Free Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD by Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain Page A

foreign.” Numerous subjects had become ill, and some required hospitalization for days or weeks at a time. Moreover, the sophomoric procedures employed during the safehouse sessions raised serious questions about the validity of the data provided by White, who was hardly a qualified scientist. As Earman pointed out, the CIA had no way of knowing whether White was fudging the results to suit his own ends.
    Earman recommended a freeze on unwitting drug tests until the matter was fully considered at the highest level of the CIA. But Helms, then deputy director for covert operations (the number two position within the Agency), defended the program. In a memo dated November 9, 1964, he warned that the CIA’s “positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing,” and he called for a resumption of the safehouse experiments. While admitting that he had “no answer to the moral issue,” Helms argued that such tests were necessary “to keep up with Soviet advances in this field.”
    This Cold War refrain had a familiar ring. Yet only a few months earlier Helms had sung a different tune when J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, asked him to report on Soviet mind control initiatives. Helms stated his views in a document dated June 26, 1964: “Soviet research in the pharmacological agents producing behavioral effects has consistently lagged five years behind Western research [emphasis added].” Furthermore, he confidently asserted that the Russians did not have “any singular, new potent drugs. . . to force a course of action on an individual.”
    The bureaucratic wrangling at CIA headquarters didn’t seem to bother George Hunter White, who kept on sending vouchers for “unorthodox expenses” to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. No definitive record exists as to when the unwitting acid tests were terminated, but it appears that White and the CIA parted ways when he retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1966. Afterwards White reflected upon hisservice for the Agency in a letter to Gottlieb: “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
    By this time the CIA had developed a “stable of drugs,” including LSD, that were used in covert operations. The decision to employ LSD on an operational basis was handled through a special committee that reported directly to Richard Helms, who characterized the drug as “dynamite” and asked to be “advised at all times when it was intended for use.” A favorite plan involved slipping “P-i” (the code name for LSD when used operationally) to socialist or left-leaning politicians in foreign countries so that they would babble incoherently and discredit themselves in public.
    Fidel Castro was among the Third World leaders targeted for surprise acid attacks. When this method proved unworkable, CIA strategists thought of other ways to embarrass the Cuban premier. One scheme involved dusting Castro’s shoes with thalium salts to make his beard fall out. Apparently they thought that Castro would lose his charisma along with his hair. Eventually the Agency shifted its focus from bad trips and close shaves to eliminating Castro altogether. Gottlieb and his TSS cohorts were asked to prepare an array of bizarre gadgets and biochemical poisons for a series of murder conspiracies allying the CIA with anti-Castro mercenaries and the Mob.
    Egyptian president Gamal Abdal Nasser also figured high on the CIA’s hallucinogenic hit list. While he managed to avoid such a fate, others presumably were less fortunate. CIA documents cited in a documentary by ABC News confirm that Gottlieb carried a stash of acid overseas on a number of occasions during the Cold War with the intention of dosing