Mind Control

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Copyright Free America and Harry V. Martin, 1995

There was just a small news announcement on the radio in early July after a short heat wave, three inmates of Vacaville Medical Facility had died in non-air conditioned cells. Two of those prisoners, the announcement said, may have died as a result of medical treatment. No media inquiries were made, no major news stories developed because of these deaths.

But what was the medical treatment that may have caused their deaths? The Medical Facility indicates they were mind control or behavior modification treatments. A deeper probe into the death of these two inmates unravels a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of California penal history for a long time, and one that caused national outcries two decades ago.

Mind control experiments have been part of California for decades and permeate mental institutions and prisons. But, it is not just in the penal society that mind control measures have been used. Minority children were subjected to experimentation at abandoned Nike Missile Sites, veterans who fought for American freedom were also subjected to the programs. Funding and experimentations of mind control have been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

California has been in the forefront of mind control experimentation. Government experiments also were conducted in the Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco at the height of the Hippy reign. In 1974, Senator Sam Erwin, of Watergate fame, headed a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights studying the subject of "Individual rights and the Federal role in behavior modification." Though little publicity was given to this committee's investigation, Senator Erwin issued a strong condemnation of the federal role in mind control. That condemnation, however, did not halt mind control experiments, they just received more circuitous funding.

Many of the case histories concerning individuals of whom the mind control experiments were used, show a strange concept in the minds of those seeking guinea pigs. Those subject to the mind control experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years.

Here are just a few experiments used in the mind control program:

• A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift his head.

Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes and then the inter costal muscles and diaphragm. The heart slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is almost like drowning" the experiment states.

Another drug induces vomiting and was administered to prisoners who didn't get up on time or caught swearing or lying, or even not greeting their guards formally. The treatment brings about uncontrolled vomiting that lasts from 15 minutes to an hour, accompanied by a temporary cardio vascular effect involving changes in the blood pressure.
Another deals with creating body rigidness, aching restlessness, blurred vision, severe muscular pain, trembling and fogged cognition.
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the U.S. Army have admitted mind control experiments. Many deaths have occurred.

In tracing the steps of government mind control experiments, the trail leads to legal and illegal usages, usage for covert intelligence operations, and experiments on innocent people who were unaware that they were being used.

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Second in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Sentinel commenced a series on mind control in early August and suspended it until September because of the extensive research required after additional information was received.

In July, two inmates died at the Vacaville Medical Facility. According to prison officials at the time, the two may have died as a result of medical treatment, that treatment was the use of mind control or behavior modification drugs. A deeper study into the deaths of the two inmates has unraveled a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of California penal history for a long time, and one that caused national outcries years ago.

In the August article, the Sentinel presented a graphic portrait of some of the mind control experiments that have been allowed to continue in the United States. On November 1974 a U.S. Senate Sub committee on Constitutional Rights investigated federally-funded behavior modification programs, with emphasis on federal involvement in, and the possible threat to individual constitutional rights of behavior modification, especially involving inmates in prisons and mental institutions.

The Senate committee was appalled after reviewing documents from the following sources:

• Neuro-Research Foundation's study entitled The Medical Epidemiology of Criminals.

• The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence from UCLA.

• The closed adolescent treatment center.

A national uproar was created by various articles in 1974, which prompted the Senate investigation. But after all these years, the news that two inmates at Vacaville may have died from these same experiments indicates that though a nation was shocked in 1974, little was done to correct the experimentations. In 1977, a Senate subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy, focused on the CIA's testing of LSD on unwitting citizens. Only a mere handful of people within the CIA knew about the scope and details of the program.

To understand the full scope of the problem, it is important to study its origins. The Kennedy subcommittee learned about the CIA Operation M.K.-Ultra through the testimony of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. The purpose of the program, according to his testimony, was to "investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means". Claiming the protection of the National Security Act, Dr. Gottlieb was unwilling to tell the Senate subcommittee what had been learned or gained by these experiments.

He did state, however, that the program was initially engendered by a concern that the Soviets and other enemies of the United States would get ahead of the U.S. in this field. Through the Freedom of Information Act, researchers are now able to obtain documents detailing the M.K.-Ultra program and other CIA behavior modification projects in a special reading room located on the bottom floor of the Hyatt Regency in Rosslyn, VA.

The most daring phase of the M.K.-Ultra program involved slipping unwitting American citizens LSD in real life situations. The idea for the series of experiments originated in November 1941, when William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA during World War Two. At that time the intelligence agency invested $5000 for the "truth drug" program. Experiments with scopolamine and morphine proved both unfruitful and very dangerous. The program tested scores of other drugs, including mescaline, barbituates, benzedrine, cannabis indica, to name a few.

The U.S. was highly concerned over the heavy losses of freighters and other ships in the North Atlantic, all victims of German U-boats. Information about German U-boat strategy was desperately needed and it was believed that the information could be obtained through drug-influenced interrogations of German naval P.O.W.s, in violation of the Geneva Accords.

Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, a colorless, odorless marijuana extract, was used to lace a cigarette or food substance without detection. Initially, the experiments were done on volunteer U.S. Army and OSS personnel, and testing was also disguised as a remedy for shell shock. The volunteers became known as "Donovan's Dreamers". The experiments were so hush-hush, that only a few top officials knew about them. President Franklin Roosevelt was aware of the experiments. The "truth drug" achieved mixed success.

The experiments were halted when a memo was written: "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, halt the program. In 1943 field tests of the extract were being con ducted, despite the order to halt them. The most celebrated test was conducted by Captain George Hunter White, an OSS agent and ex-law enforcement official, on August Del Grazio, aka Augie Dallas, aka Dell, aka Little Augie, a New York gangster. Cigarettes laced with the acetate were offered to Augie without his knowledge of the content. Augie, who had served time in prison for assault and murder, had been one of the world's most notorious drug dealers and smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and he was a leader in the Italian underworld on the Lower East Side of New York. Under the influence of the drug, Augie revealed volumes of information about the under world operations, including the names of high ranking officials who took bribes from the mob. These experiments led to the encouragement of Donovan. A new memo was issued: "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism which offered promise in relaxing prisoners to be  interrogated."

When the OSS was disbanded after the war, Captain White continued to administer behavior modifying drugs. In 1947, the CIA replaced the OSS. White's service record indicates that he worked with the OSS, and by 1954 he was a high ranking Federal Narcotics Bureau officer who had been loaned to the CIA on a part-time basis.

White rented an apartment in Greenwich Village equipped with one-way mirrors, surveillance gadgets and disguised himself as a seaman. White drugged his acquaintances with LSD and brought them back to his apartment. In 1955, the operation shifted to San Francisco. In San Francisco, "safe houses" were established under the code name Operation Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax hired prostitute addicts who lured men from bars back to the safe houses after their drinks had been spiked with LSD. White filmed the events in the safe houses. The purpose of these "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the act of lovemaking for extracting information from men. The safe house experiments continued until 1963 until CIA Inspector General John Earman criticized Richard Helms, the director of the CIA and father of the M.K.-Ultra project. Earman charged the new director John McCone had not been fully briefed on the M.K.-Ultra Project when he took office and that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens are placed in jeopardy". The Inspector General stated that LSD had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."

Earman's criticisms were rebuffed by Helms, who warned, "Positive operation capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." But in 1964, Helms had testified before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John Kennedy, that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research".

Upon leaving government service in 1966, Captain White wrote a startling letter to his superior. In the letter to Dr. Gottlieb, Captain White reminisced about his work in the safe houses with LSD. His comments were frightening. "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun," White wrote. "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

(NEXT: How the drug experiments helped bring about the rebirth of the mafia and the French Connection.)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Part Three in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets of America after the program was official cancelled, the United States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter Whites connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.

Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between Luciano and the United States War Department.

Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and from underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active leadership in organized crime in America.

The U.S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's underworld connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their invasion of Sicily, the beginning push into occupied Europe. General George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of territory that was fraught with difficulty, booby trapped roads, snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of 60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four days, a military "miracle" even for Patton.

Senate Estes Kefauver's Senate Sub committee on Organized Crime asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mussolini smashed it through the use of police repression.

Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very prominent and well-documented role in the American military occupation of Italy.

The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S. Intelligence alliance, an alliance that lasts to this day and helped to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra operations. In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the Contras.

One of the Allies top occupation priorities was to liberate as many of their own soldiers from garrison duties so that they could participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this, Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into service, and in July of 1943, the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor of Villalba and other Mafia officials as mayors of other towns in Sicily.

As the northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelligence became very concerned over the extent to which the Italian Communists resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian politics to the left. Community Party membership had doubled between 1943 and 1944, huge leftist strikes had shut down factories and the Italian underground fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to the Italian Resistance, and started appointing Mafia officials to occupation administration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern Italy.

Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and deported to Italy, where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at his hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly deported within a couple of years.

Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950's, Marseilles, in Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the Corsican syndicate began to actively cooperate with the Mafia in the heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.

In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles. American strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely important for their Naval bases as a counterbalance to the growing naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO/AFL organizer Irving Brown testified that by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, U.S. support was no longer needed because the profits from the heroin traffic was sufficient to sustain operations.

When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and hide out in the mountains.

Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the international drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping surveillance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's release from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Part Four in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments:

• Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD experiments in the safe houses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village.

• Experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.

• Experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Such experimentation requires money, and the United States government has funneled funds for drug experiments through different agencies, both overtly and covertly.

One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented.

LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to assist various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not considered too great. After spending $6 billion, the F.B.I. reports general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.

LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldemann and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown, director for the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of HEW.

LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects and vice versa. Eventually, the leadership responsibility and control of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to answer to LEAA alone.

The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the 1960's, court calendars' became blighted with lawsuits on the part of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually ignored by the news media.

Thirteen behavior modification programs were conducted by the Department of Defense. The Department of Labor had also conducted several experiments, as well as the National Science Foundation. The Veterans' Administration was also deeply involved in behavior modification and mind control. Each of these agencies, including LEAA, and the Institute, were named in secret CIA documents as those who provided research cover for the MK-ULTRA program.

Eventually, LEAA was using much of its budget to fund experiments, including aversive techniques and psychosurgery, which involved, in some cases, irreversible brain surgery on normal brain tissue for the purpose of changing or controlling behavior and/or emotions.

Senator Erwin questioned the head of LEAA concerning ethical standards of the behavior modification projects which LEAA had been funding. Erwin was extremely dubious about the idea of the government spending money on this kind of project without strict guidelines and reasonable research supervision in order to protect the human subjects. After Senator Erwin's denunciation of the funding polices, LEAA announced that it would no longer fund medical research into behavior modification and psychosurgery. Despite the pledge by LEAA's director, Donald E. Santarelli, LEAA ended up funding 537 research projects dealing with behavior modification. There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active.

The Veterans' Administration openly admitted that psychosurgery was a standard procedure for treatment and not used just in experiments. The VA Hospitals in Durham, Long Beach, New York, Syracuse and Minneapolis were known to employ these products on a regular basis. VA clients could typically be subject to these behavior alteration procedures against their will. The Erwin subcommittee concluded that the rights of VA clients had been violated.

LEAA also subsidized the research and development of gadgets and techniques useful to behavior modification. Much of the technology, whose perfection LEAA funded, had originally been developed and made operational for use in the Vietnam War. Companies like Bangor Punta Corporation and Walter Kidde and Co., through its subsidiary Globe Security System, adapted these devices to domestic use in the U.S. ITT was another company that domesticated the warfare technology for potential use on U.S. citizens. Rand Corporation executive Paul Baran warned that the influx back to the United State of the Vietnam War surveillance gadgets alone, not to mention the behavior modification hardware, could bring about "the most effective, oppressive police state ever created".

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Fifth in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the U.S. Government is the fact that so often the same names appear from scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's political career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and Edward Meese played key advisory roles.

Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS software from INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key figures.

And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study of violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by mid-1975, and its research was intended to shed light on why people murder or rape, or hijack aircraft. The center was to be operated by the University of California at Los Angeles, and its primary purpose, ac cording to Dr. Brian, was to unify scattered studies on anti-social violence and possibly even touch on socially tolerated violence, such as football or war. Dr. Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.

It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the center came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans to phase the state of California out of the mental hospital business by 1982. Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson today, to place the responsibility of rehabilitating young offenders squarely on the shoulders of local communities.

But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration for the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five years before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans. Amidst urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and Ervin of Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who engage in civil disobedience possess defective or damaged brain cells. If this conclusion were applied to the American Revolution or the Women's Rights Movement, a good portion of American society would be labeled as having brain damage.

In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and inadequate education underlie the nation's urban riots is well known, but the obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction in the rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and physical assault.

"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients. Individuals with electroencephalographic abnormalities in the temporal region have been found to have a much greater frequency of behavioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, violent tendencies, and psychosis) than is present in people with a normal brain wave pattern."

Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the claim that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the United States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They argued that the data of their book provided a strong reason for starting a program of mass screening of Americans.

"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic brain function to detect those humans who have a low threshold for impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and the major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be toward its prevention," they wrote.

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors $108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in another $500,000, under pressure from Congress. They believed that psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection with the program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired people's emotional and intellectual capacities, it could be used as an instrument of repression and social control.

The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors' report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the funding. The center was to serve as a model for future facilities to be set up throughout the United States.

The Director of the Neuro-psychiatric Institute and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was selected to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a contract agent for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors and scientists, gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, for the super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like Captain White (see part three of the series), West conducted LSD experiments for the CIA on unwitting citizens in the safe houses of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for his injection of a massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the Oklahoma Zoo, the elephant died when West tried to revive it by administering a combination of drugs.

Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was on the basis of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be treated for mental disorders and put on happy pills. The West examination was ordered after Ruby began to say that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy. Two years after the commencement of treatment for mental disorder, Ruby died of cancer in prison.

After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for the Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of Health for California, J. M. Stubblebine.

"Dear Stub:

"I am in possession of confidential in formation that the Army is prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local agencies for non-military purposes. They may look with special favor on health-related applications.

"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica Mountains, within a half-hour's drive of the Neuro-psychiatric Institute. It is accessible, but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements, making it suitable for prompt occupancy.

"If this site were made available to the Neuro-psychiatric Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.

"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse, modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness, etc. The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for instruction of selected groups of mental-health related professionals and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel, parole officers, special educators) for whom both demonstration and participation would be effective modes of instruction.

"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or other appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of Defense (or, of course, the President), could be most likely to produce prompt results."

Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:

• Studies of violent individuals.

• Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children.

• Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs.

• Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.

• Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups.

• Studies of pre-delinquent children.

It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.

The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The staff was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers, clergymen and probation officers. With the backing of Governor Reagan and Dr. Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner volunteers from several California correctional institutions, including Vacaville. Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the primary sources for the human guinea pigs. These institutions had established a reputation, by that time, of committing some of the worst atrocities in West Coast history. Some of the experimentations differed little from what the Nazis did in the death camps.

(NEXT: What happened to the Center?)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Sixth in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

Dr. Earl Brian, Governor Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health, was adamant about his support for mind control centers in California. He felt the behavior modification plan of the Violence Control Centers was important in the prevention of crime.

The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrman was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.

In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.

Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.

His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.

Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze, who be tween 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.

The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.

In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians.

The Violence Center, however, died an agonizing death. Despite the Ervin Senate Committee investigation and chastation of mind control, the experiments continued. But when the Watergate scandal broke in the early 1970's, Washington felt it was too politically risky to continue to push for mind control centers.

Top doctors began to withdraw from the proposal because they felt that there were not enough safeguards. Even the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, which funded the program, backed out, stating, the proposal showed "little evidence of established research ability of the kind of level necessary for a study of this cope".

Eventually it became known that control of the Violence Center was not going to rest with the University of California, but instead with the Department of Corrections and other law enforcement officials. This information was released publicly by the Committee Opposed to Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners. The disclosure of the letter resulted in the main backers of the program bowing out and the eventual demise of the center.

Dr. Brian's final public statement on the matter was that the decision to cut off funding represented "a callous disregard for public safety". Though the Center was not built, the mind control experiments continue to this day.

(NEXT: What these torturous drugs do.)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Seventh in a Series

Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991

The Central Intelligence Agency held two major interests in use of L.S.D. to alter normal behavior patterns. The first interest centered around obtaining information from prisoners of war and enemy agents, in contravention of the Geneva Accords. The second was to deter the effectiveness of drugs used against the enemy on the battlefield.

The MK-ULTRA program was originally run by a small number of people within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Another CIA department, the Office of Security, also began its own testing program. Friction arose and then infighting broke out when the Office of Security commenced to spy on TSS people after it was learned that LSD was being tested on unwitting Americans.

Not only did the two branches disagree over the issue of testing the drug on the unwitting, they also disagreed over the issue of how the drug was actually to be used by the CIA. The office of Security envisioned the drug as an interrogation weapon. But the TSS group thought the drug could be used to help destabilize another country, it could be slipped into the food or beverage of a public official in order to make him behave foolishly or oddly in public. One CIA document reveals that L.S.D. could be administered right before an official was to make a public speech.

Realizing that gaining information about the drug in real life situations was crucial to exploiting the drug to its fullest, TSS started conducting experiments on its own people. There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation. The Office of Security felt the TSS group was playing with fire, especially when it was learned that TSS was prepared to spike an annual office Christmas party punch with LSD, the Christmas party of the CIA. L.S.D. could produce serious insanity for periods of eight to 18 hours and possibly longer.

One of the "victims" of the punch was agent Frank Olson. Having never had drugs before, L.S.D. took its toll on Olson. He reported that, every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. Olson began to behave erratically. The CIA made preparation to treat Olson at Chestnut Lodge, but before they could, Olson checked into a New York hotel and threw himself out from his tenth story room. The CIA was ordered to cease all drug testing.

Mind control drugs and experiments were torturous to the victims. One of three inmates who died in Vacaville Prison in July was scheduled to appear in court in an attempt to stop forced administration of a drug, the very drug that may have played a role in his death.

Joseph Cannata believed he was making progress and did not need forced dosages of the drug Haldol. The Solano County Coroner's Office said that Cannata and two other inmates died of hyperthermia, extremely elevated body temperature. Their bodies all had at least 108 degrees temperature when they died. The psychotropic drugs they were being forced to take will elevate body temperature.

Dr. Ewen Cameron, working at McGill University in Montreal, used a variety of experimental techniques, including keeping subjects unconscious for months at a time, administering huge electroshocks and continual doses of L.S.D.

Massive lawsuits developed as a result of this testing, and many of the subjects who suffered trauma had never agreed to participate in the experiments. Such CIA experiments infringed upon the much-honored Nuremberg Code concerning medical ethics. Dr. Camron was one of the members of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

L.S.D. research was also conducted at the Addiction Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service in Lexington, Kentucky. This institution was one of several used by the CIA. The National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Navy funded this operation. Vast supplies of L.S.D. and other hallucinogenic drugs were required to keep the experiments going. Dr. Harris Isbell ran the program. He was a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulants Drugs. Almost all of the inmates were black. In many cases, L.S.D. dosage was increased daily for 75 days.

Some 1500 U.S. soldiers were also victims of drug experimentation. Some claimed they had agreed to become guinea pigs only through pressure from their superior officers. Many claimed they suffered from severe depression and other psychological stress.

One such soldier was Master Sergeant Jim Stanley. L.S.D. was put in Stanley's drinking water and he freaked out. Stanley's hallucinations continued even after he returned to his regular duties. His service record suffered, his marriage went on the rocks and he ended up beating his wife and children. It wasn't until 17 years later that Stanley was informed by the military that he had been an L.S.D. experiment. He sued the government, but the Supreme Court ruled no soldier could sue the Army for the L.S.D. experiments. Justice William Brennen disagreed with the Court decision. He wrote, "Experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable."

Private James Thornwell was given L.S.D. in a military test in 1961. For the next 23 years he lived in a mental fog, eventually drowning in a Vallejo swimming pool in 1984. Congress had set up a $625,000 trust fund for him. Large scale L.S.D. tests on American soldiers were conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and in Europe and the Pacific. The Army conducted a series of L.S.D. tests at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The purpose of the tests were to ascertain how well soldiers could perform their tasks on the battlefield while under the influence of L.S.D. At Fort McClellan, Alabama, 200 officers in the Chemical Corps were given L.S.D. in order to familiarize them with the drug's effects. At Edgewood Arsenal, soldiers were given L.S.D. and then confined to sensory deprivation chambers and later exposed to a harsh interrogation sessions by intelligence people. In these sessions, it was discovered that soldiers would cooperate if promised they would be allowed to get off the L.S.D.

In Operation Derby Hat, foreign nationals accused of drug trafficking were given L.S.D. by the Special Purpose Team, with one subject begging to be killed in order to end his ordeal. Such experiments were also conducted in Saigon on Viet Cong POWs. One of the most potent drugs in the U.S. arsenal is called BZ or quinuclidinyl benzilate. It is a long-lasting drug and brings on a litany of psychotic experiences and almost completely isolates any person from his environment. The main effects of BZ last up to 80 hours compared to eight hours for L.S.D. Negative after-effects may persist for up to six weeks.

The BZ experiments were conducted on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal for 16 years. Many of the "victims" claim that the drug permanently affected their lives in a negative way. It so disorientated one paratrooper that he was found taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar. BZ was eventually put in hand grenades and a 750 pound cluster bomb. Other configurations were made for mortars, artillery and missiles. The bomb was tested in Vietnam and CIA documents indicate it was prepared for use by the U.S. in the event of large-scale civilian uprisings.

In Vacaville, psychosurgery has long been a policy. In one set of cases, experimental psychosurgery was conducted on three inmates, a black, a Chicano and a white person. This involved the procedure of pushing electrodes deep into the brain in order to determine the position of defective brain cells, and then shooting enough voltage into the suspected area to kill the defective cells. One prisoner, who appeared to be improving after surgery, was released on parole, but ended up back in prison. The second inmate became violent and there is no information on the third inmate.

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