Re: The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and M
Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 3:14 am
INTRODUCTION
"Our guiding light is not the Hippocratic oath," a doctor working for the Central Intelligence Agency told a classroomful of recruits back in the mid-1960s, "but the victory of freedom." One of the trainees, at least, was taken aback by the pugnacious zeal of this fanatical doctor and wondered what he was talking about. But silence was the answer to that question for a dozen years, until The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" was published in 1977. Now re-issued, this book is a classic in its field, still unsurpassed for its thorough, lucid, and temperate account of the CIA's flirtation with mad science -- frightening "medical" experiments that the Agency hoped would give it absolute mastery over secret agents.
The history of this distressing episode proves two things: that secrecy invites dangerous temptations, and that any ideal -- even "the victory of freedom" -- may be corrupted by ill-chosen means. As much as the book itself, the story of how The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" came to be written proves that Americans are of two minds about the practice of secret intelligence -- ready enough to admit we've got to do it, but unhappy with the way it's so often done.
Like all great embarrassments, the CIA's secret drug-testing program began prosaically -- with the bright idea that "science" might be used to solve certain nagging difficulties of the intelligence business. The principal secret of secret intelligence is how to get someone to do your bidding. Money, sex, fear, and the desire for revenge all work, but none perfectly or dependably. Ideological conviction is probably the best of all, but it's also the rarest. Holding on to spies once they've been recruited is just as difficult. They get cold feet, get greedy, get hurt feelings, or get ideas of their own. One way or another, they slip away. When old hands in the game talk about intelligence tradecraft, a favorite subject, they talk about two things -- how to conduct operations without attracting notice, and how to recruit and manage agents.
Spy-running is an ancient art. Sun Tzu, the Chinese military writer of the fifth century B.C., devoted a chapter of his great work, The Art of War, to secret agents -- a subject one of his ancient commentators called "mouth-to-ear matters." Sun Tzu fully understood the concepts of agents in place, disinformation, the doubling of enemy agents, and the compartmentalization of information on the basis of "need to know." He also stressed the art of agent-handling, remarking that "he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them."
There's the rub. Delicacy and subtlety do not always work, and in any event are not easily taught. In the mid-1970s, Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA (1966-1973), told a Senate hearing, "The clandestine operator ... is trained to believe you can't count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want, or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul." But "owning" an agent goes beyond ordinary rapport, and even the greatest insight, tact and sensitivity may fail with the hard cases. When clandestine operators dream of the philosopher's stone, it's a surefire, no-fail, all-weather, inconspicuous device for the control of agents they have in mind -- a "magic bullet" to make agents putty in their hands.
Of course there is no such thing. Agent-running is an art, not a science. But from its beginning in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has done more than simply dream of a magic bullet. It has spent millions of dollars on a major program of research to find drugs or other esoteric methods to bring ordinary people, willing and unwilling alike, under complete control -- to act, to talk, to reveal the most precious secrets, even to forget on command. Leading doctors and scientists were recruited to run many of these experiments, major institutions agreed to sponsor them, and some of the results were substantial. The CIA probably played as big a role in the development and study of psychoactive drugs as the National Security Agency's code-breakers did in the development of computers.
But no magic bullet was found. Drugs can confuse, frighten, relax, arouse, kill, or simply put people to sleep, but none can reliably induce a zombielike trance and slavish obedience. The hope for selective amnesia was not only far-fetched, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding of neuro-chemistry. The spy-runners wanted a drug that would destroy all memory of code words, addresses, the identity of case officers, and even whole operations. CIA officers say it is not "soggy morality" that prevents them from undertaking dangerous operations like assassination, but the plain fact the Agency would thereafter be vulnerable to the tremors of conscience of the assassin. A memory pill would solve that problem nicely.
Researchers found that powerful drugs can indeed wipe out memory, but the sweep is clean. If the year in Berlin went, the wife and kids went with it. For a dozen years it was Liberty Hall in the variously named research arms of the CIA, as the program shifted from the Office of Security to Scientific Intelligence and back again, and then, in 1954, to the Technical Services Staff. Nothing was too wild or unlikely to escape investigation. Eventually it was clear that research was not going to turn up anything more than some useful rules for character assessment, and the drug-testing program was gradually shut down. Knowledge of the experiments had always been closely held within the Agency. Before Richard Helms retired in January 1973, he authorized destruction of CIA drug-testing records in the frank hope that all memory of the experiments, and of their victims, would disappear.
But luck was against him. The antic god that governs the fate of secrets in the American intelligence community works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. Less than two years after Helms had destroyed all institutional memory of the CIA's drug-testing program, as he had certainly intended and probably thought, a chain of improbable circumstances brought it back to the surface like the body of a drowned man. The first link in the fatal chain was forged when The New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, discovered that the CIA had been investigating American citizens inside the United States, something forbidden by the Agency's 1947 charter, and opening first-class mail, forbidden by law. The uproar following publication of Hersh's story in December 1974, led President Gerald Ford to appoint a commission, under the chairmanship of Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, to investigate these and other charges. The Rockefeller Commission interpreted its mandate narrowly and hoped to issue a prompt, reassuring report that would soothe and eventually bury public concern in the time-honored tradition of governments faced by scandal.
It didn't work out that way. The Commission found secrets dumped into its lap by the bushel. Helms's successor as Director of Central Intelligence, James Schlesinger, had concluded that there was only one way to end the string of intelligence scandals that had dogged the Agency since the Watergate burglary of June 1972. Prompted by Deputy Director William Colby, he ordered all CIA employees to tell the Agency's Inspector General about any illegal or "improper" activities that might be laid at the Agency's door. The IG's fat report, referred to within the Agency as "the family jewels," included a reference to the CIA's drug-testing program. In early 1975, Colby, by then Del himself, passed on the IG's findings to the Rockefeller Commission. Once officially delivered, the new batch of secrets could not be safely reburied, and the Commission found itself all but forced to cite the drug-testing program in its final report, issued in June 1975. Two pages of text related the bare facts, but assured the public that all doubtful practices had ceased in the mid· 1960s. News accounts focused on the worst "abuse" of the drug-testing program -- the suicide of one test subject who was secretly dosed with LSD. Even at this late hour the CIA's drug-testing program might have remained largely secret if it were not for one last element of chance -- the aroused curiosity of a former State Department officer turned free-lance writer, John Marks, who had already published one best-selling book on the CIA. It was Marks who gave human features to the bare bones of the Rockefeller account.
The publication of "national security secrets" in the United States is either the scandal or the glory of the nation, depending on who's talking. Intelligence professionals are uniformly horrified that no legal means have been found to enjoin secrecy, a matter of routine in other democracies. Great Britain, which prides itself on its ancient liberties, nevertheless submits to a rigid Official Secrets Act that grants the government· arbitrary and all but unlimited power to decide what's secret and who gets to know. American intelligence officers, including an old-boy network originally trained by the British Secret Intelligence Service during World War II, dream wistfully of an American secrets act that would close the intelligence business to outsiders. They have come close in the past, and may well succeed in the end, because the average American appears to dislike the inky wretches of journalism more than he distrusts the keepers of official secrets.
But for the moment the American press is wide open, and can freely publish anything reporters manage to find out. The result is public debate of unusual vigor and frankness, far removed from the fairy-tale world of the early 1950s, in which officials alleged and the press parroted, an evil international communist conspiracy to undermine faith in God and the Four Freedoms. The white-hat, black-hat version of the Cold War is long gone. The new realism often makes life hard for the secret arm of government, which would prefer to help friends and confound enemies without having to explain every move to the folks back home. But it also enables the attentive public to weigh what it's being asked to support, something impossible -- to cite only one example -- back in the early 19605 when the administration of President Lyndon Johnson mounted secret military operations against North Vietnam that gradually dragged the United States into war. At the same time, however, the extraordinary freedom of the American press is dependent on the handful of journalists willing to dig for the facts that officials would prefer to keep hidden. In effect, American freedom of the press is also the wild card of American democracy, since there is no predicting what journalists will take into their heads to pursue. John Marks, asking no one's by-your-leave, decided he wanted to know why an "employee of the Department of the Army" -- the sole identification provided by the Rockefeller Report -- had been secretly dosed with LSD, and then handled so casually he was allowed to jump from a tenth-floor hotel window in New York City in 1953.
Before joining the Foreign Service in 1965, Marks had graduated from Cornell, embarking on a personal odyssey in many ways typical of the last generation of American college students for whom Vietnam had once been only a geographical place name. Classified 1A by his local draft board two years later, Marks volunteered for State Department duty in Vietnam, where he spent 18 months working in the pacification program. ·He describes himself at the time as a member of "the leverage school" -- officials of mainly liberal sentiment who believed the war could be won if only the Saigon government could be made to change its policies in order to win the hearts and minds of the people. This laudable hope foundered on the great rock of culture -- the inability of our's to understand theirs -- and Marks's faith in leverage had faded by January 1968, when he watched the Tet offensive from the roof of a five-story apartment house in Saigon, marveling at the tracers lazily floating up and down as the battle raged.
By the middle of the year, Marks was back in Washington where he was assigned as a staff assistant to the director of Intelligence and Research, Ray Cline. Every Thursday he accompanied Cline to meetings of the United States Intelligence Board held in the Director's Conference Room on the 7th floor of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just outside Washington. There Marks listened to the latest intelligence on the war. "The hawks used to say, 'If you could only see what the President was seeing ...''' Marks says now. "Well, I saw it all." Cambodia was the last straw. A "NOD IS" (i.e., "no distribution") message describing secret military aid to the Lon Nol government, soon followed by the American invasion, convinced Marks he could no longer remain in the government, and he quit to become an aide to Senator Clifford Case.
In 1971 Marks was intrigued by a story in The Washington Post about a dissident CIA officer named Victor Marchetti. Marks went to see Marchetti, and stayed and talked till three in the morning. Marks already knew something about the politics of intelligence in Washington; Marchetti, who planned to write an expose of the CIA, introduced him to the world of clandestine operators inside the Agency. Marchetti got a literary agent recommended by Marks and submitted a book proposal to a number of New York publishers: One of them slipped the outline to the CIA, which then obtained a restraining order requiring Marchetti to submit his manuscript to the Agency for review. A year later, in November 1972, Marchetti told Marks he couldn't seem to write the book on his own, and asked him to help. Marks jumped at the chance. Seymour Hersh advised him to take notes on a typewriter, and Marks soon found himself typing up as many as twenty-five pages of notes in a three- or four-hour interview. Always a constitutionalist and "kind of Boy Scout-ish," Marks felt the secrecy of the CIA represented a misuse of American power, a betrayal of American ideals, and a symptom of everything wrong with American policy toward the rest of the world. He approached Marchetti's book in the spirit of a crusader.
Marks and Marchetti originally planned to publish all the secrets and then flee the country or go to jail. But after the manuscript was completed in August 1973, Marks was secretly relieved when Marchetti changed his mind, and decided to submit his book to the Agency for clearance. At first the CIA insisted on 339 deletions from the text, some big, some small, and many just plain baffling. Argument and legal maneuver reduced the number of forbidden passages to 170.Marks proposed that they publish the book with bold-face passages to indicate material the CIA tried but failed to censor, and blank gaps where the Agency had its way. This proved a brilliant publicity move. Newspapers throughout the country published a picture of the book's editor at Knopf, Daniel Okrent, holding up tattered pages of manuscript, with daylight showing through the passages literally cut out by the CIA. The book Marchetti and Marks finally published, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was the first substantial work on the American intelligence community since The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross published in 1965. Marks and Marchetti's book provided the first sustained look at American intelligence from the inside. It was a widely reviewed best seller, and it dispatched Marks on a new career as a writer.
For a time, whipped on by a reformer's zeal, Marks harried the Central Intelligence Agency like an avenging angel. His book with Marchetti was treated by the Agency as a major threat to its security, something Marks fully grasped only later when he read internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. At this point in his life, Marks felt the CIA contributed nothing but trouble to international relations, and he did not shrink from making its job more difficult. The Agency was furious, but soon had its revenge.
In December 1974 Marks went to Saigon on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, slipping into the country with a visa obtained in Bangkok and with the aid of a friend who spoke perfect Vietnamese. The CIA had learned of Marks's trip and had cabled a warning from Langley saying he was clever, not to be trusted, and not to be admitted to the country. Marks's name was added to a persona non grata blacklist at customs, but the captain who stamped Marks's passport failed to note his name. The Italian journalist Tiziano Terzzani later told Marks that the captain was jailed for his lapse. On the day before Christmas, Marks went to the embassy to arrange interviews with American officials, saying he was planning to write for Harper's. which was true, and omitted any reference to Rolling Stone. The CIA station soon knew Marks was in Saigon, and did not wait to find out what he had in mind. The day after Christmas, a dozen armed Vietnamese in tigerstripe fatigues suddenly burst into the apartment where Marks was staying and whisked him off into the night. The next half hour was the most frightening of Marks's life. He felt completely helpless, and was. But the Vietnamese, directed by the CIA, were content just to get Marks out of the country.
A dozen years later, in April 1986, Marks met the CIA officer, by then retired, who had personally arranged Marks's arrest and expulsion -- William Johnson, a grizzled and highly literate veteran of the OSS, a decade of counterintelligence wars with the Russians, and several long tours of duty in Vietnam. There are many references to Bill Johnson and his wife, Pat, in Frank Snepp's book about the fall of Saigon in 1975, Decent Interval; indeed, Johnson appears as one of the few American heroes of the debacle, desperately trying to rescue the Vietnamese who had worked for him. In 1986, at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, Johnson told Marks he was lucky to be alive; the Vietnamese (that is, the CIA) might have put him in Chi Hoa prison in Saigon, in which Americans didn't survive. But a half hour of sheer terror had been bad enough; Marks made no further trips to Third World countries where the CIA ran the local security services, and he realized there was a limit to his appetite for a secret war with the Agency.
But Marks continued to write about intelligence. He gathered material about the CIA's support of a secret war in Angola and then gave it to Seymour Hersh when he couldn't find a publisher on his own. In mid-1975, Marks was sure that useful things were still to be learned from the documents provided by the Agency to the Rockefeller Commission. So he requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. At first the Agency said the documents on drug-testing were gone -- destroyed on Helms's orders in 1973. But then in the spring of 1977 -- at a time when Marks's interests had gradually been turning in the direction of humanistic psychology, and he had begun to see less black and more gray in the political world, even where the CIA was concerned -- the Agency told him it had found several boxes of documents. Marks's interest was aroused by the first batch and the promises of more to follow.
In August, the Carter White House announced the discovery of the documents -- a total of some 16,000 pages, held as part of the Agency's financial history and thereby preserved from the shredders. But the White House described the drug-testing program in narrow terms as defensive in nature, prompted by fear of the Russians. Marks already knew that the CIA's research went much further than that, and was intended to give the United States its own broad capacity to manipulate human behavior in the age-old quest for secret control. Angry at the White House attempt to disguise what had really happened, Marks held a news conference of his own -- his first, citing documents he'd already obtained, and spelling out the broad reach of the CIA's drug-testing program. The story was picked up by all three major television networks, and made page one of The New York Times. Shortly thereafter, Marks received a phone call from the Times book publishing subsidiary, asking if he'd like to write a book for them about the CIA's drug testing. Beset by the usual money-troubles of writers and beginning to take a serious interest in psychology and the human potential movement, Marks agreed.
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" took a year to write. The heart of the narrative is based on 16,000 pages of documents, but interviews with psychologists· and CIA officials -- including one helpful Agency veteran they called "Deep Trance" -- helped to fill out the story. By this time Marks had learned to understand CIA officials, and even to trust them. After a research trip to Cuba, for example, Marks told William Hood, an old counterintelligence hand, about the grilling he'd received from one intelligence officer in the Cuban DGI. Late one night, the officer pulled out a copy of Frank Snepp's book and insisted Marks tell him the real names of all the agents Snepp had protected with pseudonyms. Marks refused, and the following day an official of the Foreign Ministry apologized. Marks told Hood about this episode because he wanted no part in the spook game, and feared the CIA might learn about his run-in with DGI through other means.
To help go through the huge mass of material turned over by the CIA, Marks hired four researchers to organize it by subject matter and chronology. Few documents were complete. Almost every name was blacked out with the exception of Sidney Gottlieb's. Why the Agency made an exception for Gottlieb, Marks never learned. Gottlieb had been head of the Technical Services Stat' at a time when the CIA was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, and he appears frequently in the Church Committee's report on Alleged Assassination Plots under the pseudonym "Victor Scheider." Some of the blacked-out names could be read by simply holding them up to the light; others were identified by context. Dr. James Moore, an expert on mushrooms, for example, was one of only 200 names in a directory of American mycologists; a few clues about job history were enough to single him out. When Marks got him on the phone, he had the feeling Moore had been expecting this call for fifteen years.
But a few names proved maddeningly difficult. A year of frustrating effort followed the simple question, What's a seven-letter name that begins with B and ends with N? When Marks finally thought he had the name he called up Deep Trance and asked, "Have you ever heard of Maitland Baldwin?" "I thought you'd never get him!" was the answer. Baldwin was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in 1955 who had wanted to do terminal-type experiments on the effect of sensory deprivation, which meant locking someone up in a lightproof, soundproof box indefinitely -- to see what would happen.
Baldwin's proposal was rejected by an Agency medical officer on humanitarian grounds. Baldwin, however, did perform lobotomies on chimpanzees, and even attempted to transplant one monkey's head to the body of another. Small wonder that the CIA blacked out Baldwin's name on documents, and devoutly hoped no one would ever find out what he'd been up to.
How did the Agency ever get involved in these bizarre experiments, and what did it hope to achieve? Official answers to these questions were all versions of the schoolboy's all-purpose excuse -- the other guys did it first. The Agency cited the baffling confession of impossible crimes by Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Hungary in 1949, hard to explain unless the Soviets had found some way to drug or hypnotize the victim. Later, Americans were perplexed and frightened by the "brainwashing" of prisoners taken by the Chinese during the Korean War. Some of them confessed to ghastly crimes, like the use of germ warfare, and others even refused to come home at war's end. In 1954, a Soviet defector, Nikolai Khokhlov, told the CIA of his responsibility for "executive action," including assassinations for the 13th Department of the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB. According to a classified document prepared by the CIA in 1964 for the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, Khokhlov "described two laboratories associated with the executive action department.... The laboratory for poisons was supposedly a large and super-secret installation. No agents were permitted access to it or even knew of its location. Khokhlov could provide no first-hand information on it. Other sources, however, have reported the existence of this type of laboratory dating back to the purges in the late 19308. A report from one source in 1954 described an experimental laboratory within Spets Byuro #1 known as the 'Chamber' (Kamera). This laboratory conducted experiments on prisoners and persons subject to execution to test the effectiveness of different powders, beverages, liquors, and various types of injections, as well as research on the use of hypnotism to force prisoners to confess."
It is not hard to imagine that this frightening report, and others like it, encouraged the CIA to redouble its secret research efforts. But the truth is the experimenters needed no encouragement, and that fear of Russian wonder drugs had nothing' to do with the origin of the CIA's own program. That went back to the Second World War, when an OSS "truth drug" committee under Dr. Winfred Overholser began experiments with marijuana and mescaline in 1943, and another OSS group investigated "quietus medication" -- that is, lethal poisons -- for possible use against Hitler. Despite harsh condemnation at the Nuremberg trials, of Nazi "scientific" experiments, U.S. investigators poring over research records at Dachau described some of the work, if confirmed, as "an important complement to existing knowledge." American clandestine operators were intrigued by the notion of exotic drugs and truth serums. Protected by secrecy, amply supplied with funds, lured on by the dream of a "magic bullet," they embarked on experiments at the frontiers of medical knowledge.
There were plenty of horrors in the 16,000 pages of documents Marks and his researchers pored through, but for the most part the research was not far removed from what later came to be known as "humanistic psychology" -- study of what the brain can do. Marks was writing a book about two subjects -- the CIA, and the human mind, and by the time Marks was finished writing, he knew he found the human mind by far the more interesting. As a result The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" expresses two dominant attitudes -- fascination with the discoveries of psychological researchers, and anger with their misuse. by the CIA for purposes that were narrow and morally careless.
Talking about morality is not the way to make friends with intelligence officers. They hate the word. They live and work in a world of sometimes harsh, always expedient rules, where results count more heavily than gold stars for good conduct. Intelligence professionals hate to be lectured on right and wrong by people who are sure both always come clearly marked. Who can blame them? "Dumb" is a word they much prefer to "wrong." Asked to judge assassination plots, weird medical experiments, and similar "excesses," they all tend to say much the same thing -- these regrettable episodes were all worse than a crime -- a blunder.
It would be nice to leave it at that, but to excuse everything afterwards is to permit everything in advance. Some things are wrong under any circumstances, and lots of things are wrong when convenience is the real reason for doing them. A little more success in the CIA's research program might have turned up a "safe" way to kill Castro. Would we regret it now only because nothing useful would have been achieved? Killing Castro would have been wrong -- not because we couldn't keep it secret, not because he might have been followed by someone even "worse." It would have been wrong because the United States had no right to inflict the trauma of a murdered leader on the people of Cuba for reasons that amounted, in the end, for the convenience of Washington. Sidney Gottlieb (alias "Victor Scheider") secured his place in history by his efforts to provide toxins for political murder, but in that effort he played only a pharmacist's role. More sinister was his sponsorship of research to find a way to make assassination routine, by turning ordinary men into automatons who would kill on command.
Facing up to the fact of the attempt has been agony enough; the heart quails to think of the catastrophe of success. What if Gottlieb and his researchers had succeeded in their wildest dreams, and no secret, nor the life of any "enemy," had been safe from the CIA? The Agency's masters have been prey to lethal daydreams about many opponents over the last 40 years -- Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Lumumba, Qaddafi, DeGaulle, Nasser, Chou En Lai, Khomeini. How could the United States have resisted the temptation to "remove" these inconvenient figures, if it could only have been done in confident secrecy? Owning agents body and soul, attractive in theory, would have given us much to regret, to deny, and to hide. But Providence is kind, and blessed us with failure. "We are sufficiently ineffective," said Martin Orne, a consultant to the CIA during the drug-testing program, "so our findings can be published."
Thomas Powers
January 1988
"Our guiding light is not the Hippocratic oath," a doctor working for the Central Intelligence Agency told a classroomful of recruits back in the mid-1960s, "but the victory of freedom." One of the trainees, at least, was taken aback by the pugnacious zeal of this fanatical doctor and wondered what he was talking about. But silence was the answer to that question for a dozen years, until The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" was published in 1977. Now re-issued, this book is a classic in its field, still unsurpassed for its thorough, lucid, and temperate account of the CIA's flirtation with mad science -- frightening "medical" experiments that the Agency hoped would give it absolute mastery over secret agents.
The history of this distressing episode proves two things: that secrecy invites dangerous temptations, and that any ideal -- even "the victory of freedom" -- may be corrupted by ill-chosen means. As much as the book itself, the story of how The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" came to be written proves that Americans are of two minds about the practice of secret intelligence -- ready enough to admit we've got to do it, but unhappy with the way it's so often done.
Like all great embarrassments, the CIA's secret drug-testing program began prosaically -- with the bright idea that "science" might be used to solve certain nagging difficulties of the intelligence business. The principal secret of secret intelligence is how to get someone to do your bidding. Money, sex, fear, and the desire for revenge all work, but none perfectly or dependably. Ideological conviction is probably the best of all, but it's also the rarest. Holding on to spies once they've been recruited is just as difficult. They get cold feet, get greedy, get hurt feelings, or get ideas of their own. One way or another, they slip away. When old hands in the game talk about intelligence tradecraft, a favorite subject, they talk about two things -- how to conduct operations without attracting notice, and how to recruit and manage agents.
Spy-running is an ancient art. Sun Tzu, the Chinese military writer of the fifth century B.C., devoted a chapter of his great work, The Art of War, to secret agents -- a subject one of his ancient commentators called "mouth-to-ear matters." Sun Tzu fully understood the concepts of agents in place, disinformation, the doubling of enemy agents, and the compartmentalization of information on the basis of "need to know." He also stressed the art of agent-handling, remarking that "he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them."
There's the rub. Delicacy and subtlety do not always work, and in any event are not easily taught. In the mid-1970s, Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA (1966-1973), told a Senate hearing, "The clandestine operator ... is trained to believe you can't count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want, or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul." But "owning" an agent goes beyond ordinary rapport, and even the greatest insight, tact and sensitivity may fail with the hard cases. When clandestine operators dream of the philosopher's stone, it's a surefire, no-fail, all-weather, inconspicuous device for the control of agents they have in mind -- a "magic bullet" to make agents putty in their hands.
Of course there is no such thing. Agent-running is an art, not a science. But from its beginning in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has done more than simply dream of a magic bullet. It has spent millions of dollars on a major program of research to find drugs or other esoteric methods to bring ordinary people, willing and unwilling alike, under complete control -- to act, to talk, to reveal the most precious secrets, even to forget on command. Leading doctors and scientists were recruited to run many of these experiments, major institutions agreed to sponsor them, and some of the results were substantial. The CIA probably played as big a role in the development and study of psychoactive drugs as the National Security Agency's code-breakers did in the development of computers.
But no magic bullet was found. Drugs can confuse, frighten, relax, arouse, kill, or simply put people to sleep, but none can reliably induce a zombielike trance and slavish obedience. The hope for selective amnesia was not only far-fetched, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding of neuro-chemistry. The spy-runners wanted a drug that would destroy all memory of code words, addresses, the identity of case officers, and even whole operations. CIA officers say it is not "soggy morality" that prevents them from undertaking dangerous operations like assassination, but the plain fact the Agency would thereafter be vulnerable to the tremors of conscience of the assassin. A memory pill would solve that problem nicely.
Researchers found that powerful drugs can indeed wipe out memory, but the sweep is clean. If the year in Berlin went, the wife and kids went with it. For a dozen years it was Liberty Hall in the variously named research arms of the CIA, as the program shifted from the Office of Security to Scientific Intelligence and back again, and then, in 1954, to the Technical Services Staff. Nothing was too wild or unlikely to escape investigation. Eventually it was clear that research was not going to turn up anything more than some useful rules for character assessment, and the drug-testing program was gradually shut down. Knowledge of the experiments had always been closely held within the Agency. Before Richard Helms retired in January 1973, he authorized destruction of CIA drug-testing records in the frank hope that all memory of the experiments, and of their victims, would disappear.
But luck was against him. The antic god that governs the fate of secrets in the American intelligence community works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. Less than two years after Helms had destroyed all institutional memory of the CIA's drug-testing program, as he had certainly intended and probably thought, a chain of improbable circumstances brought it back to the surface like the body of a drowned man. The first link in the fatal chain was forged when The New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, discovered that the CIA had been investigating American citizens inside the United States, something forbidden by the Agency's 1947 charter, and opening first-class mail, forbidden by law. The uproar following publication of Hersh's story in December 1974, led President Gerald Ford to appoint a commission, under the chairmanship of Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, to investigate these and other charges. The Rockefeller Commission interpreted its mandate narrowly and hoped to issue a prompt, reassuring report that would soothe and eventually bury public concern in the time-honored tradition of governments faced by scandal.
It didn't work out that way. The Commission found secrets dumped into its lap by the bushel. Helms's successor as Director of Central Intelligence, James Schlesinger, had concluded that there was only one way to end the string of intelligence scandals that had dogged the Agency since the Watergate burglary of June 1972. Prompted by Deputy Director William Colby, he ordered all CIA employees to tell the Agency's Inspector General about any illegal or "improper" activities that might be laid at the Agency's door. The IG's fat report, referred to within the Agency as "the family jewels," included a reference to the CIA's drug-testing program. In early 1975, Colby, by then Del himself, passed on the IG's findings to the Rockefeller Commission. Once officially delivered, the new batch of secrets could not be safely reburied, and the Commission found itself all but forced to cite the drug-testing program in its final report, issued in June 1975. Two pages of text related the bare facts, but assured the public that all doubtful practices had ceased in the mid· 1960s. News accounts focused on the worst "abuse" of the drug-testing program -- the suicide of one test subject who was secretly dosed with LSD. Even at this late hour the CIA's drug-testing program might have remained largely secret if it were not for one last element of chance -- the aroused curiosity of a former State Department officer turned free-lance writer, John Marks, who had already published one best-selling book on the CIA. It was Marks who gave human features to the bare bones of the Rockefeller account.
The publication of "national security secrets" in the United States is either the scandal or the glory of the nation, depending on who's talking. Intelligence professionals are uniformly horrified that no legal means have been found to enjoin secrecy, a matter of routine in other democracies. Great Britain, which prides itself on its ancient liberties, nevertheless submits to a rigid Official Secrets Act that grants the government· arbitrary and all but unlimited power to decide what's secret and who gets to know. American intelligence officers, including an old-boy network originally trained by the British Secret Intelligence Service during World War II, dream wistfully of an American secrets act that would close the intelligence business to outsiders. They have come close in the past, and may well succeed in the end, because the average American appears to dislike the inky wretches of journalism more than he distrusts the keepers of official secrets.
But for the moment the American press is wide open, and can freely publish anything reporters manage to find out. The result is public debate of unusual vigor and frankness, far removed from the fairy-tale world of the early 1950s, in which officials alleged and the press parroted, an evil international communist conspiracy to undermine faith in God and the Four Freedoms. The white-hat, black-hat version of the Cold War is long gone. The new realism often makes life hard for the secret arm of government, which would prefer to help friends and confound enemies without having to explain every move to the folks back home. But it also enables the attentive public to weigh what it's being asked to support, something impossible -- to cite only one example -- back in the early 19605 when the administration of President Lyndon Johnson mounted secret military operations against North Vietnam that gradually dragged the United States into war. At the same time, however, the extraordinary freedom of the American press is dependent on the handful of journalists willing to dig for the facts that officials would prefer to keep hidden. In effect, American freedom of the press is also the wild card of American democracy, since there is no predicting what journalists will take into their heads to pursue. John Marks, asking no one's by-your-leave, decided he wanted to know why an "employee of the Department of the Army" -- the sole identification provided by the Rockefeller Report -- had been secretly dosed with LSD, and then handled so casually he was allowed to jump from a tenth-floor hotel window in New York City in 1953.
Before joining the Foreign Service in 1965, Marks had graduated from Cornell, embarking on a personal odyssey in many ways typical of the last generation of American college students for whom Vietnam had once been only a geographical place name. Classified 1A by his local draft board two years later, Marks volunteered for State Department duty in Vietnam, where he spent 18 months working in the pacification program. ·He describes himself at the time as a member of "the leverage school" -- officials of mainly liberal sentiment who believed the war could be won if only the Saigon government could be made to change its policies in order to win the hearts and minds of the people. This laudable hope foundered on the great rock of culture -- the inability of our's to understand theirs -- and Marks's faith in leverage had faded by January 1968, when he watched the Tet offensive from the roof of a five-story apartment house in Saigon, marveling at the tracers lazily floating up and down as the battle raged.
By the middle of the year, Marks was back in Washington where he was assigned as a staff assistant to the director of Intelligence and Research, Ray Cline. Every Thursday he accompanied Cline to meetings of the United States Intelligence Board held in the Director's Conference Room on the 7th floor of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just outside Washington. There Marks listened to the latest intelligence on the war. "The hawks used to say, 'If you could only see what the President was seeing ...''' Marks says now. "Well, I saw it all." Cambodia was the last straw. A "NOD IS" (i.e., "no distribution") message describing secret military aid to the Lon Nol government, soon followed by the American invasion, convinced Marks he could no longer remain in the government, and he quit to become an aide to Senator Clifford Case.
In 1971 Marks was intrigued by a story in The Washington Post about a dissident CIA officer named Victor Marchetti. Marks went to see Marchetti, and stayed and talked till three in the morning. Marks already knew something about the politics of intelligence in Washington; Marchetti, who planned to write an expose of the CIA, introduced him to the world of clandestine operators inside the Agency. Marchetti got a literary agent recommended by Marks and submitted a book proposal to a number of New York publishers: One of them slipped the outline to the CIA, which then obtained a restraining order requiring Marchetti to submit his manuscript to the Agency for review. A year later, in November 1972, Marchetti told Marks he couldn't seem to write the book on his own, and asked him to help. Marks jumped at the chance. Seymour Hersh advised him to take notes on a typewriter, and Marks soon found himself typing up as many as twenty-five pages of notes in a three- or four-hour interview. Always a constitutionalist and "kind of Boy Scout-ish," Marks felt the secrecy of the CIA represented a misuse of American power, a betrayal of American ideals, and a symptom of everything wrong with American policy toward the rest of the world. He approached Marchetti's book in the spirit of a crusader.
Marks and Marchetti originally planned to publish all the secrets and then flee the country or go to jail. But after the manuscript was completed in August 1973, Marks was secretly relieved when Marchetti changed his mind, and decided to submit his book to the Agency for clearance. At first the CIA insisted on 339 deletions from the text, some big, some small, and many just plain baffling. Argument and legal maneuver reduced the number of forbidden passages to 170.Marks proposed that they publish the book with bold-face passages to indicate material the CIA tried but failed to censor, and blank gaps where the Agency had its way. This proved a brilliant publicity move. Newspapers throughout the country published a picture of the book's editor at Knopf, Daniel Okrent, holding up tattered pages of manuscript, with daylight showing through the passages literally cut out by the CIA. The book Marchetti and Marks finally published, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was the first substantial work on the American intelligence community since The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross published in 1965. Marks and Marchetti's book provided the first sustained look at American intelligence from the inside. It was a widely reviewed best seller, and it dispatched Marks on a new career as a writer.
For a time, whipped on by a reformer's zeal, Marks harried the Central Intelligence Agency like an avenging angel. His book with Marchetti was treated by the Agency as a major threat to its security, something Marks fully grasped only later when he read internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. At this point in his life, Marks felt the CIA contributed nothing but trouble to international relations, and he did not shrink from making its job more difficult. The Agency was furious, but soon had its revenge.
In December 1974 Marks went to Saigon on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, slipping into the country with a visa obtained in Bangkok and with the aid of a friend who spoke perfect Vietnamese. The CIA had learned of Marks's trip and had cabled a warning from Langley saying he was clever, not to be trusted, and not to be admitted to the country. Marks's name was added to a persona non grata blacklist at customs, but the captain who stamped Marks's passport failed to note his name. The Italian journalist Tiziano Terzzani later told Marks that the captain was jailed for his lapse. On the day before Christmas, Marks went to the embassy to arrange interviews with American officials, saying he was planning to write for Harper's. which was true, and omitted any reference to Rolling Stone. The CIA station soon knew Marks was in Saigon, and did not wait to find out what he had in mind. The day after Christmas, a dozen armed Vietnamese in tigerstripe fatigues suddenly burst into the apartment where Marks was staying and whisked him off into the night. The next half hour was the most frightening of Marks's life. He felt completely helpless, and was. But the Vietnamese, directed by the CIA, were content just to get Marks out of the country.
A dozen years later, in April 1986, Marks met the CIA officer, by then retired, who had personally arranged Marks's arrest and expulsion -- William Johnson, a grizzled and highly literate veteran of the OSS, a decade of counterintelligence wars with the Russians, and several long tours of duty in Vietnam. There are many references to Bill Johnson and his wife, Pat, in Frank Snepp's book about the fall of Saigon in 1975, Decent Interval; indeed, Johnson appears as one of the few American heroes of the debacle, desperately trying to rescue the Vietnamese who had worked for him. In 1986, at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, Johnson told Marks he was lucky to be alive; the Vietnamese (that is, the CIA) might have put him in Chi Hoa prison in Saigon, in which Americans didn't survive. But a half hour of sheer terror had been bad enough; Marks made no further trips to Third World countries where the CIA ran the local security services, and he realized there was a limit to his appetite for a secret war with the Agency.
But Marks continued to write about intelligence. He gathered material about the CIA's support of a secret war in Angola and then gave it to Seymour Hersh when he couldn't find a publisher on his own. In mid-1975, Marks was sure that useful things were still to be learned from the documents provided by the Agency to the Rockefeller Commission. So he requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. At first the Agency said the documents on drug-testing were gone -- destroyed on Helms's orders in 1973. But then in the spring of 1977 -- at a time when Marks's interests had gradually been turning in the direction of humanistic psychology, and he had begun to see less black and more gray in the political world, even where the CIA was concerned -- the Agency told him it had found several boxes of documents. Marks's interest was aroused by the first batch and the promises of more to follow.
In August, the Carter White House announced the discovery of the documents -- a total of some 16,000 pages, held as part of the Agency's financial history and thereby preserved from the shredders. But the White House described the drug-testing program in narrow terms as defensive in nature, prompted by fear of the Russians. Marks already knew that the CIA's research went much further than that, and was intended to give the United States its own broad capacity to manipulate human behavior in the age-old quest for secret control. Angry at the White House attempt to disguise what had really happened, Marks held a news conference of his own -- his first, citing documents he'd already obtained, and spelling out the broad reach of the CIA's drug-testing program. The story was picked up by all three major television networks, and made page one of The New York Times. Shortly thereafter, Marks received a phone call from the Times book publishing subsidiary, asking if he'd like to write a book for them about the CIA's drug testing. Beset by the usual money-troubles of writers and beginning to take a serious interest in psychology and the human potential movement, Marks agreed.
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" took a year to write. The heart of the narrative is based on 16,000 pages of documents, but interviews with psychologists· and CIA officials -- including one helpful Agency veteran they called "Deep Trance" -- helped to fill out the story. By this time Marks had learned to understand CIA officials, and even to trust them. After a research trip to Cuba, for example, Marks told William Hood, an old counterintelligence hand, about the grilling he'd received from one intelligence officer in the Cuban DGI. Late one night, the officer pulled out a copy of Frank Snepp's book and insisted Marks tell him the real names of all the agents Snepp had protected with pseudonyms. Marks refused, and the following day an official of the Foreign Ministry apologized. Marks told Hood about this episode because he wanted no part in the spook game, and feared the CIA might learn about his run-in with DGI through other means.
To help go through the huge mass of material turned over by the CIA, Marks hired four researchers to organize it by subject matter and chronology. Few documents were complete. Almost every name was blacked out with the exception of Sidney Gottlieb's. Why the Agency made an exception for Gottlieb, Marks never learned. Gottlieb had been head of the Technical Services Stat' at a time when the CIA was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, and he appears frequently in the Church Committee's report on Alleged Assassination Plots under the pseudonym "Victor Scheider." Some of the blacked-out names could be read by simply holding them up to the light; others were identified by context. Dr. James Moore, an expert on mushrooms, for example, was one of only 200 names in a directory of American mycologists; a few clues about job history were enough to single him out. When Marks got him on the phone, he had the feeling Moore had been expecting this call for fifteen years.
But a few names proved maddeningly difficult. A year of frustrating effort followed the simple question, What's a seven-letter name that begins with B and ends with N? When Marks finally thought he had the name he called up Deep Trance and asked, "Have you ever heard of Maitland Baldwin?" "I thought you'd never get him!" was the answer. Baldwin was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in 1955 who had wanted to do terminal-type experiments on the effect of sensory deprivation, which meant locking someone up in a lightproof, soundproof box indefinitely -- to see what would happen.
Baldwin's proposal was rejected by an Agency medical officer on humanitarian grounds. Baldwin, however, did perform lobotomies on chimpanzees, and even attempted to transplant one monkey's head to the body of another. Small wonder that the CIA blacked out Baldwin's name on documents, and devoutly hoped no one would ever find out what he'd been up to.
How did the Agency ever get involved in these bizarre experiments, and what did it hope to achieve? Official answers to these questions were all versions of the schoolboy's all-purpose excuse -- the other guys did it first. The Agency cited the baffling confession of impossible crimes by Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Hungary in 1949, hard to explain unless the Soviets had found some way to drug or hypnotize the victim. Later, Americans were perplexed and frightened by the "brainwashing" of prisoners taken by the Chinese during the Korean War. Some of them confessed to ghastly crimes, like the use of germ warfare, and others even refused to come home at war's end. In 1954, a Soviet defector, Nikolai Khokhlov, told the CIA of his responsibility for "executive action," including assassinations for the 13th Department of the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB. According to a classified document prepared by the CIA in 1964 for the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, Khokhlov "described two laboratories associated with the executive action department.... The laboratory for poisons was supposedly a large and super-secret installation. No agents were permitted access to it or even knew of its location. Khokhlov could provide no first-hand information on it. Other sources, however, have reported the existence of this type of laboratory dating back to the purges in the late 19308. A report from one source in 1954 described an experimental laboratory within Spets Byuro #1 known as the 'Chamber' (Kamera). This laboratory conducted experiments on prisoners and persons subject to execution to test the effectiveness of different powders, beverages, liquors, and various types of injections, as well as research on the use of hypnotism to force prisoners to confess."
It is not hard to imagine that this frightening report, and others like it, encouraged the CIA to redouble its secret research efforts. But the truth is the experimenters needed no encouragement, and that fear of Russian wonder drugs had nothing' to do with the origin of the CIA's own program. That went back to the Second World War, when an OSS "truth drug" committee under Dr. Winfred Overholser began experiments with marijuana and mescaline in 1943, and another OSS group investigated "quietus medication" -- that is, lethal poisons -- for possible use against Hitler. Despite harsh condemnation at the Nuremberg trials, of Nazi "scientific" experiments, U.S. investigators poring over research records at Dachau described some of the work, if confirmed, as "an important complement to existing knowledge." American clandestine operators were intrigued by the notion of exotic drugs and truth serums. Protected by secrecy, amply supplied with funds, lured on by the dream of a "magic bullet," they embarked on experiments at the frontiers of medical knowledge.
There were plenty of horrors in the 16,000 pages of documents Marks and his researchers pored through, but for the most part the research was not far removed from what later came to be known as "humanistic psychology" -- study of what the brain can do. Marks was writing a book about two subjects -- the CIA, and the human mind, and by the time Marks was finished writing, he knew he found the human mind by far the more interesting. As a result The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" expresses two dominant attitudes -- fascination with the discoveries of psychological researchers, and anger with their misuse. by the CIA for purposes that were narrow and morally careless.
Talking about morality is not the way to make friends with intelligence officers. They hate the word. They live and work in a world of sometimes harsh, always expedient rules, where results count more heavily than gold stars for good conduct. Intelligence professionals hate to be lectured on right and wrong by people who are sure both always come clearly marked. Who can blame them? "Dumb" is a word they much prefer to "wrong." Asked to judge assassination plots, weird medical experiments, and similar "excesses," they all tend to say much the same thing -- these regrettable episodes were all worse than a crime -- a blunder.
It would be nice to leave it at that, but to excuse everything afterwards is to permit everything in advance. Some things are wrong under any circumstances, and lots of things are wrong when convenience is the real reason for doing them. A little more success in the CIA's research program might have turned up a "safe" way to kill Castro. Would we regret it now only because nothing useful would have been achieved? Killing Castro would have been wrong -- not because we couldn't keep it secret, not because he might have been followed by someone even "worse." It would have been wrong because the United States had no right to inflict the trauma of a murdered leader on the people of Cuba for reasons that amounted, in the end, for the convenience of Washington. Sidney Gottlieb (alias "Victor Scheider") secured his place in history by his efforts to provide toxins for political murder, but in that effort he played only a pharmacist's role. More sinister was his sponsorship of research to find a way to make assassination routine, by turning ordinary men into automatons who would kill on command.
Facing up to the fact of the attempt has been agony enough; the heart quails to think of the catastrophe of success. What if Gottlieb and his researchers had succeeded in their wildest dreams, and no secret, nor the life of any "enemy," had been safe from the CIA? The Agency's masters have been prey to lethal daydreams about many opponents over the last 40 years -- Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Lumumba, Qaddafi, DeGaulle, Nasser, Chou En Lai, Khomeini. How could the United States have resisted the temptation to "remove" these inconvenient figures, if it could only have been done in confident secrecy? Owning agents body and soul, attractive in theory, would have given us much to regret, to deny, and to hide. But Providence is kind, and blessed us with failure. "We are sufficiently ineffective," said Martin Orne, a consultant to the CIA during the drug-testing program, "so our findings can be published."
Thomas Powers
January 1988