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Columns

Alexander Cockburn

Guinea Pigs in Freedom's Cause
June 12, 2002

No one with even a passing knowledge about the history of chemical and biological warfare in the United States should be in the least surprised about recent disclosures regarding the testing of nerve gas upon unsuspecting members of the U.S. military back in the 1960s. (If you're looking for these historical data, best not look under the file marked "war on terror.") In the late 1970s, the CIA made the mistake of responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Scientologists by contemptuously sending them a railroad car of shredded documents.

The Scientologists patiently pieced enough of the millions of scraps of paper together to figure out that in 1951, the U.S. Army had secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type of bacterium was chosen because blacks were believed to be more susceptible than whites.

The towns of Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., were targets of repeated army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver dengue and yellow fever. Hundreds fell ill with fevers, respiratory distress, still births and encephalitis. Several died.

This was the high tide of secret experiments by government agencies on unsuspecting or coerced human guinea pigs, otherwise known as citizens of the United States. As Jeffrey St. Clair and I described in our book "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press," CIA director Allen Dulles gave the late Sydney Gottlieb (boss of the Agency's Chemical Division) $300,000 to test LSD and other potions, some of them lethal. Gottlieb passed some of the money on to Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Ky., thriving on the CIA subventions (funneled through the National Institutes of Health) and acting as middleman for the Agency for its supplies of narcotics and hallucinogens from the drug companies.

Isbell fed morphine and heroin to prisoners remanded to the Center, among them black heroin addicts into whom he also injected staggering amounts of LSD for 77 straight days, measuring their reactions as he did so.

Recently, St. Clair and I heard from John Williams, who'd read our "Whiteout." He had worked at the Center and sent along these reminiscences:

"I worked at the Addiction Research Center (ARC) about 30 years ago. It was located in one of Lexington's white-picket fenced rural areas, 600 Leestown Pike. The head of the Center then was Dr. William Martin, MD (he replaced Isbell).

"My immediate supervisor was Harold Flanary. I worked there as a health physicist. My primary duties were the design, modification, repair and maintenance of laboratory equipment -- primarily automatic injectors, stimulus generators and recording devices. I never worked directly with the prisoners, and in the two years I worked there, ran into perhaps three prisoners in ARC custody being "tested." The ARC was located in a complex that had a minimum-security federal prison that housed both male and female prisoners (while I was there, a famous Illinois governor was incarcerated. I don't recall his name).

"Part of the prison also included a Clinical Research Center, with which I was not too familiar. The ARC prisoners were lifers bused in, and were not derived from the prison population there, which primarily consisted of frauds, embezzlers, forgers, other mostly white and white-collar criminals. The prison had a major problem with female prisoners constantly turning up pregnant. The prison cafeteria food was some of the best I've ever eaten anywhere.

"Some things of possible interest to you:

1. While at that time I did not realize that the ARC was a CIA operation, I suspected somebody big was behind us. The psychiatrists there talked about the development of a drug called "M-cubed." It was 1,000 times more potent than LSD, and it was designed to be used against Castro and other communist leaders. I used to eat lunch regularly with about a dozen psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmacologists and neurologists, and we all talked a lot about our work.

2. While I was there, there were at least three ARC prison riots, from what I was told, each apparently effectively repressed.

3. On the upper floor of the prison were housed about 50 World War II veterans who were among the thousands on whom the VA performed lobotomies to treat "shell shock" (PTSD). Essentially, they were walking vegetables. This saddened me greatly, as I am a disabled veteran myself.

4. Much of the equipment I maintained was used to periodically inject beagle dogs, chimps and monkeys. There were about a dozen chimps and monkeys, and close to 50 dogs. To keep the dogs in place, their spines were surgically broken. After a short time of what appeared to me to be great suffering, they died and were systematically replaced. Some were autopsied.

"Had enough?

"Sincerely, John J. Williams"

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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