This is the story of a 30 year search by U.S. intelligence
agencies to perfect mind control.
Some of those engaged in that search have agreed to talk about
it for the first time, one said. I think every last one of us
felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing.
We knew we were crossing the line.
The search would be endless. From brothels, an agent says.
We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom, to the
mystical rites of a magical mushroom ceremony performed by
an Indian shaman to a Spanish bull, Ray.
The bull has had electrodes implanted in the brain and is
controlled by a scientist. There would be victims.
One intelligence agency tried to peel this man's mind back to
reveal its deepest secrets lived.
Through it. I've lived through it.
This man worked on some of these programs.
He would write of his work. It was fun, fun, fun.
This is the story of the search for mind control.
ABC News. Club we are not professing.
To tell you. The complete story of these
activities. We are professing to tell you
the complete story that we know. But.
These records that we've uncovered don't tell the story,
they tell pieces of it. This is a story that has been
told in bits and pieces. This is an attempt to pull most
of it together. We know we don't have the full
story. We do, however, have some
striking new revelations and insights.
The story begins here, just off the nation's front yard, the
mall, the buildings. Behind me were the headquarters
for the World War 2. Office of Strategic Service.
It was here that the first halting steps toward mind
control began. The shaper and molder of OSS was
General Wild Bill Donovan, he said of his group's work.
We may have made mistakes, but we were not afraid to try things
that were never done before. In this Anything goes
atmosphere, Donovan appointed this man, Stanley Lovell, a
Boston industrialist, to break new ground in many scientific
and technical fields. Donovan called Lovell his
doctor, Moriarty, after the fiendish professor in Sherlock
Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed
for this Saturday Evening Post photo.
He later wrote of his OSS job that it was, quote, to stimulate
the Peck's bad boy beneath the surface of every American
scientist and to say to him throw all of your normal law
abiding concepts out of the window.
Here's a chance to raise merry hell.
It was in this atmosphere that the search for mind control
began. This bizarre man would be an
active participant in that search over the next two
decades. His name is George White, an OSS
captain who had formerly been with the Bureau of Narcotics.
In his diary, seen here publicly for the first time, White left a
legacy of the darker side of American intelligence work.
He received his early OSS training at the British run
school at Oshawa, Canada, to the same school where Ian Fleming,
the creator of James Bond, was trained.
White referred to the school in his Diaries as the Oshawa School
of Mayhem and Murder, fellow Mike Burke, former OSS colleague
of Whites and now president of Madison Square Garden Center.
Very compelling fellow, mysterious fellow, almost
mystical fellow. He was fascinating because you
didn't even know something about him and not enough about him to
really get a fix on him. He also knew a great deal about
the swifter elements of society, the gamier side of life and and
he was very impressive in his technical knowledge of of the
underworld, so to speak. He said one of one of our men
get speed up. He says.
You have to act real fast and teach these guys a lesson,
Charles Suragusa, a former narcotics officer and friend of
White's. He's all come around, he says.
I'm breaking kneecaps. With that, one guy laughed and
George White always had a little a little Billy with him.
And this one guy sort of snaked George White, turned on and
wiped him across the neck with it.
Then he picked up a pool stake and start beating everybody up.
He made his point and he. Made his point.
George White was not a man of understatement or subtleties.
His boss at OSS, Stanley Lovell, referred to him as deadly and
dedicated in this note from White's Diaries.
It says call Lovell regarding TDTD was a rather transparent
cover for Truth Drug. George White worked with the
Truth Drug Committee here at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in
the nation's capital. They experimented with
mescaline, scopalamine and marijuana on unwitting victims.
The committee soon learned there was no easy panacea, no truth
drug at this stage. But White and later colleagues
would not stop trying. The goal remained the same as
this 1952 CIA memo says the aim is.
Controlling an individual to the point where he will do our
bidding against his will and even against such fundamental
laws of nature as self preservation.
But it was a discovery here in Basel, Switzerland, at Sandoz
Laboratories by Doctor Albert Hoffman that led the
intelligence agencies of America to believe that they had found
the panacea. The discovery was lysergic acid
diethylamide LSD. The film that you see is
considered by many experts to be the closest illustration of the
effects of a hallucinogenic. It was one of the first times
that anybody had run into a powerful drug that was different
than anything else that they knew anything about.
John Gettinger, recently retired chief psychologist for the CIA.
This is the first time Gettinger has been interviewed publicly.
We could disable the whole city by putting a very small amount
on a water supply after all of these years of us.
Those of us who involved and then looking for this secret
drug, this was the only thing that began to look for the first
time, like it might be something like that.
The CIA's interest in LSD was intense.
The worry was that the Russians would get hold of it.
Were the Soviets into LSD? I.
Don't have to say, I'm sure they were that.
If you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of
it. But at one point, intelligence
information received from Switzerland said that Sandoz
Laboratories was about to put 100 million doses of LSD on the
open market, and it caused enough concern within the agency
that the United States was prepared to buy the entire
supply. However, a slight mistake had
been made. The mistake is made public for
the first time. I just found out on a new CIA
document that there were no such large quantities of LSD on the
market. John Marks has filed numerous
Freedom of Information suits against the CIA and has
unearthed much new material. He is the author of The Search
for The Manchurian Candidate, a history of intelligence agency
work with mind control. He is a consultant for this
report. What happened is that there was
a military attache in Switzerland, an American
officer, who got milligrams and kilograms mixed up.
In other words, he made a mistake of thinking 11
thousandths of a gram was the same as 1000 grams, which is a
mistake of a million times. So when the CIA got the
intelligence that there were 100 million doses on the market, in
fact, there were 100 doses. The man who would oversee.