"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan, you said in your post #71:

Let me be more explicit about the Pont St Esprit incident. 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.

Adele, Peter - you both have scientific training.
Please explain where you consider the reservations about Pont St Esprit that I have articulated in this thread to be unscientific.

Peter will have to answer for himself, but I don't think I have stated anywhere that I consider your statements or reservations about the Pont-St.-Esprit event, or about Hank Albarelli's works, to be "unscientific." Or, untruthful, if that is what you think I think. So, I really don't understand your question here.

Adele - thank you for your thoughtful answer. If you read my post as an attack on yourself and Peter, I can assure you that it was not intended as such.

My critique of Albarelli's hypothesis about the Pont St Esprit incident is based around the Scientific Method, and a consideration of how the Pont St Esprit events fit into the context of illegal human experimentation.

"MK-ULTRA" existed wtihin a framework of science. Its technical leaders were doctors and scientists. Men like Jolly West, Harry Harlow, Robert G Heath, George Estabrooks, Martin Orne and Ewen Cameron were world leaders in their scientific fields.

Cameron was the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association

West was head of department and director of the Neuropsychiatry Institute at UCLA.

Heath founded the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane.

Rhodes Scholar Estabrooks was chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University.

Orne was emeritus professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harlow was head of the Human Resources Research branch of the Department of the Army from 19501952, head of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council from 19521955, consultant to the Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and president of the American Psychological Association from 1958-1959.

These men's actions show them to be arrogant, ruthless, and willing to conduct experimentation in the absence of any meaningful informed consent. They all appear to have believed that the End justified the Means, where the Means was illegal human experimentation.

They also published medical and scientific textbooks which which became standard professional texts, taught to generations of students.

Therefore, my approach, when examining any evidence of "MK-ULTRA" activity is to consider it within a framework of the Scientific Method, applied in a world with no ethical constraints.

I have no problem in accepting that, in principle, these "MK-ULTRA" doctors would have sanctioned human experimentation on hundreds or thousands of people. However, I do have a problem in accepting that any of them would have regarded the results of the dispersal of LSD at Pont St Esprit as a means of learning almost anything useful in physiological or psychological terms.

As for the purpose of the human experimentation, there doesn't seem to be any, other than to see what would happen. Just like the Nazi experiments, such as puttling prisoners in ice cold water to see how long they would survive.

The Nazi doctor who led those terminal experiments was Hubertus Strughold.

Strughold was spirited to the USA as part of Paperclip, is known as "The Father of Space Medicine", and was one of the many Nazis embedded in the NASA project.

Strughold first coined the term "space medicine" in 1948 and was the first and only Professor of Space Medicine at the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. In 1949 Strughold was made director of the Department of Space Medicine at the SAM (which is now the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM) at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas). He played an important role in developing the pressure suit worn by early American astronauts. He was a co-founder of the Space Medicine Branch of the Aerospace Medical Association in 1950. He was named Chief Scientist, Aerospace Medical Division in 1961. The aeromedical library at Brooks AFB was named after him in 1977

So, here we have a bona fide Nazi doctor, who conducted terminal experiments and continued his Nazi research within the American university and military system.

Strughold was ruthless and unethical. However, this ruthlessness existed within the framework of the Scientific Method, and appears to have delivered genuine scientfic advances.

Meanwhile, like your good self, I believe it's certainly possible that LSD may have been delivered to Pont St Esprit through the atmosphere.

However, there are problems with this as a mode of delivery. Firstly, poison gas attacks are impossible to control. Eg the wind changes, and the poison blows back on your own side. Dosage levels are also entirely unpredictable.

Secondly, there are technical problems related to the development of LSD.

From Eric Olson's site:

It was

in October 1954, that Eli Lilly & Company had succeeded in synthesizing the drug in its laboratories. This was the breakthrough the agency had been awaiting for three years; now it had access to all the LSD money could buy.

It was judged to be so important that a special memorandum on the subject was rushed to CIA director Dulles on October 26. The CIA clandestine services had immediately concluded that now LSD could be employed not only in testing but also in actual intelligence operations, for reasons given in the memo to Dulles: "Hitherto, LSD could not be considered seriously as a candidate Chemical Warfare agent for overt use. This was due to two factors: a) until recently only volatile liquids could be disseminated in a suitable fashion in bulk. LSD is a solid. LSD can now be produced in quantity and recent technical developments make it possible to disseminate solids in an effective manner."

At this point, the matter was considered so important that the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence prepared its bulky top-secret study, "Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamidc (LSD-25)," which was circulated to only seven senior officials besides Dulles. The study offered the best rationale to date for tests on humans. The drug had important strategic advantages. It was assumed that Russian scientists were aware of it. National security might be at stake.

As far back as April 1953, for example, a special CIA committee running the secret drug program had requested a "large number of bodies" for testing mind-affecting compounds, expressing the belief that a great many American scientists would be willing and anxious to carry out the experiments. In 1955, the CIA concluded that tests in a controlled environment-at the agency and in hospitals and prisons-were no longer sufficient, and, to make sense, they had to be conducted in "normal social situations."

All along, Gottlieb had been trying to persuade his CIA superiors that experiments on unwitting subjects were necessary. He explained it thus: "One of the difficulties of determining explicitly the effect of the drug itself is that the subject and the observer are both conscious of the fact that an experiment is being performed. It is hoped in the next year that subjects... who are essentially normal from a psychiatric point of view will be given unwitting doses of the drug.... In this way more valuable experiments will probably be carried out in spite of hospital conditions. Attempts are being made at present to set up projects with collaborating organizations on the effect of LSD-25 on brain metabolism, on the metabolic activities of nerves and on enzyme reactions."

The CIA had learned a great deal about LSD during its first four years of experiments, but it was also aware of wide gaps in its knowledge. After reading the strategic study, therefore, CIA director Dulles said in a 1955 memo to the secretary of defense that "it would appear to be important that field trials be made to determine the effects on groups of people or on individuals engaged in group activities." This was the official green light for the CIA's indiscriminate testing of LSD on unsuspecting Americans, and from 1955 onward, there's evidence that more Such subjects were involved as the CIA kept expanding its quest for a dream drug without interference by agency directors or Presidents.

The Pont St Esprit incident took place in 1951, before LSD had been synthesized. CORRECTION: before a cheap means of synthesizing LSD in bulk form had been discovered.

To sum up, I'm not currently willing to abandon a critical, scientifically driven, analysis of clandestine experimentation. I believe the "MK-ULTRA" doctors acted entirely without moral conscience or ethical constraint. I also believe they acted within some sort of scientific framework. Albeit a bastard one.

So, my own judgement is that the Pont St Esprit incident may have happened as described by Albarelli.

However, I regard Albarelli's work as a fascinating hypothesis not yet proven as fact.