Olson Murder & French Cover Up breaks in Germany

[H.P. Albarelli Jr.]

Offizielle Anfrage der französischen Regierung an die USA über geheime LSD-Experimente in den 1950er-Jahren

F. William Engdahl
Dieser Tage entsteht ein diplomatischer und politischer Skandal, der erhebliche Auswirkungen auf die amerikanisch-französischen Beziehungen haben könnte. Ausgelöst wurde er durch neue Untersuchungen des mysteriösen Ausbruchs von »Massenwahnsinn« in einem südfranzösischen Dorf, bei dem etwa 500 Menschen erkrankten und fünf starben.

Wie zuverlässige amerikanische Quellen berichten, ist beim Bureau of Intelligence and Research des US-Außenministeriums eine vertrauliche Anfrage des Büros von Erard Corbin de Mangoux, dem Chef des französischen Auslandsnachrichtendienstes DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) eingegangen. Den Berichten zufolge bezieht sich die Anfrage auf die kürzlich veröffentlichte Darstellung über die Mitschuld der US-Regierung an dem mysteriösen Ausbruch von Massenwahnsinn in dem südfranzösischen Dorf Pont-Saint-Esprit im Jahr 1951.


Neue Enthüllungen über den mysteriösen Ausbruch von Wahnsinn in dem französischen Dorf Pont-St.-Esprit im Jahr 1951 weisen auf geheime LSD-Experimente der CIA hin.

Fast 500 Menschen waren damals betroffen, mindestens fünf von ihnen sind gestorben. Beinahe 60 Jahre lang hat man den Vorfall von Pont-St.-Esprit entweder auf eine Mutterkorn-Vergiftung – angeblich hatten die Dorfbewohner Brot gegessen, das mit bewusstseinverändernd wirkendem Schimmel verunreinigt war – oder auf eine organische Quecksilbervergiftung geschoben.
Ein kürzlich in den USA erschienenes Buch erhebt aufgrund von ausführlichen Interviews mit inzwischen pensionierten US-Geheimdienstmitarbeitern, die über die Vorgänge in Frankreich im Jahr 1951 direkt informiert waren, den Vorwurf, bei dem bis heute nicht geklärten Ausbruch von »Massenwahnsinn« in dem entlegenen Dorf handele es sich in Wirklichkeit um ein Top-Secret-CIA-Experiment, das im Rahmen des CIA-Forschungsprogramms MKULTRA (wie in ultra-geheim) durchgeführt wurde.
In seinem Buch A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments zu (Deutsch: Ein schrecklicher Fehler: Der Mord an Frank Olson und die CIA-Experimente im Kalten Krieg)dokumentiert der investigative Journalist H.P. Albarelli, dass der Krankheitsausbruch in Pont-St.-Esprit auf ein geheimes Projekt unter der Leitung der streng geheimen Abteilung Special Operations Division der US Army in Fort Detrick im US-Bundesstaat Maryland zurückzuführen ist, bei dem LSD versprüht wurde. Seiner Schilderung nach arbeiteten die Wissenschaftler, die mit der falschen Begründung verunreinigten Brotes oder einer Quecksilbervergiftung die wahre Ursache des Vorfalls vertuscht haben, für das Pharmaunternehmen Sandoz, das sowohl der US Army als auch der CIA mit LSD für Forschungszwecke geliefert hatte.
Eine französische Zeitung hatte damals über bizarre Vorfälle berichtet: »Es ist weder Shakespeare noch Edgar Poe. Es ist – leider! – die traurige Realität von Pont-St.-Esprit und seiner Umgebung, wo sich furchtbare Szenen von Halluzinationen abspielen, die geradewegs aus dem Mittelalter stammen könnten, Szenen voller Schrecken und Pathos, voll dunkler Schatten.« Die amerikanische Zeitschrift Time Magazine, deren Herausgeber Henry Luce eng mit den Propagandaaktivitäten der CIA in den 1950er-Jahren verbunden war, berichtete: »Betroffene fielen ins Delirium: Patienten warfen sich auf dem Bett hin und her, sie schrien entsetzt, aus ihrem Körper sprießten rote Blumen, ihre Köpfe hätten sich in geschmolzenes Blei verwandelt. Aus dem Krankenhaus von Pont-Saint-Esprit wurden vier Selbstmordversuche gemeldet.«
Laut Albarelli heißt es auf der Website des US-Justizministeriums bezüglich der Gefahren von LSD, Anfang der 1950er-Jahre sei »das Chemieunternehmen Sandoz so weit gegangen, der US-Regierung LSD als potenzielle geheime Waffen chemischer Kriegsführung anzupreisen. Sein Hauptverkaufsargument war dabei, schon eine kleine Menge könne, dem Trinkwasser zugesetzt oder in der Luft versprüht, eine ganze Armee von Soldaten orientierungslos, psychotisch und damit kampfunfähig machen.«
Seiner Darstellung nach lagen der CIA verschiedene Vorschläge amerikanischer Wissenschaftler vor, der Wasserversorgung einer mittelgroßen bis großen Stadt eine größere Menge LSD unterzumischen, doch nach Angaben ehemaliger Beamter der Behörde »ist das Experiment wegen der unerwarteten Zahl von Todesopfern bei der Operation in Frankreich nie genehmigt worden«.
Im Rahmen der Forschung über LSD als Offensivwaffe hat die US Army laut Albarelli in der Zeit von 1953 bis 1965 über 5.700 ahnungslose amerikanischen Militärangehörigen Drogen verabreicht. Aufgrund geheimer Verträge mit mehr als 325 Colleges, Universitäten und Forschungseinrichtungen in den USA, Kanada und Europa wurden gemeinsam mit der CIA an weiteren 2.500 Personen umfangreiche Tests mit LSD und anderen Drogen durchgeführt, viele davon waren Krankenhauspatienten und College-Studenten.


Dr. Timothy Leary, LSD-»Guru« der Harvard University, hat zugegeben, mit der CIA gearbeitet zu haben.

Ein Beamter der DGSE, der nicht namentlich genannt werden wollte, erklärt: »Sollten sich die Enthüllungen im Einzelnen als wahr erweisen, wäre dies für die Menschen in Pont-St.-Esprit und für alle Bürger Frankreichs äußerst bedrückend. Dass Regierungsbehörden der Vereinigten Staaten bewusst unschuldige ausländische Bürger zur Zielscheibe eines solchen Experiments machen würden, stellt einen Verstoß gegen das Völkerrecht und eine Verletzung internationaler Verträge dar.«

[Peter Lemkin]

Official request from the French Government to the U.S. over secret LSD experiments in the 1950s

F. William Engdahl
These days, creating a diplomatic and political scandal that could significantly impact on the US-French relations have. It was triggered by new studies of the mysterious outbreak of "mass madness" in a southern French village, where about 500 people ill and five died.

According to reports of reliable U.S. sources, was received by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the U.S. State Department a confidential inquiry of the Office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, the head of the French foreign intelligence service DGSE (Direction Generale de la for External Security). It was reported that the question refers to the recently published account of the complicity of the U.S. Government to the mysterious outbreak of mass insanity in the southern French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.


New revelations about the mysterious outbreak of insanity in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951 indicate secret LSD experiments by the CIA.

Nearly 500 people were affected at that time, at least five of them died. Almost 60 years, it has the incident of Pont-Saint-Esprit either to ergot poisoning - said the villagers had eaten bread that was contaminated with mold in mental-acting - or pushed to an organic mercury poisoning.
A recently published book in the United States stands on the basis of extensive interviews with now-retired U.S. intelligence officials who were informed about what is happening in France right in the year 1951, the complaint in which to this day unexplained outbreak of "mass madness" in the remote village if it were in fact a top-secret CIA experiment, which was under the CIA's MKULTRA research program (as in ultra-) conducted by secret ballot.
In his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold experiment (German: A terrible mistake was the murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's experiments in the Cold War) documented investigative journalist, HP Albarelli that the disease outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit is due to a secret project under the guidance of top-secret Department Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where LSD was sprayed. His account after the scientists who have worked hushed up with the wrong bread contaminated ground or mercury poisoning, the true cause of the incident for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, which had provided both the U.S. Army and the CIA on LSD for research purposes.
A French newspaper had reported bizarre incidents at that time: "It is not Shakespeare or Edgar Allan Poe. It is - unfortunately! - The sad reality of Pont-Saint-Esprit play and its surroundings, where the terrible scenes of hallucinations, which could come straight from the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of dark shadows. "The American magazine Time magazine, whose editor Henry Luce was closely connected with the propaganda activities of the CIA in the 1950s, reported: "Affected fell into delirium patients threw themselves down on the bed with her, she screamed in horror, red flowers sprouted from her body, their heads were in molten lead turns. From the hospital of Pont-Saint-Esprit reported four suicide attempts. "
According Albarelli it says on the website of the U.S. Justice Department about the dangers of LSD, in the early 1950s was "the Sandoz chemical company went so far as to extol the U.S. government LSD as a potential secret weapon of chemical warfare. Its main selling point was to have a small amount could, added to the drinking water or sprayed into the air to make a whole army of soldiers, disoriented, psychotic and thus incapable of fighting. "
In his presentation to the CIA for a number of suggestions were American scientists, unterzumischen the water supply of a medium to large city has a larger amount of LSD, but according to former officials of the authority is "the experiment because of the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France has never accepted '.
As part of the research on LSD as an offensive weapon has given the U.S. Army, according Albarelli in the period 1953 to 1965 clueless than 5,700 American military personnel drugs. Because of secret contracts with more than 325 colleges, universities and research institutes in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been carried out jointly with another 2,500 people at the CIA extensive tests with LSD and other drugs, many of whom were hospital patients and college students.


Dr. Timothy Leary, LSD "guru" at Harvard University, has admitted to having worked with the CIA.

An official of the DGSE, did not want to be named, said: "Should the detailed revelations prove to be true, it would be extremely distressing for the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit and for all French citizens. That government authorities of the United States deliberately targeted innocent foreign citizens would do such an experiment, is a violation of international law and a violation of international treaties dar. "

[Peter Lemkin]

I studied Environmental Health and Toxicology and in Toxicology classes [several] oft was mentioned in lecture or in textbooks about the 'classic' case of a whole French village that suffered from ergot poisoning.......From my own interest in hallucinogens, I knew that the active ingredient in ergot and LSD etc. were very similar and had more than a passing doubt - with no evidence whatsoever. Wonder if they'll change all those textbooks or the lectures.....

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here is the official story from MSM organ, Time:

Medicine: St. Anthony's Fire

Not in years had France seen such rain. Farmers slogged stolidly out to their fields to harvest the sodden crops, mill the grain and send it on its way. In little (pop. 4,400) Pont-Saint-Esprit, perched on a bluff along the River Rhone in southern France, the townspeople sat glumly in their bistros sipping wine, watching the swollen river slip past the medieval bridge which gives the town its name.

Then, without warning, pain and sudden death clutched Pont-Saint-Esprit. On a Saturday night three weeks ago, the town's doctors began getting calls from people complaining of heartburn, stomach cramps and fever chills. At first, they thought it was a mild epidemic of meat poisoning. But the calls kept flooding in. By Monday, 70 houses in the village had become tiny hospitals, with most of their families in bed. Then the doctors found their first clue: every one of the patients had eaten bread from the shop of Baker Roch Briand. All eight of Pont-Saint-Esprit's bakeries were ordered temporarily shut.

Red Flowers & Molten Lead. That night the first man died in convulsions. Later, two men who had seemed to be recovering dashed through the narrow streets shouting that enemies were after them. A small boy tried to throttle his mother. Gendarmes went from house to house, collecting pieces of the deadly bread to be sent to Marseille for analysis. Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit's hospital reported four attempts at suicide.

What was the mysterious madness? Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed Baker Briand's flour, that the flour had been packed in fertilizer sacks, that rats in the grain elevator had contaminated the flour. The police knew better. They had traced the flour back from Briand's bakeshop through the government-controlled flour depot to a mill near Poitiers, nearly 300 miles away.

The Parasite. Last week the word came back from the police laboratory:"We have identified a vegetable alkaloid having the toxic and biological characteristics of ergot, a cereal parasite." Pont-Saint-Esprit had been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten. Modern medicine knows about ergot, but has rarely seen it in the form of an epidemic disease.* It is a black fungus that grows on wet grain, contains chemicals that powerfully affect the blood vessels and the nervous system. Doctors often use ergot extracts to start contractions in the uterus in childbirth.

In the Middle Ages, growing uncontrolled in wet summers, ergot was no such helpful friend. The disease was called "St. Anthony's Fire," and raged periodically through Europe. Monastic chroniclers wrote of agonizing burning sensations, of feet and hands blackened like charcoal, of vomiting, convulsions and death. Whole villages were driven mad. That, in effect, was what had happened to Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

By week's end, French police had found the miller who ground the ergot-laden rye and a man who acknowledged selling him the grain, charged them both with involuntary homicide. In Pont-Saint-Esprit, the toll of illness passed 200; four had died, 28 were still on the critical list. France considered itself lucky: all the contaminated grain seemed to have gone into that one bag of flour delivered to Baker Roch Briand.

* The last verified epidemic in France was in 1816. It has never been reported in the U.S.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz0f4GX5OeP

Hank - your research is fascinating.

Did your investigations reveal any sense of why the luminaries of the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, would choose to spray a French village with LSD?

Clearly, as a scientific experiment, it would be junk as it would be near impossible to gather clinical or medical data from the subjects.

Also, conducting an act of chemical warfare against a major European ally could have had severe diplomatic consequences if discovered at the time.

In the decades following WW2, the Americans and the British in particular did conduct plenty of animal and human experimentation with chemical and biological weapons amongst the populations of central and south America - particularly in client states such as Costa Rica and Panama - see for instance posts #6 & 7 in the thread here:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/for...ead.php?t=1359

However, other than proving that spraying LSD could cause mass psychosis, and thus demonstrating that LSD was a potential battlefield incapacitant, I'm struggling to see what benefit the black doctors could have gained from an LSD experiment at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

[Jan Klimkowski]

As a footnote to the matter of battlefield incapacitants, the military incapacitant of choice is/was probably BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate aka QNB, BZ, EA-2277).

From Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams:

The Acid Brotherhood

"Bringing the war back home" the deeper resonance of the Weather motto returned to haunt the New Left. As millions of Americans took to the streets to protest the Vietnam debacle, the Defense Department was drawn ever more deeply into the problem of containing domestic violence. Military strategists recommended an array of bizarre weapons to quell civil unrest, including the psychochemical incapacitating agent BZ, which had been utilized on a limited basis as a counterinsurgency device in Vietnam.

In March 1966 French journalist Pierre Darcourt described in L'Express an action known as Operation White Wing, in which grenades containing BZ were deployed against a Viet Cong battalion of five hundred troops by the First Cavalry Airmobile; only one hundred guerrillas were said to have escaped. According to Dutch author Wil Vervey the superhallucinogen was used on at least five other occasions in Vietnam between 1968 and 1970. In all probability, however, the Vietnam experience showed the drug to be only marginally effective as a counterinsurgency agent, given its tendency to elicit maniacal behavior and the difficulties of controlling the amount of BZ absorbed in a combat situation. As one senior Defense Department official admitted, all the incapacitants "have dosage ranges into lethality. They can clobber people." Despite these drawbacks the army stockpiled no less than fifty tons of BZ, or enough to turn everyone in the world into a stark raving lunatic.

Documents prepared at the army's "limited war laboratory" at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, one of three major military installations where BZ is stored, indicate that the government seriously considered using the superhallucinogen as a domestic riot control technique. One scheme involved the use of tiny remote-controlled model airplanes nicknamed "mechanical bees." The bees, mounted with hypodermic syringes, would be aimed at selected protesters during a demonstration to render them senseless. Another plan called for spraying BZ gas to incapacitate an unruly mob. A CIA memo dated September 4, 197O, reaffirmed the importance of BZ-type weapons: "Trends in modern police action and warfare indicate the desire to incapacitate reversibly and demoralize, rather than kill, the enemy. ... With the advent of highly potent natural products, psychotropic and immobilizing drugs, a new era of law enforcement ... is being ushered in.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here's an interview conducted by the pseudonymous RUSirius with chemical warfare expert Dr James E Ketchum.

Ketchum's answers are self-serving, and probably contain deliberate obfuscation and diversionary material, but the interview is nevertheless interesting for its claims of a war with the Soviets for "inner space", using substances such as ergot.

Amusingly, precisely the same argument - of a covert mind war with the Soviets for inner space - was trotted out by those defending American psychic research, such as remote viewing.

There were many acid tests happening in the 1950s and 1960s. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters dosed sometimes-unsuspecting proto-hippies. The CIA was dosing unsuspecting mainstreamers. Leary dosed fully cognizant artists, therapists and students. But meanwhile, over at Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military.

As an Army psychiatrist just out of residency, Dr. James E. Ketchum was assigned to Edgewoord Arsenal's Medical Research Laboratories, first as a research psychiatrist in 1961. He became Chief of the Psychopharmacology Branch in 1963, and then became Acting Chief of Clinical Research in 1966. After a brief hiatus at Stanford University, he returned as Edgewoods' Chief of Clinical Research in 1968, staying there until 1971. Dr. Ketchum and his team were looking, primarily, for non-lethal incapacitating agents, and he was central to many of the experiments with these compounds that took place during that time.

Now, Dr. Ketchum has released his fascinating self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten, primarily detailing his times at Edgewood. The book boasts charts, graphs and experimental reports — a veritable goldmine of information for those who are interested in psychedelics, deliriants, or chemical warfare. It's also a funny, observant, and reflective personal memoir, casting a light not only on Ketchum and his work, but on a decade that saw 60s counterculture and the military share an oddly intersecting obsession with mind-altering drugs.

Dr. Ketchum himself has remained intrigued by these chemicals, as reflected in his ongoing friendship with Dr. Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, who wrote a foreword for this book.

I recently interviewed him for The RU Sirius Show. Steve Robles joined me.

RU SIRIUS: Tell us about the research you did at Edgewood Arsenal with various substances as weapons. What was the political environment?

JAMES KETCHUM: It was during the Cold War and there was great concern about what the Soviet Union might be plotting. It was known that they were investing a lot of money in chemical warfare research — about ten times as much as we were. And at the same time, there was an interest in the U.S. in developing weapons that might be called more "humane" as opposed to "conventional" weapons. In 1955, Congress was entertained by Major General Creasy, who described what LSD could do. At the time, that was the latest drug of interest. And as he described it to Congress, they became very enthusiastic, and voted in favor of doing research into LSD as a possible incapacitating agent that would be life-sparing. Congress passed a resolution with only one vote against it, which is perhaps indicative of the philosophy of the times.

So money was allocated to build a project at Edgewood Arsenal, the army chemical center. And over the next few years the budgeting increased, supported by John F. Kennedy, among others. I was given the opportunity to go there after my residency in psychiatry in 1961, and I thought it would be interesting. I ended up spending about ten years there. When I arrived, the program was just in its nascency. There had been some work done by others there with LSD, but they had never had a psychiatrist. And they'd run into a few problems that made them think they ought to have one. So I was given pretty much a free hand over the next few years to develop a program that would be safe and also provide the information that was being sought, not only about LSD but about drugs like BZ, and others.

RU: So you actually ended up having a long strange trip of your own. You had some very interesting experiences with it.

JK: I enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately at the time, classification of that research was so great that very little of the information we found was leaked out to the public or allowed to be spread among the public. And as is the custom in the army — or was the custom — classified papers usually remained classified for 12 years before they'd be downgraded and made available. By that time, most people had gone separate ways. The program itself had been pretty much terminated. No one really wrote the history of that decade. I thought, later, that was a serious omission. And that's what led me to write this book.

STEVE ROBLES: Did you find any evidence that the Soviets might have taken this tack in their own chemical warfare research?

JK: There was information indicating that, around 1960, the Soviet Union was importing vast quantities of contaminated rye from the satellite countries. This was interpreted as being indicative of their interest in producing LSD, since there's not much use for contaminated rye except that it contains ergot, which is a form of contamination [ed: ergot is used to prepare lysergic acid, the raw material for LSD]. That made us think maybe they were having a big LSD development program of their own.

SR: So there was a different kind of space race going on at the same time.

JK: That's right. Inner space.

RU: The meat of this book, and the fun part, is descriptions of people undergoing the experiments. I wonder if any moments in particular pop into your head showing the way that human beings behave under the influence.

JK: I watched a number of people — actually, more than a hundred — going through the experience of having BZ, which is a long-acting atropine type compound. It produces delirium if given in a sufficient dose. Half-a-milligram is sufficient in the case of BZ, as compared with about 10 milligrams of atropine. To describe the tripping in detail would take some time. In the book, I've documented an entire BZ trip over a hundred-hour period, including everything that was said and done.

RU: You had a man watching an entire football game on his fingernail or something?

JK: It was a tiny baseball game on the padded floor. The hallucinations were "real" hallucinations. I'd like to make a distinction between BZ hallucinations and LSD so-called hallucinations, which are really not hallucinations — they're more illusions. People generally know that they're not real, but produced by the drug. Whereas with BZ, the individual becomes delirious, and in that state is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, and may see, for instance, strips of bacon along the edge of the floor.

RU: Belladonna would probably be the most common deliriant among drug experimenters.

JK: Right. Loco weed. Belladonna, in the form of Asmador, for example, was used for asthma and contains atropine. People were getting high on this in the 60s. My brother described one young man trying to crawl across a street in New York City and grabbing onto the pants leg of a police officer. People don't know what they're doing when they're under the influence. They mistake people for objects and objects for people. They'll salute the water fountain or bump into a nurse and say, "Excuse me, sir," and the like.

RU: Were you guys doing a lot of chuckling while this was going on? You're trying to maintain a certain degree of decorum, but...

JK: Yes. I would tell the technicians that it wasn't nice to laugh at these things, even though the subject probably wouldn't remember it later. It was sometimes hard to suppress it. Like when one individual asked another, in the same padded room, if he could have a cigarette. And then, when the other individual held out an empty hand that looked like it was holding a pack, he said, "Oh, I don't want to take your last one." So it was fully "out there" on a fantastic scale.

RU: I had a friend who took belladonna at a rock concert. And about halfway into it, he thought he was back in his own room and that the music on the radio really sucked, and he was going to turn it off. That basically involved twisting this girl's kneecap until he got kicked out. Fortunately, it was just the kneecap.

JK: One young man tried to straighten out my arm, as if it were a pipe of some sort! He tugged on it, and pulled it, and didn't seem at all aware that I might be discomforted by that.

RU: So this book, which is about a very serious subject, is actually quite an amusing read.

JK: Yeah, I tried to keep it from being too heavy, and included a number of anecdotes about people who weren't delirious that were equally funny.

RU: Some of the inter-office activity was amusing too. Describe what happens when soldiers try to deal with mock-up battle conditions under the influence of BZ.

JK: Well of course, commanders wanted to know what would happen if this stuff were ever used in the field. So at first we set up an indoor type of situation, a sort of simulated command post with four soldiers in it. One of them was given a full dose of BZ while the others were given either small doses or none at all, in order to have some possibility of maintaining order. So this one individual would continually go to the door and try to get out. He'd turn around and say, "I'll see you later," but it was locked, and he finally concluded that he was trapped. When the cameras, which were behind these sliding plywood doors, were opened, he came over to one and looked into it as if it were the eye of a Martian. And then he tried to climb out through the medicine cabinet. Then he went over to the water bag and yelled, "Hey, this broad just committed suicide." It took quite a bit of help from his teammates to keep him from hurting himself. But fortunately, nothing serious happened.

RU: You write that nobody was really injured or permanently damaged by these experiments, and you make a distinction between the work that you did at the arsenal and work done by the Central Intelligence Agency.

JK: I tried to dissect out the work done by the army from the work done by the CIA. The CIA, of course, was the first to undertake studies of LSD. They did it without any real scientific structure; and they took liberties that they shouldn't have taken, giving it covertly to American citizens and the like. This was the MK-ULTRA program. Unfortunately, Edgewood Arsenal acquired a reputation for being somehow involved in the MK-ULTRA program — being somehow underwritten by the CIA. And this was not true. There were a couple of individuals who had a secret connection to the CIA, but the program itself was transparent, at least within the military, and there was none of the hijinx that the CIA carried out in San Francisco and other places. [ed: they gave LSD to customers in a house used for prostitution and watched them through a two-way mirror.]

RU: You recently gave testimony about the CIA program. Tell us a little bit about that.

JK: I testified on behalf of Wayne Ritchie, a deputy U.S. Marshall who had been an ideal officer — four years in the Marines, a year at Alcatraz as a guard. He was regarded as perfectly stable — normal. After a Christmas party, where people from the CIA office next door were present, he came back to his office and began to believe that everyone was against him. And then he went out on the street and walked home for the first time without his car, and was convinced that his girlfriend was against him; and the bartender was against him. So he decided to hold up a bar and get enough money for his girlfriend to fly to New York, and then he'd be arrested and they would kick him out of the US Marshal Service and everyone would be happy. So this is what he did, and this is what happened. And when he came to and realized what he'd done, he felt terrible. He wanted to commit suicide. He asked for a bullet to save the state some money, and he submitted a letter of resignation.

From that point on, he was regarded as a pariah and he spent the rest of his life believing he had committed a serious crime for which he'd never be forgiven. Then Sidney Gottleib — who was the head of the MK-ULTRA program — died. And in his obituary, it mentioned that he was supervising the administration of LSD to unwitting American citizens. [ed: The CIA also dosed unsuspecting attendants at office parties, as documented in Acid Dreams and elsewhere.] And so the light went on in his head at that point, and Wayne realized, or believed, that that's probably what happened to him. So a case was eventually brought to court, and I was asked to testify on behalf of Wayne. I spent two-and-a-half days on the witness stand, mostly answering questions from CIA lawyers. Ultimately the outcome was not favorable, unfortunately. The judge didn't feel convinced, and neither did the Appeals court. The judge said, in effect, "If you can explain this man's criminal behavior with LSD, then I suppose you could blame anyone's criminal behavior on LSD." And this really wasn't very logical and didn't fit the facts, but that's how it ended up. It was a rather unhappy ending to an unhappy story.

RU: A number of your volunteers in the LSD experiments expressed feelings of having had a profound experience. More frequently than not, they expressed a sort of regret in coming down and having the experience end.

JK: Yes. We were primarily interested in measuring performance on a systematic basis. But, of course, clinically it was pretty hard to ignore the differences in the responses to LSD that we observed. Some individuals would become very frolicsome and laugh a great deal. Some would become depressed and withdrawn; some became paranoid. Seeing the spectrum of responses in otherwise normal young men was quite interesting. One individual in particular, I believe, actually had a therapeutic experience. He was in a group of four, and we held a televised discussion after the test, and he admitted finally under pressure from his buddies that he had had some unacceptable erotic thoughts about the nurses that he was reluctant to reveal. And they told him that was all right, there's nothing wrong with that. And when he went back to his unit, I heard indirectly that his personality was different. He became more sociable and outgoing. I have to give LSD some of the credit in that case.

RU: Also a frequent response from some of the volunteers was to find the tests just silly and absurd and to just laugh at the things they were asked to do.

JK: Yeah, under LSD, they perceived the absurdity of being asked to solve as many arithmetic problems as they could in three minutes. Sometimes they refused to do it all together. But in other cases they did their best, but couldn't do as well as they did before the drug. I took it once and I had precisely the same difficulty solving arithmetic problems, but I didn't have any of the wonderful visions and fantasies. I guess because I was thinking of the psychopharmacology of the LSD going through my raphe nucleus and so forth.

RU: You took 80 micrograms. It's a little bit shy of a trip.

JK: Yeah. But it was chemically pure, U.S. Army-grade, 99.9 percent...

RU: Got any of that stuff left?

JK: Well, there was 40 pounds left in my office one day in a big black barrel...

RU: Oh yes! Do tell the story of the canister.

JK: I was chief of the department at that point. When I came into work one day, I noticed that there was a big, black, sort of oil barrel-type drum in the corner of the room. And no one said anything, or told me anything about it. So after a couple of days, my curiosity overcame me. After everyone had gone home, I opened it up and pulled out a jar. And I looked and saw that it was about 3.41623 kilograms of LSD. And so were the rest of the jars.

RU: Drop that baby on Iran and see what happens.

JK: But after another couple of days, the barrel was gone! I never heard anything; I never got a receipt for it. The LSD there was probably worth about a billion dollars on the street. And it just stayed there for a few days and went away.

SR: Speaking of getting onto the street, I've never heard of BZ, I guess it didn't penetrate the black market?

RU: That's really not the sort of thing people tend to want to take.

JK: Well, as I say, it's similar to atropine or belladonna, which some people have taken for trips, and it's been used through the ages for ceremonial purposes, for various purposes.

RU: I remember Durk Pearson saying it was interesting.

JK: It lasts about 72 hours in a dose that is just sufficient to incapacitate someone. It can last longer if you take more, but we kept the doses as low as we could. Delirium is not something that anyone particularly wants to go through. It's more of a shipment than a trip, I would say.

RU: You don't remember much. It's probably more fun to watch other people take it.

JK: Right. Not too much intelligent insight emerges under its effects.

RU: Let's get back to the purpose of this research. What you were hoping for?

JK: I felt I was working on a noble cause because the purpose of this research was to find something that would be an alternative to bombs and bullets. It could also be helpful in reducing civilian casualties, which have increased ever since the Civil War from almost zero percent to the eighty percent now or maybe higher — 90 percent perhaps in Iraq, because you can't really avoid "collateral damage" if the enemy is going to hide among the civilians. Perhaps it's a good time to rethink our use of incapacitating agents as a humane alternative.

The Russians did very well with this. When the Chechnyan terrorists took over an auditorium filled with attendees at a Moscow concert and held them captive for three days, the Russians brought in an incapacitating agent. It happened to be a morphine derivative of high potency, and they pumped it in through the ceiling and the floor, waited for a while, and then rushed in. And those terrorists did not detonate the bombs they had strapped to their bodies; they did not fire their weapons; they were all down on the floor unconscious, as was most of the audience. They were able to save about 80% of the audience.

RU: Do you feel that maybe they could've used a better incapacitating agent that would've allowed them to save everybody or nearly everybody?

JK: No, I don't think there was anything better they could've used. This was a quick-acting drug, which is what it had to be. If they'd used BZ or some drug like that, the effects would have come on too gradually. The terrorists would have had time to figure out what was going on. So this was a knockout effect, and it worked very well. And I credit the Russians for doing this, although they seem to be embarrassed about giving out the details, because in the United States and the rest of the world in general, chemical warfare in any form is a no-no.

RU: It's illegal internationally, isn't it?

JK: A number of treaties were drawn up, the last of which was the chemical warfare convention. And it's now illegal to use any drug that can either cause death or seriously disturbed behavior. And I think it's unfortunate that we went in and agreed to this treaty because we're now in a different kind of war from anything we've been in previously.

SR: I wonder what effect of LSD would have in either dislodging — or maybe even reinforcing — the beliefs of real serious believers, like fanatical Islamists, for example.

JK: Well, LSD was discarded pretty early on as an incapacitating agent when it was realized that it produced highly unpredictable effects and that people could still retain the ability to fire a rifle or push a button on a bomb-release mechanism. So I'm pretty sure LSD would not be used. It would have to be something in the opiate category, like what was used in Moscow; or perhaps one of the rapid-acting belladonna-like drugs. Incidentally, although BZ was adopted briefly and even packed into munitions, as far as I know, it was never used, despite rumors to the contrary. And later on we found rapid-acting compounds in the same category — short-acting, rapid-acting compounds that would've worked much better. But by this time, the whole notion of militarizing incapacitating agents had lost its window of opportunity. That's one reason that all this research was kind of left in file cabinets.

RU: We've talked about psychedelics, and we've talked about deliriants. But what about disassociatives like ketamine and PCP? Do those hold any potential in your opinion, and do you know if they were looked into at all?

JK: A little work was done with PCP before my arrival. They had a complication. One individual became psychotic and required hospitalization. And this kind of scared them. In fact, that's one reason I was asked to go there. So PCP would probably be an unacceptable drug.

SR: That's not an uncommon reaction to PCP, right? Violence...

JK: It definitely can produce aggressive and resistant behavior that's very hard to overcome.

RU: The 1970s was a time of great revelation of government crimes, and Edgewood Arsenal and your work got roped into the general attitude in the media towards the establishment, towards the military and so forth. Talk a little bit about how you feel the media misinterpreted your work.

JK: It grew out of the Congressional hearings, the most famous of which was the Kennedy hearings. The CIA was investigated. Congress attempted to find out just what they did with LSD in the early 50s. The CIA had destroyed all their records and the people who were still around claimed they couldn't remember anything. But as a result of that, the army was asked to look at its work with similar agents. The Inspector General held a very comprehensive review, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to do a review of the work with BZ, and although they produced follow-ups finding no harm, somehow in the public mind, the CIA work and the U.S. Army work became interwoven. I believe that's an unfortunate thing.

Another mistake was that the media characterized BZ as a super-hallucinogen, which really is not a good way to describe it. It's a deliriant, basically — pure and simple.

RU: You've indicated the effects of some of today's potential chemical weapons have been exaggerated in the media. You've spoken about the potency of VX, for example

JK: That's right. This is in relation to nerve agents. I wasn't an expert on that — that work was going on next door. But people have been told that a couple of drops of VX on the floor of Macy's would wipe out the entire customer population. And things of that nature have been represented in programs like 24. (It's a great series but...). People have a morbid fear of anything chemical, which has been encouraged by the media. Many inaccuracies have been brought out. As a matter of fact, ironically, nerve agents are a good antidote for drugs like BZ, and vice versa. Atropine's used to treat nerve agent poisoning, and nerve agents can be used to treat atropine or BZ poisoning. We found this out in the lab. Of course anyone who heard that they were going to be treated with a nerve agent for their atropine or BZ poisoning would probably be very unhappy and nervous. But it works very well!

RU: So tell people how they can get a hold of this book. It's an independent publication, with a unique design. It's almost like a coffee table book.

SR: I thought you were going to say, "Tell people how they can get a hold of that black barrel!"

RU: Yeah. Where did you hide that black barrel?

JK: Here.

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/...mical-warfare/

[Peter Lemkin]

Originally Posted by Jan Klimkowski

Here is the official story from MSM organ, Time:

Hank - your research is fascinating.

Did your investigations reveal any sense of why the luminaries of the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, would choose to spray a French village with LSD?

Clearly, as a scientific experiment, it would be junk as it would be near impossible to gather clinical or medical data from the subjects.

Also, conducting an act of chemical warfare against a major European ally could have had severe diplomatic consequences if discovered at the time.

In the decades following WW2, the Americans and the British in particular did conduct plenty of animal and human experimentation with chemical and biological weapons amongst the populations of central and south America - particularly in client states such as Costa Rica and Panama - see for instance posts #6 & 7 in the thread here:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/for...ead.php?t=1359

However, other than proving that spraying LSD could cause mass psychosis, and thus demonstrating that LSD was a potential battlefield incapacitant, I'm struggling to see what benefit the black doctors could have gained from an LSD experiment at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Just from the short descriptions it doesn't sound like real ergot poisoning to me. It would not effect such a wide population and not so severely on the mental front without substantial telltale physical effects that seem to be missing. As to why the 'Black Doctors' as you call them might want to test this on a 'real population' seems quite simple.....if you can incapacitate a French village [and hide it as ergot food poisoning to boot] you could do it in one or a thousand Soviet, Chinese or other towns - even cities. They wanted to see what the effects would be as they likely put it in the bread, or some such and dosages varied with eating habits and sizes of persons, ages, etc. But it would be much the same in France, generally, as in Russia. Why they might choose this hapless town, one can only guess - near one of the Black Doctor's summer house or chance dart on a map. Choice of a old and small town would make the 'ergot' story seem more believable than in a modern city. They might have also put one batch of ergot laced bread in somewhere for the testing they knew would happen. Methinks it was biowarfare - on the experimental level - field trial stage.
All too much of this has gone on and still goes on....

[Jan Klimkowski]

French Government Queries US re
50s Secret LSD Experiment
By F. William Engdahl
Author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian
Democracy in the New World Order
2-9-10

A major diplomatic and political scandal is erupting that could have significant import for French-American relations. It involves new research into the mysterious outbreak of "mass insanity" in a village in southern France that affected some 500 people and resulted in five deaths.

According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security). According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five, two by suicide. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold or to organic mercury poisoning.

Scientists with the highly respected British Medical Journal were quickly drawn in September 1951 to what it dubbed the "outbreak of poisoning." After initial thoughts that the cause was bread infection, they concluded that mold could not explain the event or the afflictions that struck hundreds of people in the village.

Scientists dispatched to the scene from the Sandoz Chemical company in nearby Basle, Switzerland also stated that the mold was the cause, but many other experts disagreed with them.

Over time the mystery of the outbreak only deepened and no answers were found to be satisfactory. A 2008 book about the history of bread published in France by Professor Steven Kaplan emphasizes that the "mystery remains unsolved" and at the time, still continued to perplex scientists.

New revelations

A book just released in the United States, detailing exhaustive interviews with now-retired US intelligence personnel who had direct knowledge of the 1951 French events, charges that the until-now unexplained "mass insanity" in the remote village were, rather, a top-secret CIA experiment conducted under the code-name Operation Span. Operation Span was a part of Project MK/NAOMI, itself an adjunct project to the more notorious Project MK/ULTRA, as in "ultra-top secret."

The book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. documents that the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Albarelli notes that the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

A French newspaper at the time of the bizarre events wrote, "It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St.-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows." The US Time magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce was closely tied to CIA propaganda activities in the 1950's wrote, "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit's hospital reported four attempts at suicide."

As Albarelli notes, a Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that in the early 1950s, "the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the US Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight."

He claims that the CIA entertained a number of proposals from American scientists concerning placing a large amount of LSD into the reservoir of a medium-to-large city, but, according to former agency officials, "the experiment was never approved due to the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France."

Indeed, Albarelli has discovered once secret FBI documents that reveal that the Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, a year prior to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, had targeted New York City's subway system for a similar experiment. States an August 1950 bureau memo, "[The] BW [biological warfare] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September, 1950, have been indefinitely postponed." The memo goes on to cite FBI concerns about "poisoning of food plants" and the "poisoning of the water supply" of large cities in the U.S.

In an interview with this author, Albarelli described how he developed the shocking details of the CIA secret drug programs: "My first tip-off was a 1954 CIA document that detailed an encounter between an official of the Sandoz chemical company (the producers of LSD) and a CIA official in which 'the secret of Pont St. Esprit' was referenced. The Sandoz official went on to say, 'It was not the ergot at all.'"

Albarelli says he then obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a partially redacted 1955 CIA report entitled, A CIA Study of LSD-25. "That seemingly comprehensive report contained detailed information on the manufacture, supply, and use of LSD and LSD-type products worldwide. However, nearly its entire section on France and Pont St. Esprit were blacked out." Albarelli requested an un-redacted copy but CIA officials refused to provide one.

He continued, "Then I came across a letter written by a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who was working secretly for the CIA; this was George Hunter White, who ran the CIA's New York City safe house in 1951-1954. White's letter referenced the Pont St. Esprit experiment. At that point, 5 years into my investigation, I began interviewing former Army biochemists who became very evasive and refused to talk about their work in France. Finally two former intelligence employees confirmed the experiment took place under the auspices of the Army's Special Operations Division and with CIA funding."

Lastly, Albarelli explained, "I was given an undated White House document that was part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. The document contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the 'Pont St. Esprit incident,' linking the former OSS head of secret research projects and the chief of Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division," Said Albarelli. "This, along with one other document, comprised the smoking gun."

In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli claims, the Army drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between the years 1953 and 1965, and, with the CIA, experimented widely with LSD and other drugs through secret contracts with over 325 colleges, universities and research institutions in the U.S., Canada and Europe, involving about 2,500 additional subjects, many of them hospital patients and college students.

In 2005, Scott Shane, a reporter with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote, "The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division." Asked formally for such records, the Army replied they "could find none." In 1973 the CIA destroyed all of its records on MKNAOMI and its work with Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division. When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division's projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, "I just don't give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified-if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut."

Other CIA drug projects

In 1959, American writer, Ken Kesey, while a student at Stanford University volunteered to take part in the CIA-financed Project MK/ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs during the Project MK/ULTRA study. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig reportedly inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962.

From his days as a psychology graduate student, Harvard's infamous LSD guru, Dr. Timothy Leary, whose motto to the 1968 "Flower Power" generation was "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!," was associated with the CIA's Cord Meyer. Leary devised a special personality test, The Leary, used by the CIA to test potential employees and worked with Frank Barron, a CIA employee and former psychology classmate of Leary's, at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, and later with Barron's Psychedelic Drug Research Center at Harvard. These are but two of the more known and detailed instances linking the CIA with LSD projects after the alleged French experiments.

According to an official with the DGSE, who declined to be identified, "If the details of this book's revelations prove to be true, it will be very upsetting for the people of Pont-St.-Esprit, as well as all French citizens. That agencies of the United States government would deliberately target innocent foreign citizens for such an experiment is a violation of a number of international laws and treaties."

Endnotes

Erard Corbin de Mangoux, conseiller de Sarkozy, remplacera Brochand à la DGSE,. Le Monde. October 6, 2008, accessed in http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0...41@7-40,0.html.

British Medical Journal, Ergot Poisoning at Pont St. Esprit, September 15, 1951, p. 650.

Steven L. Kaplan, Le pain maudit: Retour sur la France des annees oubliees 1945-1958 (Paris: Fayard 2008), p. 1124.

H.P. Albarelli, Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, (Walterville Oregon: Trine Day Inc., 2009).

FBI Memorandum, August 25, 1950, Subject: Biological Warfare and NY Subway System, A.H. Belmont to C.E. Hennrich.

H.P. Albarelli, Jr., interview with F. William Engdahl via email, February 6, 2010.

Ibid.

Ibid.


Ibid.

Scott Shane, Buried Secrets of Biowarfare, Baltimore Sun, August 1, 2004, p.1.

Rob Elder, Down on the Peacock Farm, Salon magazine, November 16, 2001.

Mark Riebling, Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?, 1994, Osprey Productions/Grand Royal, accessed in HYPERLINK "<http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html>http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html" <http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html>http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html.

http://rense.com/general89/50s.htm

Like CBW "experiments" conducted in the mainland US, a CBW "experiment" in mainland France in the early 1950s would be reckless, highly dangerous (if the public learnt of it), and entirely worthless from a scientific and clinical point of view.

The only purpose of such a "scientific experiment" would be to watch, at the broadest level, how matters unfolded on the ground in terms of mass hysteria and the mortality rate.

In other words, it would be a war crime committed in a time of peace against a cvilian population.

What Pont-Saint-Esprit and events such as subway and cropduster tests of CBW materials on civilian populations ultimately reveal is that secret science is junk science, and that its perpetrators are criminals who have abandoned their consciences and their human decency.

It is good for the soul to learn that men such as Frank Olson were ultimately so morally sickened by the crimes committed in the furtherance of this secret science that they rebelled.

It is bad for the soul to learn that, before they could blow the whistle, they were executed by the same nefarious forces responsible for the deep black science.