwash" the audience, "not to resist or fight authority, but to engage it in a dialogue to force progressive change." In Flashbacks, Leary admitted the LSD experiments at Harvard and Berkeley were paid for by CIA. Asked if he had connections with the Agency, he became tight and defensive. "They never gave me a dime," he says. (Riebling). But he dreamed his dysphoric dream aloud and engineered a massive cultural trance state.
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.
Tim Leary, “Pope of Dope,” CIA’s High Priest of the Drug Culture?
Leary (1920-1996) has been called, tongue in cheek, the “Spy Who Came in From the Mold,” an allusion to the fact LSD is manufactured from ergot mold—ergotamine. Insiders say, at the inception of the psychedelic revolution, Leary seemed more compelled by power than spirituality, though his rhetoric was laced with spiritual references. Perhaps there was too much Lephraucan in this guru to e too serious. He seemed best suited to his late-life role – stand up philosopher.
Beginning in the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named Project MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge.
The MKU project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report. When former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner was asked whether or not the CIA supported Timothy Leary or gave Leary LSD, he replied only, “The CIA gave it to those who were doing the research.”
Prior to October 6th, 1966, LSD was available legally in the United States as an experimental psychiatricdrug. LSD "apostle" Al Hubbard actively promoted the drug between the 1950s and the 1970s and introduced thousands of people to it. The US Federal Government classified it as a Schedule I drug according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Whether offical or not, Leary qualifies as an agent provocateur. He was an "inciting agent", a person who secretly disrupts a group's activities from within the group. Agents provocateurs typically represent the interests of another group, or are agents directly assigned to provoke unrest, violence, debate, or argument by or within a group while acting as a member of the group.
Was the Summer of Love a summer of mind control, too? Was the entire counterculture “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA, by taking LSD trips? “Go ask Alice” was an invitation down the hyperdimensional rabbithole for a whole generation.
The unwary CIA victims got no such invitation, and their toxic reactions to being dosed unawares mimicked psychotic breaks. The first scientifically conducted trips were often “bad trips.” Was the entire Baby Boom unwittingly vicimized?
LSD produced by Eli Lilly was released into an ocean of war protest with the specific agenda to distract and discredit this youthful peace movement. The war between liberals and conservatives has been carefully engineered to deflect attention into self-indulgence and provincial religiosity. The conservatives were locked and loaded against the Flower Children and Hippies.
The coup took place from within with the seemingly willing cooperation of influential leaders, who while they weren’t “in” on the plot, certainly popularized and fostered it. And the High Priest at the top of the list, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, certainly fit the old Tavistock mold. Early in his career he wrote an exemplary psychological test that was used for profiling prisoners, and choosing CIA employees. In an interview for High Times magazine in February 1978, Leary said:
“If you look back, many things that we thought were accidents turned out were not accidents. The entire LSD movement itself was sponsored originally by the CIA, to whom I give great credit. I would not be here today if it had not been for the foresight and prestige of the CIA psychologists, so give the CIA credit for being truly an intelligence agency. ”
Mind control researcher Walter Bowart interviewed Leary in the 1970s, and the acid guru had some interesting things to say about his association with the CIA. Asked, “Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?” Leary responded, “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people… I like the CIA! The game they’re playing is better than the FBI. Better than the Saigon police. Better than Franco’s police. Better than the Israeli police. They’re a thousand times better than the KGB. So it comes down to: whom are you going to work for? The Yankees or the Dodgers?”
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’, the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
Bowart reports finding stronger evidence of Leary/CIA links:
While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom ( IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program. (Bowart)
When Bowart asked, "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" He reports, ithout hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.”
Leary admitted to Bowart that even in the 60s he knew he was being wittingly used by intelligence agencies. He claimed from 1962 forward he operated as an intelligence agent aware of the world struggle for the control of minds – of consciousness. He wanted to be on the winning side.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" Bowart asked, disbelieving everything he said.
"I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..." “…nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA..."
Then he back-pedalled, again declaring that CIA sponsored his and all other personality assessment research, inluding that used to assess those for CIA employment and other intelligence agencies. They also supported J.B. Rhine’s ESP experiments at Duke University. He was relatively clueless about other LSD researchers, such as Walter Pankhe and Stanislav Grof.
The whole question is muddied by the possibility Leary was trying to make money as a writer on MK Ultra, and wanted to increase his journalistic credibility. Many thought he was just lying, which was a frequent passtime for him on which his best friends give him a mixed review.Others contend he himself was a victim of chemical and electronic mind control in prison, designed to break and “turn” him. Did he turn state’s evidence for a “get out of jail, free card?” FBI records indicate it is so. [ .]
Either way, wittingly or unwittingly, truth or lie, the “king of the hippies” was a pawn in CIA’s Great Game of global manipulation. “Why not indeed?” Isn’t the REAL question just WHO is directing the Skull and Bones “retail outlet,” CIA?
Close to his death, Leary said, “Everybody gets the Timothy Leary that they deserve.”
Wilderness of Mirrors
In September 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime precursor to CIA, began searching for a drug that forces subjects of interrogation, such as captured Nazi U-boat crews, to reveal secrets. As project director Dr. Stanley Lovell wanted a"truth drug.
Mary Meyer is deeply connected to CIA, and dispensing LSD to the President of the United States. Kennedy was no stranger to drugs taking pain pills for his back and amphetamines for endless campaign tours. But Mary was "brainwashing" him, according to directions of Harvard psychologist, Dr. Timothy Leary who had designed a personality test used by CIA. Many of his colleagues were CIA sponsored.
Cord Meyer joined CIA late in 1950, working in its International Relations Division, which he soon managed. This division covertly financed, infiltrated, and encouraged noncommunist liberal-left movements and institutions, such as labor unions, creative-academic societies, and student groups. He lectured Leary about communism, and the importance of liberal resistance to it. Leary later credits Meyer with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."
April 13, 1953: CIA launches Operation MK/ULTRA, a major drug and mind-control program. Through a front organization called The Society For Human Ecology, CIA begins sponsoring $25 million in research into the effects of mind-altering drugs -- LSD, psilocybin and mescaline -- at Harvard University and in the San Francisco-Oakland area, including Stanford and Berkeley.
1954-59: Leary is director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland. He devises a personality test, "The Leary," which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. He has also become a close friend to Frank Barron, a graduate school classmate who has been working for CIA since at least 1953. Barron works at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary will later acknowledge is "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists."
In 1960-61, Barron founds the Harvard Pyschedelic Drug Research Center. Leary follows Barron to Harvard and becomes a lecturer in psychology. After Barron administers to him some CIA-supplied psilocybin and LSD, Leary begins tripping regularly. He also studies the effects of psycheledics on others in controlled experiments.
He later admits to knowing, at the time, that "some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research." In addition to Barron, Leary's associates and assistants during this period include former OSS chief pyschologist Harry Murray, who had montiored military experiments on Truth-Drug brainwashing and interrogation, and Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA.
Leary also consults British philosopher Aldous Huxley, author of the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. He concocted a sort of psychedelic “domino theory.”
Huxley urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for the purposes human betterment. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on," Huxley tells him. "Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich."
In Spring 1962, Mary Meyer, recently divorced from her CIA husband Cord, visited Leary at Harvard, telling him she has a "friend who's a very important man, who wants to try LSD for himself." At the time, Leary did nott know about Mary’s affair with President Kennedy, which included more than thirty visits to the White House, confirmed by Presidential Secretary Kenneth O'Donnell.
Mary told Leary that the government wass studying ways to "use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing." She asks him to "teach us how to run [LSD] sessions, use drugs to do good." Leary agrees. He provides her with drug samples and "session" reports, and is in touch with her every few weeks, advising her on how to be a "brainwasher." She swears him to secrecy.
In Fall 1962, Leary meets Mary Meyer in a room at Boston's Ritz Hotel. She alludes to her "hush-hush love affair," and tells him that "top people in Washington are turning on." According to Leary's recounting, she also says: "Do you remember the American Veterans Committee, that liberal veterans group you belonged to after the war? The CIA started that."
She confides that "CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents.... dissident organizations in academia are also controlled." When Leary asks her how she knows all this, she explains: "I knocked you with those facts to get your attention. It's a standard intelligence trick."
She confides that CIA has not only been running left-wing groups as fronts, but has been sponsoring more psychedelic research than he will ever know. "You are doing exploratory work the CIA tried to do in the 1950s. So they're more than happy to have you do their research for them. Since drug research is of vital importance to the intelligence agencies of this country, you'll be allowed to go on with your experiments as long as you keep it quiet,"
She gives him, for his experiments, a bottle of "the best LSD in the world," from the National Institute of Mental Health. She takes countersurveillance precautions, and says: "We had eight intelligent women turning on the most powerful men in Washington. And then we got found out.... I made a mistake in recruitment. A wife snitched on us... I've gotten mixed up in some dangerous matters."
December 1, 1963: Around this time Mary calls Leary, who had been "expecting a phone call from [her]... ever since the Kennedy assassination." According to Leary, she says: "They couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast. They've covered everything up.... I'm afraid. Be careful."
October 12, 1964: Mary Meyer is shot to death, execution-style, at 12:45 p.m., on a park towpath by the Georgetown Canal in Washington, D.C. Her body is identified by Ben Bradlee, Cord Meyer's brother-in-law, editor of the Washington Post. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton confiscates and later burns the diary in which Mary has recorded her liaisons with JFK
1965-66: FBI agents openly surveil Leary's drug experimentation compound at Milbrook. January-August 1967: Ramparts, a radical magazine, exposes CIA sponsorship of the National Student Association, a Cord Meyer project. Meyer's best friend, James Angleton, assigns CIA officer Richard Ober to begin a leak investigation into the Ramparts story. Ober's probe is soon expanded into a spy program on the countercultural and student-protests movements, code named CHAOS.]
September 1967: Just as CHAOS is launched, Leary moves from the isolation of upstate New York, where he has been philosophically contemplating the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and becomes a gregarious, media-hounding fixture of the Southern California countercultural scene, telling young people to "Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out." While Leary's position does constitute a rejection of the corporate world, it also embraces private property and the profit motive.
1969: Leary critics will eventually point with suspicion to his close connections during this time to an international LSD-smuggling cartel, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which is rumored to be a CIA front. The Brotherhood is controlled by Ronald Stark, whom an Italian High Court will later conclude has been a CIA agent since 1960, and the Brotherhood's funds are channeled through Castle Bank in the Bahamas, a known CIA "proprietary."
Ironically, the CIA, during its MKULTRA experimentation, initiated the 1960s' psychedelic explosion. This may have been unwitting but it may also have been a deliberate effort to undermine the anti-establishment protest culture of the time. In the late 1960s and early 70s, New York biochemist Ronald Stark was one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD (which he produced at his illicit laboratories in Europe); Stark was widely suspected (as he himself claimed) of being attached to the CIA project later to be revealed as MKULTRA.The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie religious organisation based in Laguna Beach, California, supplied ample quantities of LSD to the local hippies and eventually acquired a sophisticated network of smuggling hashish and LSD to the whole United States.
Billy Hitchcock served as banker for the Brotherhood, maintaining an account with Castle Bank, which had been set up by the CIA as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations (see DEALING IN DEATH: The CIA and the Drugs Trade). Hitchcock also poured the sum of $5 million into "litter stocks" which were associated with Mary Carter Paint Company (known later as Resorts International), which was suspected of having links to organised crime. When the company constructed a casino in the Bahamas, the star guest on opening day was none other than Richard Nixon, who was about to run for president. Strange bedfellows indeed for influential figures involved in the psychedelic movement. (In 1970 Resorts International formed a private intelligence corporation called Intertel, which was staffed largely by ex-CIA, NSA, Interpol and Justice Department officials. Intertel rented its services to a wide range of corporate clients, including ITT, McDonald's and Howard Hughes' Summa Corporation).
Ronald Stark later took over Hitchcock's position of banker for the Brotherhood of Etemal Love and was involved in overseeing their LSD operation. For someone who was just known as a person helping the hippie movement, Stark kept a mysterious profile. He travelled to all the drug factories and hippie communes across the U.S., and stayed in rich hotels and private clubs, mingling with the rich and famous. He also operated a cocaine ring in the Bay Area. Since Stark took over the running of the Brotherhood, it became the single most productive manufacturer of LSD in the United States. 50 million doses (20 kilos) of the drug were mostly sold in the U.S. Stark was imprisoned in Italy from 1975 to 1979, following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. While in jail in Bologna, he received a vast number of visitors from the British and American consulates. According to the judge who released him from prison in April 1979, "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" showed that "from 1960 onwards, Stark belonged to the American secret services."
For two years Leary lives at Brotherhood headquarters, located on a ranch in Laguna Beach. During this period, the Brotherhood corners the U.S. market on LSD and begins distributing only one variety of the drug, "Orange Sunshine." Stark says he plans to distribute the product to CIA-backed guerillas fighting Chinese occupation; he reportedly knows a high-placed Tibetan close to the Dalai Lama, and wants to provide enough LSD to dose all Chinese troops in Tibet.
In the U.S., meanwhile, Stark provides enough Orange Sunshine to dose the hippie culture and radical left many times over. This is the "bad acid" on which Charles Manson's followers murder Sharon Tate, and on which Hell's Angels stab to death a black man during a concert by the Rolling Stones.
The Summer of Love has been supplanted by a Season of Hate. Because of this, many countercultural insiders -- including William S. Burroughs, White Panther leader John Sinclair, and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey -- theorize that Stark, Leary, and Orange Sunshine are all part of CIA plot to discredit and neutralize the radical left.
According to former radicals Martin Lee and Bruce Shalin, widespread use of Orange Sunshine "contributed significantly to the demise of the New Left, for it heightened the metabolism of the body politic and accelerated all the changes going on. In its hyped-up condition, the New Left burned itself out."
Fall 1969: According to declassified government documents, CIA now has a CHAOS agent with "particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community," who is providing "extremely personal data." It is decided to send this agent to infiltrate the overseas headquarters of the Black Panthers, but this will not be accomplished for many months.
In the meantime, CIA will debrief him for purely domestic information about his associates, in part because he does not "wish to deal with the FBI." This description perfectly fits Leary. No one has better "entree" than Leary, who has recently been helicoptered in as the guest of honor at Woodstock.
Working for CIA complicated, but ultimately did not preclude, Leary’s prosecution for a pot bust. He wasn’t exactly chained to the wall in a dark cellar. In Lompoc, a plush minimum-security, white-collar "joint," Leary is still able to get acid. Because he can provide valuable intelligence to the U.S. government, he is "liberated" from Lompoc in Sept. 1970 by members of the Weather Underground, an SDS offshoot.
According to Angleton's deputy, Scott Miler, in ealy October 1970, CIA is busy trying to answer the question: "What was Eldridge Cleaver doing in Algeria?" Curiously, Leary now flies to Algiers and joins up with Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Leary's travels, and the operation to spring him from jail, have been financed by Stark and the Brotherhood. By October 21, 1970, a CIA memo reports prized CHAOS source is now overseas.
From November 1970 -May 1971, Cleaver grows suspicious of Leary, searches Leary's apartment "for documents proving that Leary and his wife were CIA operatives, and imprisons him in the Panthers' Algerian compound as "white slaves."
Leary and his wife escape to Switzerland with the assistance, according to Leary, of an "Algerian bureaucrat named Ali," who "made no bones about his connection to the CIA." "Are you sure you can trust him?" Leary's wife asks him. "He's liberal CIA," Leary says, "and that's the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century." The escape operation is financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, though checks drawn on CIA's Castle Bank.
1973-78: After two years of "jet-setting" in Switzerland, Leary returns to the U.S. By his own account, this occured through the machinations of CIA. Leary says they have "kidnapped" him. Leary comes into the open as a government informant. Under the code-name CHARLIE THRUSH, he turns State's evidence against the Weather Underground. Freed from prison, he is taken into protective custody for fear that radical revolutionaries have marked him for execution.
1978-93: After his last offical contacts with security agencies, in 1978, Leary distances himself both from the government and the "movement" that no longer really exists. Out in the cold, he becomes a sophist in the true sense, a wise-man for rent or hire. Leary seems to the Left a lightweight, a one-man Madison Avenue scam, a functional part of the Establishment he once swore to subvert.
He also publishes Flashbacks: An Autobiography, recounting obliquely his dealings with Cord and Mary Meyer and his work as a government informant, touching only in passing on CIA's funding of LSD resarch. He designs computer software and hails the coming of the Information Superhighway. Though lacking family wealth, or any gainful employment since 1962, he has nevertheless managed to become a rich man.
In his “stand-up philosopher routine,” he said he would "brainwash" the audience, "not to resist or fight authority, but to engage it in a dialogue to force progressive change." In Flashbacks, Leary admitted the LSD experiments at Harvard and Berkeley were paid for by CIA. Asked if he had connections with the Agency, he became tight and defensive. "They never gave me a dime," he says. (Riebling). But he dreamed his dysphoric dream aloud and engineered a massive cultural trance state.
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.
