Little Shop of Horrors, part three of a three-part series on emerging biological threats…

"You've just got to trust us. We are honorable men."

Richard Helms, former CIA Director

Missing chapters in an old ghoulish tale recently exhumed could add new dimensions of barbarity to revelations in the press, and corroboration by the US government, that thousands of Americans were exposed to radioactive, chemical and biological agents in the 40s and 50s and 60s. But the government's swift and uncharacteristic expiation-by-confession of past trespasses could imply more than just a willingness to lay bare a tarnished conscience. It might instead be a Cheshire cat ploy to keep far more sinister secrets frozen beneath the thick ice of official censorship.

Like an iceberg, US complicity in the rewiring, robotizing and subversion of the minds and bodies of thousands of unsuspecting Americans runs far deeper than imagined. And, because such trickery --- allegedly dictated by the need to thwart equally demoniacal cold war threats --- calls for absolute secrecy, the government nearly succeeded in keeping a tight lid on this ultra-covert component of its war machine. Nearly. Small leaks have since sprung from the warlocks' overflowing cauldrons. Most were swiftly swabbed clean. A short memory and a phlegmatic unconcern for the inscrutable ways of government helped appease America's scruples and dissipate the telltale noxious fumes from its delicate nostrils.

Providentially, however, a number of cases escaped skullduggery and oblivion, among them the mysterious death of tennis pro Harold Blauer. On the morning of January 8, 1953, 42-year-old Blauer was taken from his room at Manhattan's New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he was being treated for depression, to receive an injection. Blauer demured. A month earlier, four injections had made him horribly ill, physically and mentally. He now felt well. Why should he be forced to take that last needle?

Shortly before 10 a.m., against his wishes, Blauer was given 450 milligrams of an experimental mescaline derivative code-named EA-1298. Within minutes, his body snapped as if struck by lightning. His face became contorted, his eyes rolled uncontrollably in their sockets, saliva foamed down his chin. Oxygen and glucose were administered, as was sodium amytal. Artificial respiration was then frantically applied, to no avail. Blauer was pronounced dead shortly after noon. His death certificate tersely concluded that a[n undisclosed] chemical compound has triggered a preexisting heart condition, causing a massive coronary.

Blauer was one of the many victims of a fiendish relationship between the US Army Chemical Corps which insisted on fast results and psychiatrists who were loyal to their research interests, not their patients. The facts concerning the case first became public in 1975, twenty-two years after Blauer's agonizing death, when his daughter, Elizabeth Barrett, sued the US government for using her father as a guinea pig and for causing him a painful and needless death.

It took twelve more years of Byzantine courtroom proceedings and behind-the-scenes cloak-and-dagger negotiations between the CIA, the Army Chemical Corps and the plaintiffs until US District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley finally ruled against the government and awarded Barrett and her sister, Belinda Blauer, the paltry sum of $702,044 --- instead of the $50 million they had sought.

Nine months after Blauer's death, at 2:30 a.m. on November 28, 1953, Robert Lashbrook was awaken by the sounds of shattering glass. By the time Lashbrook reached the gaping hole in the window of his New York City hotel room, Dr. Frank Olson, whose mind and body had been in his care, lay dead, splayed like a disembodied puppet on the pavement thirteen floors below.

Lashbrook was in a hell of a fix. He called his bosses at the CIA and the agency hurriedly concocted a story that prompted the otherwise fastidious New York police to drop the investigation. By knitting a tale of carefully tangled thread, the CIA was able to conceal its role in Olson's death for over two decades. In 1975, a single sentence in a government report provided a bewildered Mrs. Olson with the clue that enabled her to assemble the mangled jigsaw pieces of her husband's puzzling death.* The CIA, she discovered, has spiked Dr. Olson's Cointreau with LSD to determine whether the hallucinogenic drug "would have a disabling or otherwise useful effect on the psyche." The effect was beyond anything the experimenters could have anticipated. After nine days of forcible and repeated exposure to the mind-bending power of LSD, Dr. Olson, clad only in his underwear, escaped madness by jumping to his death through the closed windows of his New York's Statler Hotel room.

Frank Olson's story does not end there. His death was not only cruel but senseless. Nothing was learned from the experiment for which the CIA had "volunteered" him. So casual was the Agency's approach to the [then] most powerful and popular of the psychotropic drugs that no one had bothered to modulate the dosage. The CIA knew that LSD is a powerful and dangerous chemical before they condemned Olson to certain death.

There's more. Results of a forensic examination released recently also contradict government assertions that Frank Olson jumped to his death from his Manhattan hotel. Multiple fractures to his skull did not appear

consistent with a 13-story fall, according to James Starrs, a George Washington University professor of law and forensic science, who was asked by Olson's family to examine the body. It is now widely believed that Olson, one the US top germ warfare researchers, was killed when the LSD he unknowingly took made him erratic and irrational enough to compromise highly classified information. Olson had in fact been deemed a threat to national security.

Harold Blauer's and Frank Olson's immolation at the altar of national security, however tragic, will go down as a minor episode in a much larger grand design by a number of US agencies to play Frankenstein with the bodies and souls of Americans. From the start, the CIA was at the forefront of such research and CIA-funded projects grew like weeds in the 1950s. Some were given graceful or homely code names that belied the perversity of their mission: BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MONGOOSE, DERBY HAT. Other missions earned more lugubrious acronyms --- EDOM (Electronic Dissolution Of Memory) and OTC (Operation Third Chance, in which LSD was used to loosen the tongues of persons whom the intelligence services wanted to "crack" after conventional means had failed). Indecipherable, MKULTRA, under whose banner Blauer, Olson and scores of other Americans were sacrificed, was an "umbrella" project which made use of radiation, electroshock, sodium pentothal, cannabis, scopolamine, morphine, ether, mescaline and LSD.

When caught in the act, or when later challenged in court, as their carefully erected walls of secrecy developed incriminating cracks, the CIA expressed outrage and steadfastly denied being involved. Once inculpated, the "Company" brushed off with sanctimonious disdain any suggestion of guilt and in turn accused its accusers of apostasy for having exposed its ignoble deeds in the first place.

How extensive was the MKULTRA program? While details continue to trickle drop by drop like incriminating blood from oozing declassified government archives, the public will probably never know the full extent of CIA covert assaults on the mental and physical integrity of American citizens. In January 1973, shortly before he left office, CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all existing records. Seven boxes of documents, spanning a 15-year period and comprising thousands of pages, were obliterated. Fortuitously, some misfiled MKULTRA material was subsequently discovered, enough to prove that the CIA had willfully and maliciously broken the law, that it had conducted illegal and unethical projects, and that it had bypassed mandatory audit channels. It is worthy of note that, on the basis of the information included in its pages, the 1976 Senate Report (which tipped off Frank Olson's widow) recommended that the "final" MKULTRA testing phase be eliminated, not because it was illegal or unethical, but because it exposed the CIA to too great a risk of discovery and compromise!

Since the dawn of history despots and benevolent rulers alike have recognized that control of their subjects' mind is more useful than compliance by their body. Until recently, the capacity to twist the mind to conformity was crude and haphazard. Today, mind manipulation is science fact, not fiction. No longer a rare or arcane form of warfare to be used against the enemy, it has been widespread and practiced openly on hundreds of thousands of people --- men, women, children, minorities, mental patients, prison inmates and the elderly.

We are all potential candidates for brainwashing, lobotomy, psycho-surgery, castration, behavior modification, aversion therapy, electro-convulsive shock treatment and direct brain stimulation. We could also be unwitting test animals for a bubbling crucible of diabolical designer drugs capable of making us ill, denying us free will or yanking us out of reality as a merciful prelude to death.
On the afternoon of September 26, l950, the US Army released into the air Serratia marcescens bacteria to see if winds would carry them towards San Francisco. The experiment must have worked, for within a week doctors at the old Stanford University Hospital detected a rare and particularly tenacious infection. A month later, Edwin Nevin, a retired pipe fitter, was dead, and five other patients had developed crippling chills, high fever, lethargy and disorientation. In all, eleven cases of Serratia infection were reported at Stanford Hospital. These developments notwithstanding, the Army continued its open-air testing on military and civilian populations. It did not notify public health officials of its research and withheld information from Stanford Hospital doctors when the infections erupted. Twenty-six years later, upon learning the gruesome details of his grandfather's death, Edwin Nevin III sued the US Army for $11 million. Although the grandson did not know it at the time, evidence about the experiments and details of the senior Nevin's death had been secretly leaked to Congress two years earlier.

Edward Nevin was not the only person to die as a result of Army bacteriological testing. Nor was he the only victim whose cause of death was covered up by the Army. In 1975, the Army revealed that it had altered the death certificates of three other men who had died in 1951, 1958 and 1964.

The complete story of Army germ experimentation on unwitting citizens is far from complete. Tests were conducted at many more locations, some in health care centers, to deflect responsibility away from the Army and onto hospitals where staphylococcal and other infections are common. The Army has since admitted that it carried out 239 open-air tests of biological agents between 1949 and 1969. At least one such experiment was conducted in the New York City subway system.**

How many more went unreported --- before or since? It has been suggested that the baffling Legionnaires' Disease, which caused the deaths or illness of about two hundred persons, may be linked to biological agents developed at Fort Detrick, MD. It was last identified in 1981 when 16 Buffalo, NY residents were diagnosed with the pneumonia-like symptoms. Legionnaire's Disease, which medical researchers believe was caused by bacteria of unknown origin, can be directly traced to a previous outbreak in 1965, when 62 inmates of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a Washington-based federal mental institution, were infected. Sixteen of the infected inmates died. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that rumors that AIDS might be a bacteriological experiment run amok persist. Though unlikely, the theory has not been abandoned.

What has been learned about government experiments on the brain should make everyone distrustful. Over 10,000 pages of formerly top secret US Army and CIA documents have lain bare what has since been described as the most extensive mind-control program in the world. For decades, psychologists, psychiatrists, prison officials, scientists, lawyers and politicians have refined, ordered, participated in, aided and abetted, and concealed mind-control research in US hospitals, laboratories, universities, mental institutions, medical offices, prisons and schools. Cases abound in which originally harmless medical research became wedded to politics to create the most powerful and formidable instruments of madness and death a government would be willing to use on its own citizens.

Several books, some exhaustively documented by researchers of unimpeachable integrity, have since been published. Curiously, none ever made the best sellers' list. All languished in book stores for a short period then were forced off the shelves, a fate that certain books suffer now and then when their contents are deemed "deleterious to national security." *** Anything is possible. Weren't John Lennon's (and other poets') lyrics dissected by the FBI for fear that they might contain subliminal subversive messages?

No one will ever know why the Defense Department, not otherwise prone to buckle under congressional pressure, did an abrupt about-face a year ago last March and rescinded a secrecy oath imposed on servicemen who were exposed to chemical agents during and after WWII. As many as 60,000 soldiers and sailors in Alabama, Alaska, California, DC, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Utah and Panama were subjected to varying levels of poison gases to measure their potency and test the effectiveness of protective clothing. Were US ground troops similarly exposed during the Gulf War? Could the decision to investigate the "mystery ailments" which continue to plague thousands of Gulf War veterans -- after vehement denial by the military of foul play -- turn out to be an oblique admission of guilt?

After decades of imposed silence, the living dead are emerging from the night to haunt their tormentors and to jolt the collective consciousness out of its craven inertia. It might not be premature to ask what other horrors are being brewed, as we sleep, in the name of national security, and which among us will be chosen to partake. For whom will the mycotoxins toll? Who will be tested when more bite is added to snake venom?

How many will be stopped dead in their tracks -- alive and excruciatingly lucid inside a body turned to stone --- as nerve agents capable of simulating terminal Parkinsonism are dispersed to the four winds?

We have come a long way. Exquisitely evil, we keep on sowing new killing fields with fresh seeds of folly. Think of weapons that only kill the indigent or the sick or the mad or the supremely wise. Imagine concoctions genetically engineered to annihilate certain races. Are the gays next? The color-blind? The obese? The elderly? Will the widowed be summarily executed? Could redheads have to undergo mass-sterilization? Are the albino or the flat-footed doomed? Will stamp collectors be mercilessly canceled out of circulation?

Surely, other remedies can be found to further bolster the formidable reactionary powers of dogmatism and intolerance. How about a magic nectar that silences all graying 60-something men five feet nine inches tall who can't help but feel that other fiendish ways of curtailing freedom, denying individuality, compromising sanity or abridging life may be on the way, and who know beyond the shadow of a doubt that so long as we reject intellectual, political, religious and moral conformity, there will be no good place on Earth left for us to hide?


* Page 387, Final Report, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence, US Senate (1976).

** In 1966, sixteen years after the fatal San Francisco tests, the US Army tossed a bulb containing Serratia bacteria from a moving subway train to verify that biological agents could be spread rapidly through the New York subway system. The experiment was a success.

*** Authored by a respected NYU Law School research scholar, edited by this writer and published in 1992 by HarperCollins, Evil Money, a searing exposé linking governments, international banks and top accounting firms in a web of money-laundering schemes, disappeared from bookstores nearly overnight. HarperCollins even denied having published it. The author subsequently was the target of threats and one documented attempt upon her life.

(W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist and former press attaché at Israel's Consulate General in New York. He lives and works in California.)

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