In the October 13, 1993, New York Times, Supreme Court Roundup; Justices to Rule on Challenges by Career Criminals, by Linda Greenhouse, is this tidbit:
Gay Agent
Without comment, the Court refused to hear an appeal filed by a gay man who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for nine years before the agency learned of his homosexuality and dismissed him in 1982.
The man, identified in Court papers as John Doe because he served in an undercover position, argued that he had a constitutional right to continued employment as long as he complied with all security regulations. He said he had breached no regulations, had not compromised any classified information, and that as an openly gay man, was not liable to blackmail. He challenged a "blanket ban" by the C.I.A. on employing homosexuals.
The man had earlier lost his case before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled earlier this year that the C.I.A. did not appear to have a general policy of that sort, but rather had dismissed him based on an "individualized determination that his own case represented a threat to the national security mission of the Agency."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not vote in the case, Doe v. Woolsey, No. 92-2025, presumably because she served on the appeals court when the case was there.
Apparently, John Doe was terminated by the CIA, even though as an out-gay man he posed no more of a security risk than any other sexually active, unmarried employee. The agency claimed it did not have a blanket policy of terminating homosexuals, but instead, on the director's discretion, Doe was fired because he hadn't disclosed for the previous years that he had been a sexual active gay (although he'd been chaste for his three-year probationary period) and if there's anything the agency doesn't like it's being caught up short by somebody else's "secret."
His narrative went like this:
Respondent John Doe was first employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA or Agency) in 1973 as a clerk-typist. He received periodic fitness reports that consistently rated him as an excellent or outstanding employee. By 1977, respondent had been promoted to a position as a covert electronics technician.
Not a bad start! Great pluck--very Rebekah Brooks of him.
In January 1982, respondent voluntarily informed a CIA security officer that he was a homosexual. Almost immediately, the Agency placed respondent on paid administrative leave pending an investigation of his sexual orientation and conduct. On February 12 and again on February 17, respondent was extensively questioned by a polygraph officer concerning his homosexuality and possible security violations. Respondent denied having sexual relations with any foreign nationals and maintained that he had not disclosed classified information to any of his sexual partners. After these interviews, the officer told respondent that the polygraph tests indicated that he had truthfully answered all questions. The polygraph officer then prepared a five-page summary of his interviews with respondent, to which respondent was allowed to attach a two-page addendum.
On April 14, 1982, a CIA security agent informed respondent that the Agency's Office of Security had determined that respondent's homosexuality posed a threat to security, but declined to explain the nature of the danger. Respondent was then asked to resign. When he refused to do so, the Office of Security recommended to the CIA Director (petitioner's predecessor) that respondent be dismissed. After reviewing respondent's records and the evaluations of his subordinates, the Director "deemed it necessary and advisable in the interests of the United States to terminate [respondent's] employment with this Agency pursuant to section 102(c) of the National Security Act . . . ."[1]Respondent was also advised that, while the CIA would give him a positive recommendation in any future job search, if he applied for a job requiring a security clearance the Agency would inform the prospective employer that it had concluded that respondent's homosexuality presented a security threat.
If Madeleine Albright could claim she didn't know until she was 59 years old and being vetted for a job in the Clinton White House that she was born to Jewish parents who'd converted to Catholicism---even though she came out of post-war central Europe, and had few surviving relatives--wasn't John Doe's similar late awakening on an even theoretical par?
As much as I'd like to view this anonymous federal employee sympathetically---as a clear victim of bigotry and intolerance, sandwiched as he was somewhere between Matlovich v. Secretary of the Air Force and Bowers v. Hardwick, a gay martyr within a supposedly sophisticated, international organization that only showed him its fundamentalist mean streak---I simply can't.
The fact is, for at least eleven years that he was in court fighting to be reinstated to his job (his court cases list three CIA directors--Casey, Webster and Gates--as appellants) he was paid his full salary by the United States government, and that's my definition of a dream income, if not a dream job. He should more properly be called John Dough.
The CIA hired John Doe in 1973 as a clerk-typist, and seven years later promoted him to an undercover position. In periodic fitness reports, the Agency consistently rated him as a strong or outstanding employee. Though Doe began engaging in homosexual activities in 1976, he did not inform the CIA of his sexual orientation until January 28, 1982. Shortly thereafter, he was placed on paid administrative leave, and has continued to collect his salary through the course of this litigation..
September 8, 1975,
It seems likely in that era that efforts were still being made to create a homosexual-free zone at the level of the intelligence operations hierarchy, similar to the mystique surrounding the armed forces, especially the air force, which is what drives evangelical Christians to forget their plowshares and flock to it as a Biblical safe harbor.
But the loss of diversity in a social system, is the loss of an equalizing, testing, and ultimately civilizing force, and the loss is all theirs. It was not formerly the tradition in the American military, when conscription was a rite of passage for most males. I have an elderly friend who had a successful career as am art director and set designer for television and the movies, who served in Korea for three years in the early 50's, where the army farmed him out to some UN task force, where he was utilized as the Korean president's palace decorator---Uncle Sam having always been the best sugar daddy in town.
The loss of a queer eye seems quite apparent in the following story, 'Field Laboratories' in C.I.A. Tests Are Described, about a pair of C.I.A. "safehouses" that supposedly operated in San Francisco and New York City for nine years, between 1954 and 1963. They were the brainchild of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the C.I.A.'s "behavior control project," as well as being the resident poison-dart guru. The article opens with this lede:
The apartments in New York and San Francisco had red drapes, dressing tables trimmed in black velveteen, paintings of cancan girls, two-way mirrors and elaborate, well-concealed recording equipment.August 4, 1977, New York Times, page A16, 'Field Laboratories' in C.I.A. Tests Are Described, by Joseph B. Treaster,
August 4, 1977, New York Times, page A16, 'Field Laboratories' in C.I.A. Tests Are Described, by Joseph B. Treaster,
The apartments in New York and San Francisco had red drapes, dressing tables trimmed in black velveteen, paintings of cancan girls, two-way mirrors and elaborate, well-concealed recording equipment.
The apartments had been set up by the Central Intelligence Agency as "field laboratories" for trying out LSD and marijuana on unsuspecting men lured from local bars.
C.I.A. officials and former employees testifying before a joint Senate committee today on the agency's 25-year project on the manipulation of human behavior said they did not know who had administered the drugs.
But Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, quoted from C.I.A. documents indicating dozens of payments for $100 each "for undercover agents' operating expenses." And a former C.I.A. psychologist testified that he had interviewed prostitutes in the apartment maintained by the agency in San Francisco.
There was one apartment in each city. The one in New York was at 103 West 13th Street, a Federal investigator said, but the address of the San Francisco apartment was not immediately known. Both were studio apartments.
In New York the "safe house," as the agents referred to it, consisted of two adjoining studios with a connecting door, one in which the unsuspecting person was "entertained" and the other for observation through a two-way mirror. The layout was believed to be the same in San Francisco.
Admiral Turner Questioned
After running through a detailed description of the apartment in San Francisco and the payments, Senator Kennedy asked Adm. Stansfield Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, whether he was able to "draw any conclusions" from these facts.
"No, sir," the admiral replied softly, reaching for a glass of water as the audience in the crowded hearing room burst into laughter.
"There may be a lighter side to this," Senator Kennedy said, "but there is an enormously serious side---the range of drugs, the number of people, exactly what that operation was all about."
According to C.I.A. documents, the nine-year operation, identified today by the code-name "Midnight Climax," started in 1954, after two men had died in unwitting drug tests, including one somewhat similar to the "experiments" in the apartments.
Admiral Turner said he had "no idea" how many people had been given drugs. But Senator Kennedy, citing his examination of "documents, flow charts, cash charts" and the amount of money involved, said the number of persons "was considerable."
According to C.I.A. documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with several current and former Government employees, the apartments were rented by agents of the Bureau of Narcotics, using fictitious names, and maintained by them.
The arrangement, several of those interviewed said, had been worked out by George White, a senior narcotics agent and former member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A., and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the agency's behavior control project. Mr. White, who was also known as Morgan Hall, died two years ago. Admiral Turner said that Dr. Gottlieb, who destroyed most of the project's records when he retired in 1973, had not been questioned on the matter.
Under pressure from Senator Kennedy, Admiral Turner said he would see that Dr. Gottlieb was questioned in light of information disclosed about the project this week.
The C.I.A. documents indicated that the drug tests were carried out by narcotics agents. But Mr. Giordano said that "if that were the case, it was done without our knowledge, or mine."
How terrible that sounds, when they could have had a nice Bouguereau nude to place over the fireplace, which could have given the place an air of old Western Saloon. (And name me one straight men who can choose fabrics.)
With the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, we don't need to read between the lines of the Times' report of the congressional hearing looking into covert intelligence activities, where the room was convulsed with laughter by a dry unspoken implication and a reach for a sip of water.
The names Joseph Treaster puts in quotation marks for the two facilities, which had been closed for a decade in San Francisco, and two in New York City---calling them "field laboratories"---or the "safe house" in New York, which would have been better called the short house, since it lasted less than two years, shuttered, apparently, as a consequence of internal inquiries into Frank Olson's death, when the strict compartmentalization on MKULTRA matters necessarily broke down.The San Francisco 'pad" wasn't launched until over a year after the New York place closed down, but that fact didn't make it into the hearing record or the Times, because if it were known, a timeline of cause and effect might be inferred. Instead, we're told the project ran for nine years on both coasts.
These setups---"unsafe houses" would be more apt---might be rational if there were swarms of Russian agents or leftists, waiting to be enticed into some compromising illicit situation. Short of that, the logical explanation is the pads were set up as high-level inter-governmental brothels, where the booze and the broads were on the house, but a Sword of Damocles hung from the two-way mirror on the ceiling. (All the stress on LSD is a distraction, overfed to the media long past its stale date. And there are other, often superior, "truth serum" botanicals.) The records of the experiment were destroyed by Gottlieb when he retired in 1973, probably because there never were any records, as they were irreconcilable with the business at hand and the agency's charter. "Studying" LSD in this setting would be like studying the orgasmic potential of the adolescent male---a foregone conclusion, in other words.
George White, a.k.a. Morgan Hall, the senior Bureau of Narcotics agent who was Gottlieb's partner in the endeavor, outstripped the spy master in his louche hedonism. The San Francisco apartment, which White established and Gottlieb visited four times a year, was filled with sex toys and S & M paraphernalia.
More serious lies were told at the Congressional hearing by C.I.A. spokesmen than just changing the term of the enterprise. In what seems to be an unexpected coincidence, a month after the August 4th, New York Times article, on September 5th, the Washington Post published an article that covered the same ground, but the facts stemmed from an entirely different source---the private diaries of George White:
The diaries were kept by Col. George H. White, Alias Morgan Hall, a colorful federal narcotics agent and CIA "consultant" who died two years ago. They reveal new details, including names and dates, about the safe house project, dubbed "Operation Midnight Climax," which was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 1960s to manipulate human behavior. Curiously, White's widow donated his papers to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College, a two-year school set amidst the rolling Los Altes hills 40 miles south of San Francisco. The papers are a rare find for anyone interested in the espionage business and show White dashing about the world, busting up narcotics rings in South America, Texas and San Francisco's Chinatown.
It would take an institution as obscure as Foothill Junior College to escape the reach of the military-industrial-intelligence-educational-media-foundations complex that rules reality, for White's diaries to have survived and reach the public's attention.
The diaries revealed the address of the San Francisco apartment, which the United States Congress, the C.I.A., and the New York Times could not "immediately" come up with, but it also disclosed a different address for the New York City "field laboratory" then the New York Times reported:
"a house at 81 Bedford St. in New York City's Greenwich Village [that White rented] under the name of Morgan Hall, the same one he used several years later to set up the Telegraph Hill apartment at 225 Chestnut St. in San Francisco."
In Treaster's Times' article, the only figure he names is C.I.A, Director Adm. Turner, who along with several "C.I.A. officials and former employees," as well as "a former C.I.A. psychologist," gave testimony to Congress. In the last sentence of the article, Treaster quotes a "Mr. Giordano," who had not been introduced before in the article, but given the context, he appears to be a senior officer of the Bureau of Narcotics:
The C.I.A. documents indicated that the drug tests were carried out by narcotics agents. But Mr. Giordano said that "if that were the case, it was done without our knowledge, or mine."Treaster reports the address of the New York "safe house" as being a studio apartment at 103 West 13th Street, amending that on a second reference to "two adjoining studios with a connecting door," and outfitted with a two-way mirror so that observers could record the action of hired prostitutes and guests. Personally, I've never seen two studio apartments which had a door communicating between them like hotel rooms do, Be that as it may:
There was one apartment in each city. The one in New York was at 103 West 13th Street, a Federal investigator said, but the address of the San Francisco apartment was not immediately known. Both were studio apartments.
A flaw at the heart of this story is that it is very difficult for a hooker to work out of a doorman building in New York City, especially a building cramped with studios and small one-bedrooms like the building pictured below, number 105 West 13th Street, at the corner of 6th Avenue. There could be a dozen neighbors circulating from the same hallway, any of whom would raise havoc at the sight of a stream of working girls and their bar pickups. The Cafe Loup pictured, if it has a separate address, would be 107, since the numbers grow as you move west. It's doubtful there ever was a number 103.
This non-descript red brick building could date from the 20's. The hideous make-over of the first-floor facade and lobby, in polished gray marble and aluminum, looks like it dates from the 60's. The brickwork is spalling, the air conditioners punched-through the walls look like leaking sieves.
Looking eastward along 13th Street from in front of number 113.
81 Bedford St.
The building at 81 Bedford St. in the West Village is a six-story apartment house that looks too small to ever have a full-time super, let alone a doorman.
NYSongLines, which maps out Manhattan architecture block by block even mentions Gottlieb's brief legacy at this address:
81 (block): An apartment in 81 Bedford was used as a safe house by the CIA for LSD experiments from 1952-54-- sometimes administered by prostitutes on unwitting non-volunteers.NYSongLines takes its information from the Washington Post article of Sept. 5, which makes clear what the rest of the record obscures: that the CIA never ran both houses simultaneously:
In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of the Bureau of Narcotics. Apparently, the Chestnut Street duplex also was used by the bureau to lure narcotics dealers and then arrest them. In 1956, White and narcotics agent Ira C. Feldman, who posed as an East Cost mobster, arrested seven San. Franciscans as part of a heroin ring.For what's it's worth, Forgotten NY tells us that
Beat-era novelist William Burroughs lived at 69 Bedford, a few doors down, in the 1950s.A 650 s.f. one-bedroom in 81 Bedford St. is currently on the market for $949,000.
Why the C.I.A. would misrepresent to Congress the location of its New York unsafe house is a mystery. But to other details that are wrong or false, like misrepresenting the project's starting date, we can infer a clear meaning.
Treaster in the Times again:
According to C.I.A. documents, the nine-year operation, identified today by the code-name "Midnight Climax," started in 1954, after two men had died in unwitting drug tests, including one somewhat similar to the "experiments" in the apartments.While the Washington Post's writer, John Jacobs, quotes that the house was in use a year earlier:
His diaries show that Gottlieb and Lashbrook met him at the Bedford Street apartment. A June 8, 1953, entry said: "Gottlieb brings $4,123.27 for 'Hall' - Deposit $3,400." A Sept. 16 entry added: "Lashbrook at 81 Bedford - Owen Winkle and LSD surprise - can wash."So the apartment was operational before November 28, 1953, the date of Frank Olson's death.
Before you can begin to hazard a probable truth, you first have to fully dismantle the structure of lies which the mostly self-serving C.I.A. has built around itself, whether the lies were really necessary or not. Fortunately, the endless-war foundation the C.I.A. citadel was built upon shifted remarkably with the fall of the Soviet Union, so the C.I.A. is the single organization with the greatest motive for replacing the Cold War by a new one---an 1,000-year-war with "extremists" and "terrorists."
Speaking of the outrage which greeted Gary Webb's August, 1996 expose in the San Jose Mercury News holding the CIA responsible for cocaine imports, there was an Op-Ed piece from the New York Times published over two years earlier---on December 3, 1993---titled, "The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency," by Larry Collins. Note the Times' headline writer doesn't say "allegations," or "rumors," but states the fact plainly. Although the New York Times can, and often does speak the truth, it doesn't advocate for the truth. Instead, it will advocate against the truth, as it did when it led the crowd-shaming of Gary Webb. This led to the suspension of his expose series, his transfer to a distant office, his de-facto dismissal, and eventually, his suicide
The CIA installed a series of brutal outlaw regimes in country after country, as they moved their drug pipeline from Costa Rica to Panama to Nicaragua, then to Haiti, keeping a step in advance of the stymied counter-narcotics efforts of other federal agencies who tried to resist. Did the Contras, or the residents of South Central Los Angeles have an international network, their own fleet of private jets, as well as a private bank in which to launder billions of dollars in profits? Not only does the CIA operate behind a cloak of invisibility called "national security," they have the power and authority to create cartels with other agencies and corporations and co-opt anyone who might countervail them, This is the lesson of the "field laboratory," or "safe house" operation, which partnered Dr. Sidney Gottlieb with George White, aka "Morgan Hill," who while he ran the San Francisco house was also the top Bureau of Narcotics agent on the West Coast. Add to this the C.I.A.'s domination of corporate media, as well as their ability to manipulate the political class by maintaining secret files and dossiers, which likely included activities compiled at these very same "pads."
A case in point is Ira "Ike" Feldman, who served as the pimp-procurer supplying prostitutes to the San Francisco pad. His "cover" was as a low-life gangster, which is how he was able to entrap selected narcotics traffickers for the Department of Justice. This mode wouldn't have worked once crack cocaine became a drug of choice. Smoking cocaine was so addictive dealers used a hit on the pipe as a test to weed out undercover policemen.
There was a strong emphasis on sexual licentiousness at both pads. Where in the experiment's protocols did a sexual overlay get established? Rather than "behavior modification," the LSD enterprise seems to have pandered to the oldest and basest aspects of human nature. Well-known figures like Timothy Leary and Stephen Gaskin, who were early experimenters with LSD in San Francisco, were as likely to trip in a meditation, concert, or lecture hall. Gaskin famously led a band of followers in a migration out of San Francisco to a farm commune in Tennessee after undercover operatives debased and ruined the possibility of any psychedelic cultural transformations for the good arising out of the use of LSD.
Feldman lived long enough to give an interview in 1994, which was published in Spin Magazine. The writer, Richard Stratton, first establishes in the article how he got the interview---through his "pen cred," as in "state pen," not pen-and-pencil, having served a decade in the penitentiary for selling marijuana. This apparently, was enough to impress Feldman that he wasn't dealing with a hippy LSD dilettante, but someone deep enough to appreciate his special, down-to-earth gruffness.
In the article, Altered States of America, Richard Stratton starts off by explaining that
Ira "Ike" Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Union's potential for developing alternative weaponry.As part of his mythic backstory, Stratton tells us about Feldman
A Brooklyn boy, he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. The Army sent him to another language school, this time in Monterrey, California, where he added Mandarin Chinese:to his repertoire.Learning to speak Russian and Mandarin as second and third languages would be an impressive accomplishment if Feldman had learned to speak English first in a minimally educated fashion. Don't they have English classes in Monterrey? Instead, Feldman delights in his street patois; and a profanity so colorful, and a world view so crude, that it would be remarkable if it weren't also so vapid and insecure.
Take away his gangster trappings, like the fifty and hundred dollar bills he threw around to gain the attention of a trapped audience of economically beholden sex workers, and you're left with the jaw-dropping inconsistency and irrationality of someone of his ilk working for the federal government. Here is a first-person description of his initiation into the C.I.A. ethos:
Posing as Joe Capone, junk dealer and pimp, Feldman infiltrated the seamy North Beach criminal demimonde. "I always wanted to be a gangster," Feldman told me. "So I was good at it. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. One day, White calls me into his office. 'Ike,' he says, 'you've been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Now I'm gonna give you another assignment. We want you to test these mind-bending drugs.' I said, 'Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs?' He said, 'Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?' I know about The Manchurian Candidate. In fact, I read the book. 'Well,' White said, 'that's why we have to test these drugs, to find out if they can be used to brainwash people.' He says, 'If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you'll be doing a great deal for your country.'"
These days, Feldman takes offense at how his work has been characterized by former cops who knew him. "I was no pimp," Feldman insisted. Yet he freely admitted that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. "These cunts all thought I was a racketeer," Feldman explained. He paid girls $50 to $100 a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment that White had set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested.
"As George White once told me, 'Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she'll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he'll treat you nice.' But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people."If anything like this were true, why was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded 183 times? Actually, shouldn't that be water-bored? Ticking time clock---how about a ticking calender---or better still---ticking cuneiform tablet?
I submit these C.I.A. drug experiments weren't to get people to talk, but to get them to shut up. I'll let Ike continue:
The "pad," as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboy's lair, circa 1955. The walls were covered with Toulouse-Lautrec posters of French cancan dancers. In the cabinets were sex toys and photos of manacled women in black fishnet stockings and studded leather halters. White outfitted the place with elaborate bugging equipment, including four microphones disguised as electrical outlets that were connected to tape recorders hidden behind a false wall. While Feldman's hookers served mind-altering cocktails and frolicked with the johns, White sat on a portable toilet behind the two-way mirror, sipping martinis, watching the experiments, and scribbling notes for his reports to the CIA.
I understand that the supplier of the eavesdropping and recording equipment installed in the apartment also supplied the "portable toilet," since obviously the apartment's one john was so situated that White & Co. Voyeurs couldn't pass through the [studio] action. But is this really how spycraft wants to be visualized and remembered? If they could ask James Bond's Q for any exotic device, or advanced tool in the world, do you think they'd say, "what I really want is my own composting toilet with BioScentGuard? Couldn't this functional deficiency have been foreseen, like the "double studios" in NYC that had preceded the S.F. lair? Ira "Ike" Feldman boasts the setup was like the "Playboy Club, circa 1955," but having piss and shit in a chamber pot in the bedroom is distinctly 1755. Ira-Ike then delivers the money shot:
"We tested this stuff they call the Sextender," Feldman went on. "There was this Russian ship in the harbor. I had a couple of my girls pick up these Russian sailors and bring 'em back to the pad. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren't talking. So we had the girls slip 'em this sex drug. It gets your dick up like a rat. Stays up for two hours. These guys went crazy. They fucked these poor girls until they couldn't walk straight. The girls were complaining they couldn't take any more screwing. But White found out what he wanted to know. Now this drug, what they call the Sextender, I understand it's being sold to guys who can't get a hard-on."But I don't understand how screwing until the skin is abraded off your penis somehow gets someone to talk? And about what exactly? What sort of "crap" did White task Ira to extract out of these Russian sailors with Sextender? Aren't merchant seaman pretty much the same around the globe, having been that way since time immemorial? Or were these men sex-starved survivors from a sunken nuclear submarine, who the Soviets deemed safer in San Francisco than the U.S. did a homosexual? (Making this riff even more ridiculous was the early scientific interest in LSD as an aphrodisiac.)
Why the powers-that-be would have green-lighted an interview like Feldman's in 1994 is beyond any psychotropic to explain. Ira-Ike could have safely gone to his maker and none of the rest of us would be the wiser. It's the complete gratuitousness of a thug on display that especially galls. Nothing with the C.I.A. is as advertised.
The earliest article on LSD I've located in the mainstream press is a notice in a science column from the New York Times in 1957. It's clearly a mistake to project backwards from the 60's or later an idealized Merry Prankster-Sargent Pepper conception of the first decade of LSD experimentation, when the purveyors of the powerful new drug in the United States and Canada were trying to either weaponize it, or demonize it--preferably both, as a quartet of scientists, led by the infamous Harold Abramson, does in 1957 when referring to LSD solely as "a drug that produces symptoms resembling schizophrenia"---or for short, as insanity chemical, which the Times' takes as its heading:
December 1, 1957, New York Times, The Week In Review, Science Notes - Insanity Chemical,
Experiments in which a tolerance was built up in normal persons against a drug that produces symptoms resembling schizophrenia are described in the technical journal Science by Drs. H. A. Abramson, B. Sklarofsky, M. O. Baron, and N. Fremont-Smith of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Central Islip (N.Y.) State Hospital. They found that a tolerance can be developed against the insanity-producing drug, called LSD-25, by administration of a similar compound called MLD-41, which also produces schizophrenic effects but is only one-third as effective as the LSD-25 After administering the milder drug for five or six days in increasing doses, it was observed, the normal volunteers could tolerate fifty times the dose of LSD-25 that usually brings on the psychotic symptoms without any abnormal effects. The experiments lend hope to the possibility that schizophrenia, if found to be caused by some chemical in the body, might be treated in the same manner.The Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., was an interesting venue in which to do LSD research:
From its founding in 1910 until it closed its doors in 1939, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York was the center of the American Eugenics Movement. Charles Davenport, a geneticist and biologist, founded the ERO, and served as its director until 1934. Under the direction of Davenport and his associate, superintendent Harry H. Laughlin, the influence of the ERO on science and public policy waxed during the early twentieth century until the beginning of World War II. The ERO is important to the history of embryology because it played a key role in the application of scientific theories about heredity to the formulation of social policies about human reproduction.But the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the world at the time, which also had major units catering to alcoholics who couldn't afford private hospital care, was where the population of "normal volunteers" was secured, although both descriptions were used advisedly. In a typical perversity, Abramson and his colleagues were published with a finding on schizophrenia, when they were in fact, treating alcoholics. How different everything sounded by 1967, when LSD was seen as a tool of enlightenment, rather then mimicking insanity.
Davenport became the director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in 1898. In 1904 he convinced the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) to fund the Station for Experimental Evolution, located on the same campus. Davenport was excited by the potential social benefit of studies in human heredity, as was his wife, Gertrude Crotty Davenport, also an embryologist and geneticist.
With a grant from Mary Harriman, the widow of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910. In 1917, the Carnegie Institution began funding the ERO, and continued to provide its primary funding source until the ERO closed in 1939. John D. Rockefeller, John H. Kellogg, and other private wealthy philanthropists also provided funding for the organization.
________________________________________________________________________________
LSD — The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, by P.G. Stafford and B.H. Golightly, [1967]
Chapter IV. Everyday Problems (part 1) Frigidity, Impotence, Homosexuality and Perversion.
Chapter IV. Everyday Problems (part 2) Alcoholism and Other Addictions:
The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, Edited by Harold A. Abramson, Hardcover [Bobbs Merrill Co, 1967] Description:
697pp., xxvpp. preliminaries.; contains 36 articles/papers by numerous contributors. most of the articles were presented at the Second International Conference on the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, 1965 in Amityville, NY., Stanislav Grof, Sidney Cohen, Walter Pahnke, Humphry Osmond and Sanford Unger were some of the participants., a great copy of a classic work in a fascinating field.
1967, Journal of Asthma Research, 5: 139-143, The Use of LSD-25 in the Therapy of Children, by Harold A. Abramson, M.D., Archived,
The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1910-1939) by Cera R. Lawrence, Archived,
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_______________________________________________________________________________
981 F.2d 1316
60 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 41,949, 299 U.S.App.D.C. 114,
61 USLW 2446
John DOE
v.
Robert M. GATES, Director of Central Intelligence, Appellant.
No. 91-5249.
United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued Oct. 26, 1992.
Decided Jan. 12, 1993.
Rehearing Denied March 23, 1993.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia No. 82-02016.
___________________________________________________
486 U.S. 592 (1988)
WEBSTER, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
v.
DOE
No. 86-1294.
Supreme Court of United States.
Argued January 12, 1988
Decided June 15, 1988
___________________________________________________
796 F.2d 1508
41 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 618,
40 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 36,296, 254 U.S.App.D.C. 282,
55 USLW 2093
John DOE
v.
William J. CASEY, Director, C.I.A., Appellant.
No. 85-5291.
United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued March 13, 1986.
Decided Aug. 1, 1986.
_______________________________________________________________________________
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