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Psychiatrist Gerald D. Klee dies, involved in Army LSD experiments
#1
Gerald D. Klee dies at 86; psychiatrist involved in Army LSD experiments
By Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun
March 8, 2013, 7:50 p.m.

In 1975, Klee confirmed reports that the University of Maryland had been involved in secret research in which soldiers were given the hallucinogenic drug in the 1950s.

Gerald D. Klee, a retired psychiatrist and LSD expert who participated in experiments with the hallucinogenic drug on volunteer servicemen at U.S. military installations in the 1950s, has died. He was 86.

Klee died Sunday of complications after surgery at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Md., his family said.

In 1975, Klee made headlines when he confirmed reports that the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Psychiatric Institute had been involved in secret research between 1956 and 1959, when hundreds of soldiers were given LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide.

He said that in addition to LSD, the Army was experimenting with other hallucinogens as part of its chemical weapons research program.

Klee said the Army had negotiated a contract in 1956 with the University of Maryland's Psychiatric Institute to conduct physiological and psychological tests on the soldiers.

"A large proportion of the people who have gotten involved in research in this area have been harebrained and irresponsible Timothy Leary being the most notorious example and a lot of the stuff that has been published reflects that," Klee told the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1975.

"We didn't have any axes to grind, and the university's role was to conduct scientific experimentation," he said. "The interests of the University of Maryland group were purely scientific, and the military was just there."

Klee said soldiers from military posts around the country were brought to the Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground installations in Maryland to participate in experiments involving various drugs and chemical warfare agents, of which the hallucinogens were a small part.

"They were mostly enlisted men there were a few commissioned officers but they were mostly unlettered and rather naive," Klee said. "Now the people knew they were volunteering, the bonus was leave time seeing their girlfriends and mothers and that kind of thing. They had a lot of free time, and most of them enjoyed it."

Klee said he and his colleagues from the university tried to explain to the volunteers what to expect.

"They were told it was very important to national security," he said in the Evening Sun interview.

Before the experiments commenced, Klee experimented with LSD.

"I figured that if I was going to study this stuff, then I've got to experience it myself," he told the newspaper. "I felt obliged to take it for experimental reasons and also because I didn't think it would be fair to administer a drug to someone else that I hadn't taken myself."

The LSD was slipped into cocktails at a party in the soldiers' honor. While this approach garnered criticism, Klee said the Army and civilian researchers acted responsibly.

"I was there and I didn't like it, but thought I might be of help to the victims," Klee told the Washington Post in the 1975 interview.

The civilian team quickly learned about those who had experienced "bad trips." He said he did not know of any lasting ill effects on the soldiers but added that university researchers followed the cases only during their month stay at Edgewood.

"What the Army did after that, I don't know. I've given many hours thought to that. I wish I did know," he said in the interview.

"I think he felt unease about this," said a son, Kenneth A. Klee, an editor and writer.

In an email, the younger Klee wrote that his father and his colleagues accepted the military money because they thought it was "important science." He added that because they were World War II veterans and the nation was mired in the Cold War, it "didn't seem unreasonable."

"I do know my dad did his best to do right (and conduct real science the two were closely linked for him) and that he disapproved of the unethical acts he witnessed. Hence his willingness to be vocal on the subject a few years later," his son wrote.

In 1975, the Army admitted that it had administered LSD to nearly 1,500 people between 1956 and 1967.

Klee later led an unsuccessful effort to persuade President Nixon to renounce the use of LSD as a chemical weapon.

Gerald D'Arcy Klee was born Jan. 29, 1927, and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He graduated from high school in 1944, then enlisted in the Army and served in Paris with the Office of Liquidation until being discharged in 1946.

After earning a bachelor's degree in 1948 from McGill University, he graduated in 1952 from Harvard Medical School.

He interned from 1952 to 1953 at the U.S. Public Health Hospital on Staten Island, N.Y., and from 1954 to 1956 completed a residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and the Veterans Hospital at Perry Point, Md.

From 1959 to 1967, he was director of the Division of Adult Outpatient Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, and served in a similar capacity at Temple University from 1967 to 1970.

Klee also was a medical educator who taught at the University of Maryland, Temple and Johns Hopkins and maintained a private practice until retiring in 2000.

Klee's four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by two sons, three daughters, a brother and 11 grandchildren.

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com
Copyright © 2013, The Baltimore Sun


Adele
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#2
Quote:In 1975, the Army admitted that it had administered LSD to nearly 1,500 people between 1956 and 1967.
I believe this to be a GROSS underestimate. They also 'farmed out' the research [sic] and testing to non-'Army' entities and/or cut-outs; and the CIA and others were also doing parallel research. Lastly, it began before 1956 and lasted WELL after 1967. A very ugly chapter in American history. LSD was only one of MANY psychomimetics tested alone or with other drugs and hypnosis, sleep deprivation, torture, et al. Read Albarelli's book on the murder of Frank Olsen for a good overview of the entire set of programs and how they were hidden and rationalized.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
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#3
Mmmm....McGill university undergraduate....But most of his work was at University of Maryland...
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx

"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.

“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
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#4
Magda Hassan Wrote:Mmmm....McGill university undergraduate....But most of his work was at University of Maryland...

Oh yeah, groovy, baby.

The Men Who Created The Sixties

To Kill The Legitimacy of the Counterculture.

Quote:Gerald D'Arcy Klee was born Jan. 29, 1927, and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He graduated from high school in 1944, then enlisted in the Army and served in Paris with the Office of Liquidation until being discharged in 1946.

After earning a bachelor's degree in 1948 from McGill University, he graduated in 1952 from Harvard Medical School.

He interned from 1952 to 1953 at the U.S. Public Health Hospital on Staten Island, N.Y., and from 1954 to 1956 completed a residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and the Veterans Hospital at Perry Point, Md.

From 1959 to 1967, he was director of the Division of Adult Outpatient Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, and served in a similar capacity at Temple University from 1967 to 1970.

From Paperclip straight to the MK-ULTRA umbrella network of "research": on human guinea pigs in the miltary, prisons, orphanages and Haight-Ashbury.

Army, USAF, ONI, Military Intelligence, CIA, DIA etc etc.

With university tenure as cover.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
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#5
Magda Hassan Wrote:Mmmm....McGill university undergraduate....But most of his work was at University of Maryland...

He must have known Dr. Russ Monroe, a psychiatrist who had been at Tulane University School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, which was headed by Dr. Robert G. Heath. Dr. Monroe left Tulane and went to the University of Maryland School of Medicine where he continued working with LSD, as he had done at Tulane in Dr. Heath's various programs there.

Adele
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#6
In The CIA Doctors, the revised version of his book Bluebird, Dr Colin Ross outlines the umbrella network of academics based on study of scientific literature, case files, funding streams and FOIs.

I have copies of both books, and have used similar investigative techniques myself.

Ultimately, much of the funding wasn't even via the Human Ecology Fund or suchlike: it was direct from miitary sources.

Here's an overview interview:

Quote:The CIA Mind Control Doctors: From Harvard to Guantanamo

by Colin A. Ross
Psychiatrist, Author,
The CIA Doctors, Military Mind Control
and Project Bluebird
September 3, 2009

My book, The CIA Doctors,[i] is based on 15,000 pages of documents I received from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act and dozens of papers published in medical journals. These papers report the results of research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of the Army, the Office of Naval Research and the CIA. From 1950 to 1972, the CIA funded TOP SECRET research at many leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. There was a series of CIA mind control programs including BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH and MKNAOMI.

MKULTRA and related programs had several over-lapping purposes. One was to purchase mind control drugs from suppliers. Another was to form relationships with researchers who might later be used as consultants at the TOP SECRET level. The core purpose of these programs was to learn how to enhance interrogations, erase and insert memories, and create and run Manchurian Candidates. All of this is described clearly and explicitly in the declassified CIA documents, which provide a glimpse into the tip of the iceberg of CIA and military mind control.

The CIA mind control experiments were interwoven with radiation, chemical and biological weapons experiments conducted on children, comatose patients, pregnant women, the general population and other unwitting groups who had no idea they were subjects in secret experiments. Radiation, bacteria and funguses were released over urban areas. A large cloud of radiation was released over Spokane during OPERATION GREEN RUN; plutonium was injected into a comatose patient in Boston by Dr. William Sweet, a member of the Harvard brain electrode team; plutonium was placed in the cereal of mentally handicapped children at the Fernald School in New England; 751 pregnant women were injected with plutonium at Vanderbilt University; the bacteria serratia maracens was released into the air in San Francisco, resulting in a series of infections and plutonium was injected into an amputee at the University of Rochester. All these experiments were conducted without any informed consent or meaningful follow-up. Hallucinogens, marijuana, amphetamines and other drugs were administered to imprisoned narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky, terminal cancer patients at Georgetown University Hospital, hospitalized sex offenders at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan and johns picked by prostitutes hired by the CIA in San Francisco and New York.

Most of these experiments were conducted by psychiatrists with TOP SECRET clearance. These included Louis Jolyon West, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma and later at UCLA; Dr. Robert Hyde in Boston; Dr. Carl Rogers at the University of Wisconsin; Dr. Martin Orne at Harvard; Dr. Charles Osgood at the University of Illinois; Dr. James Hamilton at Stanford; Dr. Charles Geschichter at the University of Richmond and Dr. Harold Abramson and Dr. Harold Wolff at Cornell. Other TOP SECRET-cleared MKULTRA contractors included Dr. Maitland Baldwin, a neurosurgeon at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a pharmacologist at Emory.

The CIA doctors violated all medical codes of ethics dating back to Hippocrates, including the Nuremberg Code. The experimental subjects were not told the real purpose of the experiments, did not give informed consent, were not afforded outside counsel and received no meaningful follow-up. As described by the psychiatrists in published papers, experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, combined with sensory deprivation, electroshock and other interrogation techniques, resulted in psychosis and death among other "side effects." The purpose of these experiments was to see how easily a person could be put into a psychotic state or controlled.

In a series of MKULTRA projects, the CIA paid a former Bureau of Narcotics officer, George White, to set up safe houses in San Francisco and New York that were decorated like brothels. George White then hired prostitutes to pick up johns at bars, bring them back to the safe house, give them LSD without their knowledge, and then have sex with them. The CIA officers watched the sex through one-way mirrors. The project documents state that the purpose of the experiments was to test the effects of LSD on unwitting subjects under field conditions that mimicked an interrogation of a foreign operative.

In one of the memos contained in the MKULTRA files for these projects, however, another purpose of the safe house operation is revealed. The CIA was actually testing the performance of "Jekyll-Hyde" identities they had created in the prostitutes. They wanted to see if they could make female spies or female agents with alternate controllable personalities. Another purpose of these experiments was to test the CIA's Manchurian Candidate prostitutes under conditions that mimicked a field operation. The johns were given LSD as part of the cover for testing the CIA's female Manchurian Candidates prior to their use in actual operations (the mission being to have sex with and extract information from targets). The recruitment of street prostitutes provided an additional layer of cover for the testing of the Manchurian Candidates, plus it provided free live pornography for the CIA officers.

In other experiments, conducted by Dr. Jose Delgado at Yale and Drs. Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin and William Sweet at Harvard, brain electrodes were implanted in people and their mental state and behavior was controlled from a remote radio transmitter box. These experiments were conducted with funding from the Office of Naval Research. In experiments at Tulane funded by the CIA and the Army, implantation of brain electrodes was combined with injecting mescaline and other substances directly into the experimental subjects' brains.

BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA were the precursors of present-day enhanced interrogation programs used by the CIA at secret prisons outside the United States. Water-boarding, electric shock, hooding, prolonged sleep deprivation, death threats and other techniques discussed in the Senate and Congress and in the media, are, in my opinion, elements of a limited hangout, a CIA strategy in which a little bit of the truth is revealed in order to cover up the greater part of the truth. None of these experiments or operational programs would be possible without the participation of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists. The doctors are directly involved in testing the interrogation techniques and monitoring their effects.

The purpose of mind control experiments is controlling human behavior: making enemy combatants open up during interrogation; protecting secret information by erasing memories; making spies more resistant to interrogation because secret information is held by hidden identities and making people more prone to influence, social control and suggestion. It has nothing to do with medical treatment, easing suffering or curing disease. The mind control experiments and operational programs violate basic human rights and all codes of medical ethics.

Dr. Colin Ross is a psychiatrist, internationally renowned researcher, author and lecturer. In addition to The CIA Doctors and Military Mind Control, he is also author of Project Bluebird, in which he exposes unethical experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects. His research is based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Dr. Ross is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. He is the founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma.
[i] Colin A. Ross (2006). The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists. Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Reply
#7
I will get this book eventually.
It clearly was not just Gehlen's Org that Americans ought to be concerned about.
I've been digging a little on "imported enemies of my people" besides the famous well known cases of Gehlen and Rudolph and Von Braun.

Among other points I find that psychiatry was subjected to the same kinds of imported fascists. Into "medicine" too? It seems my enemy was not going to let all the death-camp "scientific data" go to waste.
My research is incomplete but progressing.
Thanx again Jan
Read not to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse;
but to weigh and consider.
FRANCIS BACON
Reply
#8
Jim Hackett II Wrote:I will get this book eventually.
It clearly was not just Gehlen's Org that Americans ought to be concerned about.
I've been digging a little on "imported enemies of my people" besides the famous well known cases of Gehlen and Rudolph and Von Braun.

Among other points I find that psychiatry was subjected to the same kinds of imported fascists. Into "medicine" too? It seems my enemy was not going to let all the death-camp "scientific data" go to waste.
My research is incomplete but progressing.
Thanx again Jan

Jim - you could start with Prof Robert G Heath of Tulane as mentioned by Adele above.

Heath was a world leader in his academic field and core MK-ULTRA.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Reply
#9
This topic of Deep Political corruption of Psychiatry is important.
Not just the MK mindbusting junk, but the sheer audacity of victimizing the weaker,
that is a hallmark of tyranny and fascism.
Hitler

Corrupted Medicine in general is part of our problem too.

In that you both know more than I about the topic I am grateful for the help.
Jim
Read not to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse;
but to weigh and consider.
FRANCIS BACON
Reply
#10
Jim Hackett II Wrote:This topic of Deep Political corruption of Psychiatry is important.
Not just the MK mindbusting junk, but the sheer audacity of victimizing the weaker,
that is a hallmark of tyranny and fascism.
Hitler

Corrupted Medicine in general is part of our problem too.

In that you both know more than I about the topic I am grateful for the help.
Jim

Thank you, Jim. It is almost unbelieveable what has been done in this country in the name of 'medical research' or some other academic label. More may still be uncovered.

Adele
Reply


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