Excerpt from the four-part series entitled:
"The High and the Mighty: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA"
====================================================
Steamshovel Press #12
by G.J. Krupey
1995
:: I Get High with a Little Help from My Friends... ::
As recorded in a report prepared for a congressional committee
investigating the CIA's mind control experiments (171), among
the goals of the MK-ULTLTRA project were to develop:
o "substances which will promote illogical thinking and
impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be
discredited in public"
o "materials to render the induction of hypnosis easier" -
"substances which will produce 'pure' euphoria with no
subsequent let-down"
o "materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia
for events preceding and during their use"
o "substances which alter personality structure in such a way
that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon
another person is enhanced"
o "substances which will lower the ambition and general working
efficiency of men."
As examined above, the CIA planned to use LSD as an aid in the
interrogation of captured enemy agents, as well as a sort of
prophylactic for training American agents in resisting
interrogation in the event of capture. Another usage of the
drug planned by the Agency was as a clandestine confusion agent,
to be slipped in food, drink, or whatever to foreign leaders and
politicians of a leftist slant in order to reduce them to
quivering, hallucinating blobs of flesh, gibbering deranged
nonsense in public speeches, embarrassing and disgracing
themselves before the public and in the eyes of the world.
(172)
Of course, the CIA claims that such a use of LSD was never
contemplated against domestic targets. But the Agency, in
violation of its own (pre-Reagan) charter, gathered domestic
intelligence right from the start, and during the height of the
anti-war movement, coordinated Operation CHAOS with the FBI,
military intelligence, and various police departments, to
infiltrate and disrupt those pesky peaceniks. (173) The CIA
intercepted and opened mail, tapped phones, ran smear campaigns.
(174) As we have already seen, during the heyday of MK-ULTRA,
the Agency tested LSD on unwitting-US citizens, in conditions
that were far from clinical and in ways that were nowhere near
being "scientific." They even used each other as guinea pigs.
And there are still unanswered questions about what role, if
any, the CIA might have played in inundating the 1960s counter-
culture with LSD and other drugs during a crucial period, or
even if they possibly created the counter-culture, through
unforeseen circumstances, or even as the ultimate MK-ULTRA
experiment in mass psychological control and manipulation
through drugs.
Too absurd to even consider? Then stop reading now, you won't
be able to take what's coming next...
There is something about the story of Mary Meyer-as-JFK's LSD-
mistress that, if true, is naggingly bothersome. Like the
assassination itself. it demands clarification, insists on being
solved. Recall the plans of Al Hubbard and Humphry Osmond to
make the world a better, more peaceful place with the
application of psychedelic chemical therapy to certain hand-
picked politicians, and their claims of some success. All this
quite a few years before Mary Meyer's similar campaign: was it a
case of like thinking evolving from acid insight happening in
two different places and times, or was Mary Meyer possibly
acting as an agent for Hubbard and Osmond, or someone who was
their direct agent? Consider the Leary connection to Mary Meyer
in light of his connections to Hubbard, Osmond, and Aldous
Huxley. Consider Hubbard's career as an undercover agent for
various government agencies and defense related industries,
including his connection to the CIA. Consider his later career
spent fighting against the youth counter-culture that one would
otherwise think he would have been proud of as being the fruit
of his labors. Then consider Mary Meyer herself, estranged wife
of one of the CIA's seminal top operatives, and her affair with
a president who developed a mutual distrust for the CIA, a
president who swore he would shatter the CIA into a thousand
pieces and scatter the remnants to the wind. A president
believed by many to have been assassinated by that same CIA.
Consider the CIA sex and drugs safehouse experiments conducted
by George Hunter White. Consider the proposed use of LSD as a
means of discrediting foreign leaders. Consider the list of
substances developed by the CIA, or attempted to be developed by
the CIA listed above.
Now consider this: was John F. Kennedy, president of the United
States, the ultimate MK-ULTRA guinea pig? Was Mary Pinchot
Meyer playing some sort of clandestine game, was she some sort
of Mata Hari? Or was she perhaps unwittingly being used by
someone in that capacity?
After all, if we can seriously consider a CIA ready, willing,
and able to assassinate a president they came to see as a threat
or a traitor, why not a CIA willing to dose a president with LSD
and study him as a test subject? What other world leader could
they try their theories out on while observing him in closely
monitored, intimate situations?
Still too absurd to consider? Probably. I hesitate to even put
it on paper myself. But that isn't even the most bizarre
possible theory...
While LSD is not guaranteed to permanently alter the thought
processes of those who experience it, despite the frequent
claims to the contrary often made during the 1960s, it certainly
will give those individuals possessed of some intelligence and
discernment a lot to think about. During the time period when
CIA agents were furthering the scientific testing of LSD by
dosing each other without warning, most agents had their already
well-entrenched paranoid worldviews reinforced: to them, LSD was
a nightmare experience, one to be avoided at all costs. But to
some it was truly a revelation. One agent, after coming down
from the peak of a trip, broke down and wept in front of his
fellow spooks.
"I didn't want to leave it. I felt I would be going back to a
place where I wouldn't be able to hold onto this kind of beauty.
I felt very unhappy. The people who wrote the report on me
said I had experienced depression, but they didn't understand
why I felt so bad. They thought I had had a bad trip." (173)
He was lucky they didn't slap a straight jacket on him and cart
him away for good!
Another operative who came away from his trip without the usual
paranoid residue common to spooks on dope had found himself with
"A more global view of things. I found it awfully hard when
stoned to maintain the notion: I am a US citizen- my country
right or wrong ... You tend to have these good higher feelings.
You are more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea and more
susceptible to the seamy sides of your own society...I think
this is exactly what happened during the 1960s, but it didn't
make people more communist. It just made them less inclined to
identify with the US. They took a plague on both your houses
position." (174)
Certainly, this is a self-defeating philosophy for a spy to
adopt. Did such experiences tempt any CIA agents to chuck it
all, or to stay only to subvert from within? It's a farfetched
speculation, with little evidence to support it. While there
were several notable CIA renegades who would come to public
knowledge with horrible tales to relate of their activities as
covert operators, such men as Phillip Agee, John Stockwell,
Ralph McGeehee, George O'Toole, and David MacMichael seem to
have been impelled more by the resolution of their own troubled
moral dilemmas than by psychedelic insight.
However, one obscure theory, most likely, implausible yet
fascinating, comes from Lawrence Livermore, North California
punk rock luminary best known for his column in punkzine Maximum
Rock 'n Roll. Livermore claims to have once met a fellow who
claimed to be the son of "a high level CIA operative who had
inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination" which he
described as "a power struggle between the liberal and
reactionary wings of the CIA." This fellow ran away from home,
went to the Haight-Ashbury and blew his mind on ... well, you
know what by now (as well as the irony of the situation ... ),
but by the time Livermore met him, he was "in the process of
drinking himself to death." The gist of this wretched fellow's
tale was that:
"Within the CIA there were good and evil factions, and when the
bad group ("the dark ones"...) threatened to gain complete power
via the Kennedy assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam
war and its related heroin trade, the CIA's white knights struck
back with LSD." (175)
It should be noted that Livermore's informant wove a tale that
"tied together Tibetan monks, Hitlerian mystics, secret
brotherhoods dating back to the days of Atlantis, and the
manipulation of white and black magic in the name of saving or
enslaving the human race, and would hiss at the televised image
of Henry Kissinger and say, "He's one of them..look at his eyes."
(176)
It's hard enough to believe merely when it's a tale of black and
white "knights" of the CIA jousting over control of the nation
and the minds of the human race, when the other elements are
added to it, it sounds more like an episode of the continuing
saga of Indiana Jones, or maybe one of Trevor Ravenscroft's
satanic fantasies.
Livermore himself gives the impression that he finds the story
"far-fetched-sounding, yes, but minus the quasimystical
elements, by no means preposterous." (177) Could it have been
possible that some faction of CIA agents, their typical cold war
super-patriot minds blown by acid, indeed flooded the country
with LSD, not as part of some plot to forestall change or stifle
rebellion, but to encourage it, especially in the aftermath of
Kennedy's assassination by their dark counterparts within the
agency? It would not be entirely improbable, if we remember
Captain Al Hubbard and his plans to foster world peace by
turning on world leaders even before Mary Meyer. And if Kennedy
and Mary Meyer were pursuing an acid dalliance, with crucial
repercussions for foreign policy, would it be too hard to
believe that possibly it was due to the influence of somebody or
something else, some self-appointed clique of mystic
manipulators, perhaps, denizens of the clandestine world and
adepts of its covert activities yet ultimately rejecting the
goals of that world, running their own program and agenda
beneath the cover of something much more banally insidious, like
the CIA's MK-ULTRA program?
Well, it would make a good novel anyway...
NOTES:
171) Project MK-ULTRA- The CIA's Program of Research in
Behavioral Modification, Washington, DC, Government Printing
Office, August 31, 1977, pp. 123-25, as cited in Ranelagh, pp.
777-78, n27
172) Lee & Shlain. p. 35; Lee, Ranftel, & Cohen. p. 20
173) Marks, p. 75
174) ibid
175) Livermore, Lawrence (pseudonym of Larry Hayes), "Whatever
Happened to the Psychedelic Revolution? LSD in the Eighties",
Burning Toddlers #2, January 1988, pp. 15-18, Frank Publications,
PO Box 56942, Phoenix, AZ 85079
176) ibid
177) ibid
Excerpted from Part Four of the series:
---------------------------------------
"The High and the Mighty: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA"
copyright 1995 by G. J. Krupey
Which appeared in:
------------------
Steamshovel Press #12
ISSN 10602-3795
POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121
Research on Mary Pinchot Meyer, her alleged acid circle, her
murder and any subsequent cover-up continues at Steamshovel
Press, which is currently following several interesting leads in
this regard. Contact editor Kenn Thomas or author G.J. Krupey
at Steamshovel's address if you have any information or
additional leads on the topic. Confidentiality assured to,
those who request it.
