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June 19, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
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June 21,
2002
CounterPunch
Special Report
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
by Douglas Valentine
Part Three
Reconstructing
History
What emerges from the story so far is
the likelihood that Barbara secretly went to the Whites' apartment
looking for something she could never obtain from Eliot. Had
Eliot been a caring and supportive husband, she might not have
gone. Or she might have trusted him enough to tell him about
her visit and the bizarre experience that ensued.
Possibly she enjoyed the LSD trip. But
considering the paranoia she developed later in life, it's more
likely that she, like Clarice, was traumatized, and that she
buried the trauma in her subconscious mind, like a war veteran
burying some horrible combat experience, only to have it emerge
years later as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
It is possible, too, that the CIA was
responsible for exacerbating the seeds of doubt, guilt, and self-loathing
that evolved into Barbara's paranoia. White put LSD in her drink
while she was in a compromising position. She was with her infant
daughter, without her husband. In a similar situation, Clarice
decided not to tell her parents--the authority figures in her
life at the time.
The overwhelming question is, what exactly
happened to Barbara that night? Clarice cannot recall if Barbara
left the Whites' apartment before her. Because she was tripping
on LSD, she cannot even recall walking home. She wonders why
George White would do such a horrible thing to a friend, let
alone to a woman with a baby?
Did White take advantage of Barbara while
she was defenseless under the influence of LSD? Eliot wonders
if White molested Barbara? If White did abuse her while she was
out of her mind on LSD, would she risk telling Eliot, whom she
knew to be jealous at worst, and unsympathetic at best?
It is agonizing to imagine Barbara's
predicament. How did she manage to care for her child? Like Clarice,
did she fear she might never fall asleep again? That terrifying
thought made Clarice contemplate suicide. Did it also plant the
first suicidal thoughts in Barbara's mind?
Clarice does not recall what happened
to Barbara that night, and Tine isn't saying. So none of these
questions will ever be answered. But plenty of evidence suggests
that the CIA conspired to conceal the truth about what really
happened on the evening of January 11th, 1953.
The Missing
Pieces
Mitchell Rogovin initially told Eliot
that his prior relationship with the CIA was unrelated to the
case. Later, however, he advised Eliot that the CIA did intend
to assert a conflict if the case went to trial. Does that mean
that Rogovin, in some way, was involved in the MKULTRA Program?
In addition, the Rogovin firm may have
given Eliot misinformation about a crucial matter of law. In
a February 8, 1980 internal memorandum, the Rogovin firm said
that Eliot could not sue the federal government for battery,
because White was working for the CIA at the time he dosed Barbara.
But in testimony before the Senate in 1977, Gottlieb said that
White was being paid directly by the CIA for only three to six
months. Gottlieb could not remember the time frame, but he testified
that all of the operations White conducted involved Bureau of
Narcotics interests. A May 1953 entry in White's diary indicates
that he returned to the Bureau of Narcotics that month. And if
White was only on the CIA's payroll for three months, as Gottlieb
testified, then he was a bona fide federal law enforcement officer
when he dosed Barbara with LSD. The government could have been
sued.
Another questionable incident occurred
in early 1981, when Rogovin met with John Blake, the Staff Director
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whom he described
to Eliot as "a former Deputy Director of the CIA."
In fact, Blake had been the CIA's Deputy Director of Administration,
and in that capacity was the direct supervisor of CIA officer
Robert Wiltse, the chief of the Victims Task Force. According
to Rogovin, Blake in turn introduced him to John Bross, "an
old-time CIA man who recently returned from retirement to the
Agency to assist in the transition to the New CIA Director, William
Casey." Rogovin expressed the hope that Bross would convince
the CIA to look more favorably on a pre-lawsuit settlement. But
that never happened, and one must wonder what role Blake actually
played in the negotiations.
Finally, a July 1978 memorandum from
John Blake to the Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield
Turner, refers to a strategy paper for defending the CIA against
lawsuits by victims of the MKULTRA Program. The CIA's Assistant
General Counsel Anthony Lapham composed the paper. While serving
as a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
David Acheson in the mid-1960s, Lapham was responsible for liaison
with the CIA regarding its relationship with the Bureau of Narcotics.
In this capacity Lapham was aware of the existence and purpose
of several MKULTRA "safehouses," the first of which
was established by George White in Greenwich Village in June
1953. Indeed, in 1966, Lapham directed FBN agent Andrew Tartaglino
to shut down a second MKULTRA safehouse on 13th Street in New
York.
Furthermore, on January 23rd, 1967, Lapham
met with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and several other CIA and Treasury
officials in sensitive discussions concerning an investigation
by Senator Edward Long (D-MS). As Chairman of the Subcommittee
on Invasion of Privacy, Long was probing allegations of illegal
wiretapping by various branches of the U.S. government, and his
staff had stumbled on the existence of the MKULTRA safehouses.
A January 30th, 1967 memorandum, written by Gottlieb, records
the CIA's on-going efforts to conceal its involvement with the
MKULTRA safehouses from Senator Long. When asked if the CIA was
using the Narcotics Bureau as a "front" for domestic
operations, Gottlieb said no. He told the Treasury Department
officials that the "pads" were only used for routine
narcotics operations.
Lapham knew this wasn't true. And ten
years later he designed the CIA's strategy against MKULTRA-related
lawsuits. If anyone had a conflict of interest in the Victims
Task Force case it was Tony Lapham. But his activities have never
been questioned, let alone investigated.
The Causal
Relationship
Entries in his diary conclusively prove
that George White gave Barbara Smithe LSD. A surreptitious dose
of LSD is battery, and Clarice testified that it was delivered
to Barbara. So why didn't Rogovin pursue this issue? Why did
he emphasize the potential damage of Dr. Berger's testimony instead,
when there was hearsay evidence that Berger had made sexual advances
toward Barbara while she was his patient?
Considering this, one must also wonder
if the electroshock treatments were prescribed for Barbara's
benefit, or if they were designed to erase memories of George
White from her troubled mind?
Although his firm generated evidence
to support the theory that LSD was the "precipitating agent"
in Barbara's paranoia, Rogovin seems to have ignored it. As the
Rogovin firm noted in a January 15, 1980 report it provided to
Eliot, LSD was thought to precipitate a "model fit"
of schizophrenia. There was a consensus in the research community
that LSD flashbacks could occur and cause mental illness, and
there was agreement that unwitting ingestion was an important
contributing factor to adverse LSD reactions. Unwitting ingestion
represented "a maximally stressful event because the perceptual
and ideational distortions then occur without the saving knowledge
that they were drug induced and temporary."
One researcher concluded, "the hallucinogenic
experience is so striking that many subsequent disturbances may
be attributed to it without further justification."
Even the CIA had uncovered evidence that
LSD may have caused Barbara's breakdown. A year before the Rogovin
firm conducted its research into LSD, Director of Central Intelligence
Stansfield Turner, in a letter dated January 10th, 1979, asked
the Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) to study
the problem. In his personal response to Turner, HEW Administrator
Joseph A. Califano said, "We believe it may be assumed that
where studies with these drugs were conducted in academic institutions
by reputable investigators, any short-term consequences would
have been detected. But if the CIA administered these drugs to
persons under other circumstances, we believe you should take
all possible steps to ascertain whether any individuals might
have been injured as a consequence of their participation in
such research."
George White gave Barbara Smithe LSD
in his apartment, while she was with her 20-month old daughter,
and yet the Rogovin firm decided to drop the case. Why?
Lowlifes on
LSD
Deviants were not the only subject population
of the CIA's LSD experiments. As an August 1963 report on MKLUTRA,
authored by the CIA Inspector General John Earman, clearly stated,
"the effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all
social levels, high and low, native American and foreign, is
of great significance and testing has been performed on a variety
of individuals within these categories."
Entries in George White's diary indicate
that several MKLUTRA victims were dosed at a safehouse he rented
with CIA money in Greenwich Village. In June 1953 White received
$4100 from Dr. Gottlieb. He deposited the money in the National
City Bank and used it to rent an apartment at 81 Bedford Street.
Helping White decorate the apartment with Toulouse-Lautrec posters
was his "Special Employee" Pierre Lafitte, who also
hired prostitutes to lure victims into White's lair. Also assisting
White were Gil and Pat Fox.
"Tine knew that George was dosing
people," Gil Fox explains. "It was his job, and when
George was working LSD he rented an apartment in the Village
at 81 Bedford Street. He set himself up as an artist/painter
named Morgan Hall. He had Pat, who was an artist, paint murals
on the walls."
Other people helped White as well, including
other FBN agents, and White's close friend Irwin Eisenberg. A
wealthy industrialist from California, Eisenberg owned an expensive
home in Larchmont, New York. White often visited Eisenberg there,
and in his diary he describes swimming in the estate's spacious
pool.
According to CIA officer Laubinger, Eisenberg
was a "benefactor of the arts" who in 1953 was sponsoring
the career of Linda King, an aspiring New York actress. An entry
in White's diary notes that he invited Linda to the Bedford "pad"
on 12 September 1953. A subsequent entry indicates that Linda
became "psychotic" and that Tine took her to Lenox
Hills Hospital on East 77th Street and Park Avenue. When Linda
arrived at the hospital she claimed White had "drugged"
her. But nothing came of the incident. Evidently the CIA arranged
an accommodation with the medical department of the New York
City Police department to protect White from any hassles with
victims.
"We knew he was a federal narcotic
agent and was giving people LSD," Gil Fox says. "He
would invite people to Bedford pad, dose them with LSD, and then
take photographs of them through a two-way mirror. But I never
got into it. We weren't interested in that aspect of his life.
He wanted to keep that aspect of his lifestyle secret. At the
time LSD was great fun, that's all. Then sub-agent Olson walked
out the window, and that's when the shit hit the fan."
On 26 November 1953, Defense Department
employee Frank Olson, who had been working on the MKULTRA Program,
allegedly ran through a window and fell to his death from the
tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. Several days
before, Olson had been given a surreptitious dose of LSD by Dr.
Gottlieb. Olson's death was ruled a suicide by the CIA and the
NYPD.
Epilogue
Clarice Smithline never forgave George
White. She describes him as a mean man who drank all day and
kept lots of guns on the table. Once he crushed her curtains
because, he said, they were too pretty.
But she respected him, too. After he
retired as the FBN's District Supervisor in San Francisco, White
invited his father to live with him and Tine at their apartment
in town. There was a fire in the apartment and George rescued
his father. But he could not get back inside to save his beloved
parrot.
"Why," Clarice asks, "did
he dose his friends with LSD?"
The short answer is, so the CIA could
learn how to entrap and discredit people. In one alleged case,
White, on behalf of his friend, New York mayoral candidate Rudolph
Halley, slipped LSD to an opposition speaker at a Halley political
rally.
That is what MKULTRA was all about: entrapping
and compromising politicians, friends and foes alike. It is well
known within the intelligence research community that the CIA
tried to dose Fidel Castro with LSD, and that the FBI made illegal
tapes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. engaging in extra-marital
sex, in a blatant attempt to force him out of politics.
This is the truly frightening aspect
of MKULTRA, and it was known not only to espionage insiders like
Anthony Lapham, but also to the Victims Task Force. As Frank
Laubinger recalls, the Victims Task Force was led to believe
that White "was mixing it up with drug dealers; that he
would slip it to people to aide in their debriefings. But there
was no evidence White was giving pot to drug dealers."
Instead, White was giving LSD to average,
vulnerable people like Barbara Smithe.
"Why give them LSD then let them
wander into the night?" Laubinger asked this writer. "Was
it a lark? Was he serious? This is not standard scientific procedure."
Indeed.
"We were interested to find out
why," Laubinger concludes, "and we would have stayed
with it for several years, but the powers that be told us to
put it behind us."
Laubinger pauses. "If they really
wanted to find out what happened, it would have been investigated
by Congress."
And if not for the fact that so many
Congresspersons have stayed at CIA safehouses, that might actually
be a valid course of action.
The Known Victims
Barbara Smithe:
died of cancer after suffering serious mental problems.
Valerie Smithe:
lives in a foreign country.
Clarice Stein Smithline: settled with the Whites and the CIA.
Francine Kramer:
when contacted by CIA officer Frank Laubinger she was courteous,
but did not recall who was present on the night of 11 January
1953.
Gil and Pat Fox:
swingers who didn't really care.
Kai Jurgenson:
never found
Jo Jurgenson:
advised by her psychiatrist not to assist the Victims Task Force.
Linda King: never
found by the Victims Task Force. There was no record at Lenox
Hills Hospital, and when Laubinger contacted White's childhood
friend, Irwin Eisenberg, he was on his deathbed and did not
want to be bothered. She is said to be living in Los Angeles,
her home for over 50 years.
Herman Ginsberg and his wife Bobbie: Herman Ginsberg was an executive with Crown
Cork & Seal. White's diary indicates they were dosed on 13
September 1953 at the Bedford "pad." White wrote that
Herman told him of a "psychic transformation" after
using "the hypertension drug." When contacted by CIA
officer Frank Laubinger, Ginsberg was not helpful and said he
did not believe they had been dosed.
Ruth Kelly:
a dancer in San Francisco, never found by the Victims Task Forcer,
said to be alive and well and living in Miami.
Laubinger could not find Pierre Lafitte
either, despite the combined efforts of the DEA , CIA and FBI,
and the knowledge that he lived in and operated a restaurant
in New Orleans.
George White:
in 1963 he became seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver and
by 1965 his weight was down to 135 pounds. Upon his retirement
he was appointed fire marshal in Stimson Beach, California. He
continued to drink and surround himself with adoring deviants
until his death in 1975. (White wrote famous letter to Sid Gottlieb,
in which he said: "I was a very minor missionary, actually
a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because
it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American
boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction
and blessing of the All-Highest?")
Albertine White:
the only person who knows the truth.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix
Program, and TDY, all of which are available through iUniverse.com.
For information about Mr. Valentine and his books and articles,
please visit his website at www.douglasvalentine.com
He can be reached at: redspruce@attbi.com
Today's
Features
James T. Phillips
Serbian Reservations: Kosovo 2002
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