The committee was headed by Winfred Overholser, MD, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Overholser, a Harvard graduate was Chairman of psychiatry at George Washington University, who presided over St. Elizabeths for 25 years. He was elected President of the American Psychiatric Association in…
The OSS (later CIA) first tested extreme interrogation — torture — techniques in Camp King where the chief physician was General Dr. Walter Schreiber, former medical chief of the Wehrmacht, followed by Dr. Kurt Blome, the former Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich. * Paperclip Rogues Intelligence officials in…
The CIA was established by President Harry Truman in 1947 as an information gathering agency to apprise the President with accurate up-to-the-minute information in particular about trends and developments in all danger spots in the world. President Truman had not anticipated that the CIA would function as an elitist espionage…
The Naval report about the Dachau mescaline experiments was the catalyst for Project CHATTER which focused on identifying and testing drugs for interrogations and recruitment of intelligence agents. It was headed by Lieutenant Dr. Charles Savage, a graduate of Yale and the Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago….
Charles Loucks, Chief of U.S. Chemical Warfare in Europe learned about the hallucinogen LSD from Hitler’s former chemist, Richard Kuhn, who described its astounding incapacitating effect. Paperclip RoguesLoucks recognized LSD as a chemical agent with enormous military potential. The US Army definition of “psychological warfare” marked Top Secret in 1948:…
Dr. Rinkel, a research psychiatrist obtained LSD from its sole Swiss manufacturer, Sandoz Chemicals; his partner, Dr. Robert Hyde took the first acid trip in the West. They then organized an LSD Study at Boston Psychopathic Institute where they tested the drug on 100 patients.” Soon an elite group of…
In 1949, the Rand Corporation issued a report, “Are Communist Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession in Public Trials?” The report relied on old Soviet hypnosis experiments conducted in 1923 (which were translated into English in 1932). The Soviets had reported success in implanting memories of crimes hypnotically. The…
BLUEBIRD was the first structured comprehensive, integrated CIA mind control project involving both domestic and overseas covert activities designed to study enemy techniques and test them on selected individuals, including “potential intelligence agents, defectors, refugees, Prisoners of War and “others.” Under this early program, experimental psychoactive drugs and hypnosis were…
Soviet doctors concluded that lobotomy was “contrary to the principles of humanity.” Furthermore, they concluded that “through lobotomy an insane person is changed into an idiot.” (Wikipedia). The CIA considered lobotomy as a solution for “disposal” of individuals.
A 1952 CIA memo titled: “LOBOTOMY and Related Operations” discussed the question: Is lobotomy a solution for “disposal” of an individual who might pose a security risk? Lee and Shlain (Acid Dreams) report that a group of CIA scientists entertained the possibility of using an “icepick” lobotomy to render an…
Dr. Paul H. Hoch, a psychiatrist who trained in Germany and came to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa, gained immigrant status with legal assistance by John Foster Dulles (future Secretary of State and brother of Allen Dulles). From 1948 to 1955, Hoch served as Director of experimental research at…
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. Harry Solomon, Dr. Julius Levine, and Dr. Norman Paul actively promoted bimedial lobotomy in the major journals. The lobotomy studies were funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. Levine, Greenblatt and Solomon reported the “superiority” of bimedial lobotomy over the conventional approach in The New England…
