"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Ed Jewett]

[quote=Adele Edisen]
.... Unleashing LSD on a village or a subway provides no such opportunity for close monitoring of individual psychological and physiological effects. So, what would be the purpose of a "field trial" on a large human community?

The most plausible answer is to test the impact of LSD as a mass incapacitant.


snip


One further reservation about Pont St Esprit. Typically this type of experimentation would be carried out on "Third World" populations, in Central America, Africa, South-East Asia. Why would American or British intelligence take the risk of conducting such an experiment in the sovereign territory of France, a major European ally?


snip

I absolutely believe it could have happened as Hank Albarelli describes, but my reservations are at two levels:

i) technical details such as mode of delivery;

ii) purpose of such human experimentation.

I have selected three comments for purposes of discussion and articulation. I'm not an expert on the topic, the chemical (honest, I never inhaled it), or the incident (alleged), nor Albarelli.

But let me suggest three points:

1) How can anyone be sure there were no previously-placed-and-safely-secured observers? Can we be sure that there wasn't someone put safely and unobtrusively in place to monitor? It is not irrational to think that locals could have been recruited as monitors. See 2C) and 2D) .

2) It seems perfectly reasonable to attempt this "trial delivery" inside France, for several reasons:

A) Locals and/or Allied operatives might have a better chance of squelching any news coverage. I refer you to the book (specifically Essay Six) "A Certain Arrogance" and its notations about the extent and depth of psy-op control of the European press.
B) Locals spoke, at least historically, languages that were not easily or at least widely mastered:
"... Occitan was the language spoken in Languedoc, and Catalan was the language spoken in Roussillon...". [I had the occasion to scout for wines from that region just last night.]
C) The site is not terribly far from the Pyrenees whose Basque peoples and operatives sustained "The Freedom Line" (see the book by that name by Peter Eisner), where certainly Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS were involved.
D) It is also not terribly far from Marseille, home port of a criminal league allied with the Allies, the OSS and the CIA.

If the intent of the use of this psychoactive were to make dysfunctional any local military or gendarmerie or even great masses of the populace, certainly a small handful of observers adept at moving in secrecy in darkened places could observe what needed to be observed. Discreet surveillance is the modus operandi noted repeatedly by Albarelli in his book in terms of the early history of the CIA nee OSS in its clandestine monitoring of post-psychoactive-dosing psychosocial experience in bordellos pre-wired with microphones and cameras and attended/frequented by known agents.

3) Finally, the question is asked as to what the purpose of such human experimentation might have been. I think it erroneous in general, and perhaps in this case, and certainly in reference to the Albarelli book (which I own and have read) to suggest that there need be a purpose of any reasonable merit. The repeated themes in Albarelli's tale were, as also suggested in "Fleshing Out Skull and Bones" (that society that gave us so many key and leading intelligence agency operatives) that the CIA's efforts were driven in great part by a bunch of elite, spoiled/protected "fraternity boys" engaging in whatever pranks they could invent. Indeed, the frontispiece to the book (after the publisher's foreword) is the following quote from a key player in the tale of the book, George Hunter White, who appears frequently (the index cites 71 mentions, including seven multi-page sections):

"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

My own hand-scrawled notation underneath that quote, which names my own personal example from my days (blessedly short-lived) in an elite American prep school, says "giving license to puerile, sophomoric behavior reminiscent of unsupervised, rich, privileged prep school kids like ____".

You can't expect these folks to act and make decisions based on the same logic or values used by others.