InvisibleEye
Bluelighter
For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium,” (in Dec. 17th issue of The New Yorker - highly recommended read!!) documents the people who were involved and what they did.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/us-army-experiments-with-lsd-in-the-cold-war.html
Excerpt:
On April 28, 1961, Clovis and the two other team members flew to Europe for ninety days. Their mission, called Operation THIRD CHANCE, was to dose unwitting people with LSD and measure the results. In preparation, the team reviewed dossiers on foreign intelligence assets who were suspected of espionage or of filing questionable reports. The medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel David MacQuigg, evaluated the physical health of the candidates, to the extent that it had been documented; Clovis met with their American handlers to build psychological profiles; and the Army intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Jacobson, looked for tools to use in interrogation, such as discrepancies in previous testimony, evidence of dissembling, and weaknesses, or “soft spots,” where the assets could be emotionally worn down or broken by harassment.
In each country, the team joined with local operatives and methodically rehearsed scenarios to lure subjects to a spot where they could be given the LSD and interrogated. As Jacobson later noted, the team even memorized scripts for “verbal gambits” that would steer the interrogation in a preferred direction. He recalled that “a variety of devices for stressing the subject” were prepared, although he did not say what those were. And since the team did not want to alienate an asset who might turn out to be valuable, the members rehearsed a “reconciliation pitch” to assuage any resentment that the test caused.
No two experiments were the same, but there were commonalities. Typically, the Special Purpose Team sought out a safe house—an accommodation that was unknown to Soviet operatives, or had no other intelligence value. Once the subject arrived, agents would initiate casual banter in the living room, where, hours earlier, Clovis had prepared the drug. He had brought over from Edgewood powdered LSD, which he would use to dust a drinking glass— leaving upon it “an imperceptible dry residue.” Once the test subject was made comfortable, a member of the Special Purpose Team would offer everyone refreshments. When subjects were dosed in soda or juice, the team member made a show of pouring the drinks from the same bottle. If alcohol was served, LSD was slipped into a cocktail after several rounds, while the interrogators sipped “cold tea”—presumably passed off as whiskey—or slowly nursed their drinks.
The officers watched and waited for the drug to take effect, and then employed a verbal gambit to direct the test subject into a room with a polygraph. Using the years of LSD research that Van Sim had helped orchestrate at Edgewood, the response time of the drug could be charted with reasonable accuracy. As the LSD achieved its peak effect, the interrogators’ techniques grew increasingly harsh, to cause maximum anxiety and fear. Jacobson noted that there would be “verbal degradation and bodily discomfort,” and threats against the subject’s life. In two cases, the team suggested to subjects that their “mental condition had been induced and would be a permanent state unless they coöperated.” The questioning would last as long as the drug was effective: eight hours, or possibly more.
***
The members of the Special Purpose Team chose ten subjects, in various European countries. Clovis maintained the posture of a scientist, charting the many variables, tinkering with doses, and making psychological observations. He carefully documented the reactions, which ranged from the expected (“frightened, dependent”) to severe (“defeated, hopeless”). Some of the men appeared to be innocent of any wrongdoing. An intelligence asset in Germany who had access to sensitive documents had presented some difficulties to his handlers, and so was nominated for a test. The LSD-enhanced interrogation “gained admissions from the subject which explained most of his handling difficulties,” but the man insisted that he was not a spy.
There were also some unexplained reactions, affirming LSD’s capacity to trigger infinite behavioral variation. One subject seemed to be immune to the drug—an “object lesson in humility,” Jacobson observed. The team began to fear that someone had given the man a warning, or that he had been trained in countermeasures to LSD, suggesting that the whole operation was somehow “compromised to the opposition.” Several weeks later, the team found a pretext to covertly slip him LSD again, this time at more than twice the first dose. The reaction was similar: scarcely any effect.
In France, the team abandoned the decision to test only foreigners, and surreptitiously gave LSD to Private James Thornwell, a soldier from South Carolina who worked as a clerk at an American military-communications station in Orléans. Thornwell, the only African-American soldier at the station, had a contentious relationship with his superior and had recently been demoted; for these reasons, it appears, he was suspected of stealing a hundred and seventy-two classified documents that had gone missing. For ninety-nine days, members of the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps had interrogated Thornwell continuously. Thornwell later recalled being confined to a small room, where he was kept awake for long stretches and forbidden access to food, water, or a toilet; interrogators told him, “If you talk, you get your physical needs taken care of.” He was beaten, and attacked with racial epithets; but he was also told that his interrogators were there to protect him from white soldiers trying to hunt him down, or from assassins working for French intelligence. Thornwell was convinced that he was fighting a war for his own mind. When he could not hold himself any longer, he defecated on an interrogator’s desk. To withstand the isolation, he played imaginary chess on a wall, and dictated an improvised novel, just to hear a human voice. But as the days went by he was pulled deeper into a psychological void. According to a report drafted by a psychiatrist Thornwell saw years later, “He became unsure of who he was, where he was, and why all of this was happening.”
At some point, Thornwell admitted to taking some of the classified documents—an admission that he later said he made up in order to end his suffering. But what he said did not add up: once, he claimed to have burned some of the classified documents; another time, he said that he tossed them all into the Loire. (More than fifty of the documents had been discovered on the riverbank.) He agreed to be questioned under sodium pentothal, saying that he had nothing to hide; the officers found the results inconclusive. He agreed to hypnosis, and was told that if he lied he would feel pinpricks across his body. When he withheld some information about his life, he felt millions of pins tearing into his skin and in his brain, and screamed in agony. But he said nothing more conclusive about the documents.
At last, after three months of trauma, Thornwell was released, but the Army wasn’t done with him. An evaluation by a military psychiatrist found—unsurprisingly, after his ordeal—that Thornwell exhibited an “antisocial personality” with “paranoid trends.” Yet, even though the psychiatrist didn’t believe that Thornwell had “voluntarily compromised government secret information,” he recommended that the experimental interrogations continue. Hypnosis would not work on such a man, he wrote, but “the tension method,” in combination with “tension-producing drugs,” would be successful. This is where the Special Purpose Team came in.
Shortly after Thornwell was let go—maybe even that same day—he met a man who called himself Fusfield. After introducing himself as a lawyer, Fusfield told Thornwell that he was in grave danger, and that he could help. Thornwell could never recall precisely what happened after his lengthy confinement, but he remembered that the two men had lunch, and then Fusfield drove him to a remote mill house in the wooded French countryside. Along the way, a car began to pursue them. Fusfield told Thornwell that assassins working for the French government had tracked them down. By the time they reached the house—a lone rustic structure by a river—Thornwell’s sense of reality had begun to warp. The house’s interior appeared to be covered with spiderwebs, and he found himself seated at a desk, facing a small man with pallid green skin. The man, keeping his hands under the table, explained that he and Fusfield had taken tremendous risks to help him, but, before they could take any more, they needed to be able to trust him—they needed to know what had happened to the documents.
Thornwell, weakened by his relentless isolation, knew that he was not himself. “My head was full of the universe,” he later told his psychiatrist. “Meteorites were burning inside my head, stars shooting off.” He started feeling intense pain and confusion. Time and space tore apart. One moment, it seemed, he was seated at the desk; at another moment, his body had been thrown across the room, and he was being violently crushed against a wall. Suddenly again, he was back in his chair, facing the ashen, alien-like man across the desk, as if he had never left. Thornwell didn’t understand LSD, or even that he had been drugged; he had no framework for comprehending what was happening to him. His nerves felt as though electric current were coursing through them, and he became convinced that a magnet was keeping him locked in the chair—that he was being electrocuted through it. He struggled to get up, but the man at the desk told him to sit, and he found that he could not disobey: he had lost any sense that the chair was separate from his body. Thornwell passed out. When he awoke, the following morning, he was in Fusfield’s car again, heading back to Orléans. He looked at Fusfield, and he saw the same ghoulish skin that the man behind the desk had. Fusfield handed him a piece of fruit. Then he let him go.
Throughout Thornwell’s interrogation, the members of the Special Purpose Team drew his attention to the changes in his perception, and indicated that they had the power to make him permanently insane. After he was let go, he forever had to question whether he had been fundamentally altered. “I felt like my mind was being erased,” he said later. Back in the United States, Thornwell could not speak of his experience without descending into hysterical fits of tears—and, even if he could, who would believe him? He drifted in and out of jobs and relationships. Depressed, and deeply suspicious of the people around him, he went for long periods without speaking—until he feared that he would lose the ability altogether—and once refused to see anyone but his doctor for nearly six months. “The irony is that the Army interrogation techniques forced upon him a tortuous state of isolation,” his psychiatrist noted. “And the legacy of this is that he now imposes this upon himself.” In 1980, two senators from South Carolina, moved by Thornwell’s story, succeeded in obtaining a private congressional bill for him. Thornwell was awarded six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “But he still struggled,” his lawyer, Harvey Kletz, told me. “His behavior was still aberrant, and I don’t think the money in any way changed what burdened him.” Four years later, Thornwell’s body was found in a swimming pool. His wife speculated that he had died of a seizure, although he had never had one before. He was forty-six years old.
For William Jacobson, the intelligence officer on the Special Purpose Team, Thornwell’s interrogation was a success. In a classified report that he filed with Van Sim and a small roster of Army officials, he argued that key admissions had been extracted from him, and from the other test subjects. In Thornwell’s case, these included “variations of the subject’s previous account,” and “satisfactory evidence of subject’s claim of innocence in regard to espionage intent.” Jacobson observed that Thornwell’s interrogation indicated a “need for preplanned precautions against extreme paranoid reaction,” but he argued for further tests with “real subjects of actual crimes for research and operational purposes.”
David MacQuigg, the Medical Corps doctor assigned to the team, also filed a report, in which he expressed naked contempt for the men he had experimented on. Describing them as “money-mad” con artists and liars, he wrote, “These people have no morals and live by their wits.” Like Jacobson, he saw the need for additional tests, and even for the construction of an “interrogation laboratory” where LSD might be tested in combination with radical alterations in room temperature, or a barrage of “supra-sonic waves.” Rather than arguing for reduced amounts of LSD, MacQuigg wrote, “I am of the opinion that a heavier dosage is indicated,” even though this would inevitably cause disabling mental breakdowns. “While it is true that there will be subjects overdosed, and become too upset to interrogate at peak, there is a big gain,” he explained.
Clovis, who no doubt had the most intimate experience with LSD, appeared to have the greatest reservation about how it had been used. It frustrated him that there was little meaningful science to be gained from the interrogations; trying to isolate the effect of the drug amid the chaos that the team manufactured was nearly impossible. The tests offered no definitive conclusions about anything the Army had been trying to learn, he argued, and noted wryly that “in most cases, the gain was considerably less than that.” He thought the attempt to combine the peak LSD experience with harsh interrogation, to create maximum terror, was nearsighted. “I most emphatically do not think that subjects, with the dosages we used, are ‘recovered’ at six hours, nor at seven, nor even at ten,” he argued. His only argument in favor of continuing the research was that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly pursuing similar work, and so “time is of the very essence here.”
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/us-army-experiments-with-lsd-in-the-cold-war.html
Excerpt:
On April 28, 1961, Clovis and the two other team members flew to Europe for ninety days. Their mission, called Operation THIRD CHANCE, was to dose unwitting people with LSD and measure the results. In preparation, the team reviewed dossiers on foreign intelligence assets who were suspected of espionage or of filing questionable reports. The medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel David MacQuigg, evaluated the physical health of the candidates, to the extent that it had been documented; Clovis met with their American handlers to build psychological profiles; and the Army intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Jacobson, looked for tools to use in interrogation, such as discrepancies in previous testimony, evidence of dissembling, and weaknesses, or “soft spots,” where the assets could be emotionally worn down or broken by harassment.
In each country, the team joined with local operatives and methodically rehearsed scenarios to lure subjects to a spot where they could be given the LSD and interrogated. As Jacobson later noted, the team even memorized scripts for “verbal gambits” that would steer the interrogation in a preferred direction. He recalled that “a variety of devices for stressing the subject” were prepared, although he did not say what those were. And since the team did not want to alienate an asset who might turn out to be valuable, the members rehearsed a “reconciliation pitch” to assuage any resentment that the test caused.
No two experiments were the same, but there were commonalities. Typically, the Special Purpose Team sought out a safe house—an accommodation that was unknown to Soviet operatives, or had no other intelligence value. Once the subject arrived, agents would initiate casual banter in the living room, where, hours earlier, Clovis had prepared the drug. He had brought over from Edgewood powdered LSD, which he would use to dust a drinking glass— leaving upon it “an imperceptible dry residue.” Once the test subject was made comfortable, a member of the Special Purpose Team would offer everyone refreshments. When subjects were dosed in soda or juice, the team member made a show of pouring the drinks from the same bottle. If alcohol was served, LSD was slipped into a cocktail after several rounds, while the interrogators sipped “cold tea”—presumably passed off as whiskey—or slowly nursed their drinks.
The officers watched and waited for the drug to take effect, and then employed a verbal gambit to direct the test subject into a room with a polygraph. Using the years of LSD research that Van Sim had helped orchestrate at Edgewood, the response time of the drug could be charted with reasonable accuracy. As the LSD achieved its peak effect, the interrogators’ techniques grew increasingly harsh, to cause maximum anxiety and fear. Jacobson noted that there would be “verbal degradation and bodily discomfort,” and threats against the subject’s life. In two cases, the team suggested to subjects that their “mental condition had been induced and would be a permanent state unless they coöperated.” The questioning would last as long as the drug was effective: eight hours, or possibly more.
***
The members of the Special Purpose Team chose ten subjects, in various European countries. Clovis maintained the posture of a scientist, charting the many variables, tinkering with doses, and making psychological observations. He carefully documented the reactions, which ranged from the expected (“frightened, dependent”) to severe (“defeated, hopeless”). Some of the men appeared to be innocent of any wrongdoing. An intelligence asset in Germany who had access to sensitive documents had presented some difficulties to his handlers, and so was nominated for a test. The LSD-enhanced interrogation “gained admissions from the subject which explained most of his handling difficulties,” but the man insisted that he was not a spy.
There were also some unexplained reactions, affirming LSD’s capacity to trigger infinite behavioral variation. One subject seemed to be immune to the drug—an “object lesson in humility,” Jacobson observed. The team began to fear that someone had given the man a warning, or that he had been trained in countermeasures to LSD, suggesting that the whole operation was somehow “compromised to the opposition.” Several weeks later, the team found a pretext to covertly slip him LSD again, this time at more than twice the first dose. The reaction was similar: scarcely any effect.
In France, the team abandoned the decision to test only foreigners, and surreptitiously gave LSD to Private James Thornwell, a soldier from South Carolina who worked as a clerk at an American military-communications station in Orléans. Thornwell, the only African-American soldier at the station, had a contentious relationship with his superior and had recently been demoted; for these reasons, it appears, he was suspected of stealing a hundred and seventy-two classified documents that had gone missing. For ninety-nine days, members of the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps had interrogated Thornwell continuously. Thornwell later recalled being confined to a small room, where he was kept awake for long stretches and forbidden access to food, water, or a toilet; interrogators told him, “If you talk, you get your physical needs taken care of.” He was beaten, and attacked with racial epithets; but he was also told that his interrogators were there to protect him from white soldiers trying to hunt him down, or from assassins working for French intelligence. Thornwell was convinced that he was fighting a war for his own mind. When he could not hold himself any longer, he defecated on an interrogator’s desk. To withstand the isolation, he played imaginary chess on a wall, and dictated an improvised novel, just to hear a human voice. But as the days went by he was pulled deeper into a psychological void. According to a report drafted by a psychiatrist Thornwell saw years later, “He became unsure of who he was, where he was, and why all of this was happening.”
At some point, Thornwell admitted to taking some of the classified documents—an admission that he later said he made up in order to end his suffering. But what he said did not add up: once, he claimed to have burned some of the classified documents; another time, he said that he tossed them all into the Loire. (More than fifty of the documents had been discovered on the riverbank.) He agreed to be questioned under sodium pentothal, saying that he had nothing to hide; the officers found the results inconclusive. He agreed to hypnosis, and was told that if he lied he would feel pinpricks across his body. When he withheld some information about his life, he felt millions of pins tearing into his skin and in his brain, and screamed in agony. But he said nothing more conclusive about the documents.
At last, after three months of trauma, Thornwell was released, but the Army wasn’t done with him. An evaluation by a military psychiatrist found—unsurprisingly, after his ordeal—that Thornwell exhibited an “antisocial personality” with “paranoid trends.” Yet, even though the psychiatrist didn’t believe that Thornwell had “voluntarily compromised government secret information,” he recommended that the experimental interrogations continue. Hypnosis would not work on such a man, he wrote, but “the tension method,” in combination with “tension-producing drugs,” would be successful. This is where the Special Purpose Team came in.
Shortly after Thornwell was let go—maybe even that same day—he met a man who called himself Fusfield. After introducing himself as a lawyer, Fusfield told Thornwell that he was in grave danger, and that he could help. Thornwell could never recall precisely what happened after his lengthy confinement, but he remembered that the two men had lunch, and then Fusfield drove him to a remote mill house in the wooded French countryside. Along the way, a car began to pursue them. Fusfield told Thornwell that assassins working for the French government had tracked them down. By the time they reached the house—a lone rustic structure by a river—Thornwell’s sense of reality had begun to warp. The house’s interior appeared to be covered with spiderwebs, and he found himself seated at a desk, facing a small man with pallid green skin. The man, keeping his hands under the table, explained that he and Fusfield had taken tremendous risks to help him, but, before they could take any more, they needed to be able to trust him—they needed to know what had happened to the documents.
Thornwell, weakened by his relentless isolation, knew that he was not himself. “My head was full of the universe,” he later told his psychiatrist. “Meteorites were burning inside my head, stars shooting off.” He started feeling intense pain and confusion. Time and space tore apart. One moment, it seemed, he was seated at the desk; at another moment, his body had been thrown across the room, and he was being violently crushed against a wall. Suddenly again, he was back in his chair, facing the ashen, alien-like man across the desk, as if he had never left. Thornwell didn’t understand LSD, or even that he had been drugged; he had no framework for comprehending what was happening to him. His nerves felt as though electric current were coursing through them, and he became convinced that a magnet was keeping him locked in the chair—that he was being electrocuted through it. He struggled to get up, but the man at the desk told him to sit, and he found that he could not disobey: he had lost any sense that the chair was separate from his body. Thornwell passed out. When he awoke, the following morning, he was in Fusfield’s car again, heading back to Orléans. He looked at Fusfield, and he saw the same ghoulish skin that the man behind the desk had. Fusfield handed him a piece of fruit. Then he let him go.
Throughout Thornwell’s interrogation, the members of the Special Purpose Team drew his attention to the changes in his perception, and indicated that they had the power to make him permanently insane. After he was let go, he forever had to question whether he had been fundamentally altered. “I felt like my mind was being erased,” he said later. Back in the United States, Thornwell could not speak of his experience without descending into hysterical fits of tears—and, even if he could, who would believe him? He drifted in and out of jobs and relationships. Depressed, and deeply suspicious of the people around him, he went for long periods without speaking—until he feared that he would lose the ability altogether—and once refused to see anyone but his doctor for nearly six months. “The irony is that the Army interrogation techniques forced upon him a tortuous state of isolation,” his psychiatrist noted. “And the legacy of this is that he now imposes this upon himself.” In 1980, two senators from South Carolina, moved by Thornwell’s story, succeeded in obtaining a private congressional bill for him. Thornwell was awarded six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “But he still struggled,” his lawyer, Harvey Kletz, told me. “His behavior was still aberrant, and I don’t think the money in any way changed what burdened him.” Four years later, Thornwell’s body was found in a swimming pool. His wife speculated that he had died of a seizure, although he had never had one before. He was forty-six years old.
For William Jacobson, the intelligence officer on the Special Purpose Team, Thornwell’s interrogation was a success. In a classified report that he filed with Van Sim and a small roster of Army officials, he argued that key admissions had been extracted from him, and from the other test subjects. In Thornwell’s case, these included “variations of the subject’s previous account,” and “satisfactory evidence of subject’s claim of innocence in regard to espionage intent.” Jacobson observed that Thornwell’s interrogation indicated a “need for preplanned precautions against extreme paranoid reaction,” but he argued for further tests with “real subjects of actual crimes for research and operational purposes.”
David MacQuigg, the Medical Corps doctor assigned to the team, also filed a report, in which he expressed naked contempt for the men he had experimented on. Describing them as “money-mad” con artists and liars, he wrote, “These people have no morals and live by their wits.” Like Jacobson, he saw the need for additional tests, and even for the construction of an “interrogation laboratory” where LSD might be tested in combination with radical alterations in room temperature, or a barrage of “supra-sonic waves.” Rather than arguing for reduced amounts of LSD, MacQuigg wrote, “I am of the opinion that a heavier dosage is indicated,” even though this would inevitably cause disabling mental breakdowns. “While it is true that there will be subjects overdosed, and become too upset to interrogate at peak, there is a big gain,” he explained.
Clovis, who no doubt had the most intimate experience with LSD, appeared to have the greatest reservation about how it had been used. It frustrated him that there was little meaningful science to be gained from the interrogations; trying to isolate the effect of the drug amid the chaos that the team manufactured was nearly impossible. The tests offered no definitive conclusions about anything the Army had been trying to learn, he argued, and noted wryly that “in most cases, the gain was considerably less than that.” He thought the attempt to combine the peak LSD experience with harsh interrogation, to create maximum terror, was nearsighted. “I most emphatically do not think that subjects, with the dosages we used, are ‘recovered’ at six hours, nor at seven, nor even at ten,” he argued. His only argument in favor of continuing the research was that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly pursuing similar work, and so “time is of the very essence here.”
