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June 19, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
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June 20,
2002
CounterPunch
Special Report
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
by Douglas Valentine
[Editors' Note: We are once again
pleased to publish an exclusive investigative report by Douglas
Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, the best book on the
CIA's assassination program in Vietnam. This time Valentine,
who has just put the finishing touches on Strength of the Wolf
(a history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the origins
of the war on drugs), explores one of the Agency's more disgusting
chapters, the doping of unsuspecting American citizens with LSD.
With the Bush administration and members of congress from both
parties clamoring to unfetter the spy Agency in the wake of 9/11,
this cautionary tale from the CIA's recent past couldn't come
at a more apt time. For more on George Hunter White and the CIA's
MK-Ultra program read our book Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press.--jsc/ac]
Barbara Crowley Smithe was nineteen years old
in January 1953. She was full-figured, sexy and smart, with dark
hair, blue eyes, and a trace of Irish freckles. She lived in
Manhattan with her husband Eliot Smithe, and their 20-month old
daughter, Valerie.
People who knew Barbara said she was
a vibrant, happy young woman, but that she became confused about
her sexuality, and gradually lost her self-esteem. Her friends
did not know why, but she began to have angry confrontations
with Eliot. Arguments led to rough fights and a separation in
1957. Two extra-martial affairs engendered a haunting sense of
guilt, guilt led to depression, depression dissolved into despair,
and ultimately Barbara succumbed to paranoia.
At her psychiatrist's advice Barbara
was admitted to Stony Lodge Hospital in December 1958. Before
long she and Eliot divorced, and Valerie went to live with Eliot's
parents. Institutionalized for much of the next twenty years,
Barbara died of leukemia in February 1978, without ever telling
Eliot the secret she took to her grave--the stunning secret that
may very well explain her descent into mental illness.
Indeed, Barbara's mental breakdown may
be traced to the night of January 11th, 1953, when--without her
knowledge or consent--she was given a dose of LSD by an agent
of the Central Intelligence Agency. After that incredible night,
her short, sad life was never the same.
MKULTRA
Why would the CIA want to give LSD to
a nineteen-year-old woman with an infant in her arms? What did
Barbara Smithe have to do with pressing matters of National Security?
The official explanation dates to 1951,
when the CIA received an unsubstantiated report that the Soviet
Union was about to corner the world market in LSD. The Soviets
were thought to be perfecting drug-induced "brainwashing"
techniques, and the CIA reeled at the prospect of Russian agents
dumping LSD into New York's water supply, and then using insidious
Communist propaganda to turn drug addled American citizens against
their own government.
While this frightening scenario never
did materialize, the CIA was able to use it as a pretext to start
testing LSD on friends and foes alike. The spy agency's ultimate
objective was to develop the capability to entrap and blackmail
spies, diplomats, and politicians--ours, as well as theirs.
The CIA called its experimental LSD "mind-control"
project MKULTRA.
After a year of conducting MKULTRA experiments
in laboratories, the CIA's researchers decided they needed to
start testing LSD in "real life" settings. In order
to do this, however, they needed a "front," so they
asked Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics (FBN), to provide them with an agent who was capable
of finding suitable test subjects within the arcane setting of
narcotics control. Subjects were to be FBN informants, drug addicts
and drug peddlers, prostitutes, pornographers, and other degenerate
underworld characters--in other words, people who were already
compromised by their deviant behaviors, and would be unable to
complain to the police if they were damaged during the LSD experiments.
The Double
Man
The man Anslinger selected for the MKULTRA
job was George Hunter White. A highly successful and flamboyant
federal narcotic agent since1935, White's claim to fame was a
1937 undercover case he made against the notorious drug smuggling
Sino-American trade association, the Hip Sing T'ong. Posing as
John Wilson, the nephew of his "Uncle Sam" (a hitherto
unknown hood who was forming a new drug syndicate), White crossed
the country contracting with Hip Sing T'ong members for huge
purchases of opium.
According to legend, White, a Caucasian,
was initiated into the T'ong, swearing to accept "death
by fire" should he ever break its sacred oath of secrecy.
The investigation climaxed in November 1937 with a series of
spectacular mass arrests, including several prominent Mafiosi.
The case cemented White's status as the FBN's top agent, and
subsequently involved him its most important, secret investigations.
At five feet, seven inches tall, and
weighing a rotund 200 pounds, White, who shaved his head completely
bald, was the image of a tough detective, the kind who made bad
guys tip their hats and speak politely to cops. A native of California,
he was ebullient and brash, and as a former crime reporter for
the San Francisco Call Bulletin, had a nose for
sniffing out trouble. And trouble was what White enjoyed more
than anything else. Rough and tough and good with his fists,
White led his fellow federal agents into many a fight with the
country's most vicious hoods. More importantly, his many newspaper
contacts were always available to his publicity hunger boss,
and after he extricated Anslinger's stepson from an undisclosed
legal problem, White became the Commissioner's favorite and most
trusted agent.
The main reason White was given the MKULTRA
LSD testing assignment, was that he had acquired clandestine
drug testing experience during the Second World War. In 1943
he had been transferred from the FBN to the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS). Assigned to the spy agency as a counter-intelligence
officer, Major White became deeply involved in OSS "truth
drug" experiments, in which distilled marijuana was used
in the interrogation of prisoners of war, suspected double agents,
and conscientious objectors. White's 'truth drug" experiments
continued until at least 1947.
White also was selected for the MKULTRA
assignment because he was a disgruntled employee. After the war
he had returned to the FBN and by 1950 was serving in New York
City, where, apart from his work as a federal narcotic agent,
he participated in a number of sensitive "political"
investigations for the U.S. Government. Among his special assignments,
White worked briefly with Assistant U.S. Attorney Roy Cohn and
Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) rooting Communists out of the
CIA and the State Department, and from mid-1950 until early 1951
he served as the chief investigator for Senator Estes Kefauver
(D-TN) in a nationwide expose of organized crime. But White was
impetuous and overstepped his bounds. First he incurred Harry
Truman's wrath by attempting to link the President to organized
crime in Kansas City. And in early 1951 he was fired from the
Kefauver Committee for leaking classified information. But the
final blow came a few months later when the Kefauver Committee
aired allegations that New York Governor Thomas Dewey had commuted
Lucky Luciano's prison sentence for a sizable campaign contribution.
The allegation was base on a memorandum White had written in
1947, and in retaliation, the sullied Governor banished White
from New York.
Dewey's edict was a disappointment to
White, whose ambition at the time was to serve as the FBN's district
supervisor in New York. But White was too important to be dismissed
offhand: the MKULTRA Program, which was to be established in
New York, was already in the works, and so Commissioner Anslinger
simply reassigned him as district supervisor in Boston. But White
was rarely there. Instead he kept his apartment in New York while
awaiting his final security clearance from the CIA. He was still
an employee of the FBN, but he was bitter about the roadblock
in his narcotic law enforcement career, and was hoping to find
steady employment with the CIA. In this spirit George White willingly
and energetically embarked on his CIA, MKULTRA assignment.
Partners in Crime
Although George White had notoriety and
powerful friends, and existed above the law as one of Espionage
Establishment's "protected few," he was a deeply conflicted
man. His first wife, Ruth, deserted him in 1945, calling him
"a fat slob," and according to psychological reports
compiled while he was applying for employment with the CIA, White
compensated for that humiliation by seeking attention, and by
hurting people. This was the third reason why the CIA accepted
him for the MKULTRA job: George White was a sadist-masochist
with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol, kinky sex, and power.
The archetypal Double Man, White, however,
had the ability to charm as well as to repulse, and on 18 August
1951 he married his second wife, Albertine Calef, a clothing
buyer at the Abraham and Strauss department store in Brooklyn.
Described as a "bubbly" woman, Tine was born in New
York of Egyptian Jewish parents. When interviewed for this article,
Tine expressed nothing but devotion to the memory of her former
husband. She described him as "effective and punctual, a
great raconteur, a voracious reader of non-fiction books, and
a very good writer." According to her, George White was
a liberal Democrat who never picked a fight or resorted to strong-arm
tactics.
Tine apparently turned a blind eye toward
her husband's deviant behavior. They shared a comfortable apartment
at 59 West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, and hob-nodded with
politicians, diplomats, law enforcement officials, artists and
writers. Tine thoroughly enjoyed the fast company her husband
kept, and in order to maintain her exciting lifestyle, she stood
by and did nothing when he poisoned Barbara Smithe with LSD.
Indeed, when this writer asked her what George White did to Barbara
on the night of January 11th, 1953, the 80 plus year old woman
descended into a string of expletives that would have embarrassed
a sailor. Her tirade left this writer with the firm impression
that she was thoroughly capable of having been White's accomplice
in his dirty work.
Click Here to Continue "Sex,
Drugs & the CIA"
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix
Program, and TDY, all of which are available through iUniverse.com.
For information about Mr. Valentine and his books and articles,
please visit his website at www.douglasvalentine.com
Today's
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Jeffrey St. Clair and
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