"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Christer Forslund]

From CIA: What Really Happened in the quiet French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit by Hank P. Albarelli Jr. (16 March 2010)

Stepping backward for a moment to the time before I discovered the true cause of the southern France outbreak, perhaps the very first solid clue I had that something was amiss about the incident was a CIA confidential informer's report I had been given in 1999. That report, dated December 1953, concerned a meeting the unidentified informer had with an official with the Sandoz Chemical Company in New York City. The informer wrote that after "having several drinks" the Sandoz official blurted out, "The Pont Saint Esprit secret' was that it was not the bread at all." Continued the Sandoz official, "For weeks the French tied up our laboratories with analyses of bread. It was not the grain ergot, it was a diethylamide-like compound." By this, of course, the official meant a man-made drug had provoked the Pont St. Esprit outbreak.

The CIA informer then asked, according to his report, "If the material wasn't in the bread then how did it get into the people?"
To this, the official responded, "An experiment." Now concerned, the informer asked, "An experiment?" To which the Sandoz official coyly responded, "Maybe by the French government," knowing that most likely the American informer well knew the identities of the actual perpetrators of the experiment. It was all an act of high political drama and subterfuge that concluded with the Sandoz official saying, "One small reason I'm here in the U.S. is to dispose of our LSD. If war breaks out our LSD will disappear."