The Wizards of Langley (2 page)

The adoption of the new directive, according to an official history, had a “devastating effect upon the morale of OSI.” Becker resented OSI’s reaction. On August 21, he met with senior officers and acknowledged the legitimacy of their doubts about the military’s competence in the scientific and technical area, but demanded that OSI make a loyal effort to make the directive work. Superior performance, he told them, would lead
to OSI leadership in the field. The meeting failed to convince OSI’s senior members that Becker had known what he was doing when he revoked Weber’s directive. But from that time on, OSI devoted less attention and energy to asserting the CIA’s role in coordinating scientific intelligence activities and more to developing OSI’s capabilities for research in all areas of scientific intelligence, including weapon systems development, “in anticipation of a day when a new DCI and a new DDI [Deputy Director of Intelligence] would value such independent capabilities.”
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Such a day arrived in early February 1953 when Allen Dulles, who had become deputy DCI in August 1951 after a short stint as operations chief, replaced Smith. In addition, Robert Amory succeeded Becker as head of the agency’s intelligence directorate.
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Two years later OSI’s leadership was strengthened when Herbert J. Scoville became head of OSI in August 1955. The forty-year-old Scoville had received a B.S. degree from Yale in 1937, where he had studied chemistry, mathematics, physics, and German. Five years later, he was awarded a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Rochester. From 1948 until joining the CIA, he had served as the technical director of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, which advised the chiefs of the armed services on a variety of nuclear weapons issues.
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In 1959, a new DCI directive on the production of scientific and technical intelligence assigned the CIA responsibility for producing such intelligence as a “service of common concern” and “as required to fulfill the statutory responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence.” The directive also reestablished the Scientific Intelligence Committee, with a mission of fostering coordination.
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Amid all the bureaucratic battles, OSI had been actively producing studies and estimates. In 1949, it issued the 64-page single-spaced study “An Estimate of Swedish Capabilities in Science”—a detailed assessment of Swedish scientists, research institutions, and technology programs, including highly classified wind tunnel and pulse-jet engine research. The study concluded that the Soviets would gain a distinct, but small, scientific advantage if it overran Sweden, and recommended “denying” them certain Swedish scientists and research facilities in the case of a Soviet invasion.
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That same year, OSI informed the Office of the Secretary of Defense that the Soviets would not invest their scarce resources in developing radiological weapons. Such a program “would interfere with atomic bomb production,” OSI stated in a briefing paper. “In addition,” OSI concluded,
“radiological materials are difficult to handle and disseminate, and their use is relatively ineffective.”
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Until 1955, when responsibility was transferred to the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, chaired by Scoville, OSI was responsible for preparing national intelligence estimates on atomic energy.
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Its 1954 estimate on the Soviet program reported on the production of uranium, reactor power, and the likely explosive force of Soviet weapons. The study also considered how large the Soviet nuclear stockpile might be in each year through mid-1957, based on alternative assumptions concerning the composition of the warheads and their individual yields.
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In 1954, Chadwell and key OSI personnel, along with some consultants, appear to have been called in to aid the CIA’s Board of National Estimates in preparing the first full-scale National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Soviet guided missiles. The 49-page estimate examined Soviet capabilities to develop all varieties of guided missiles as well as probable Soviet intentions. However, the lack of hard intelligence then available was neatly summarized at the beginning of the estimate: “We have no firm current intelligence on what particular guided missiles the USSR is presently developing or may now have in operational use.”
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The exercise convinced Dulles that guided missile intelligence had to receive greater attention both within the CIA and across the intelligence community. In late March 1955, the Guided Missiles Branch of OSI’s Weapons Division was elevated to division status. (In 1957, a Space Branch was established to monitor Soviet earth satellite, lunar, and interplanetary efforts.)
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The nuclear activities of U.S. adversaries and allies, small and large, remained the main focus of OSI’s analytical effort. In 1958, OSI began inquiring into Israel’s nuclear activities, particularly its production of heavy water and uranium. That same year, the Netherlands nuclear energy program was the subject of a 23-page OSI report, which examined the tiny nation’s nuclear research and development program, evaluated its ability to produce plutonium and U-235, and assessed the objective of the program—“the development of economic applications of nuclear energy.” A 1959 study of the French nuclear weapons program attempted to assess France’s capability to produce fissionable material as well as develop and test nuclear weapons.
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In August 1958, the OSI’s Charlie Reeves began assembling data on generating stations and transmission lines in the vicinity of known or suspected Soviet atomic energy sites in the Urals, the USSR’s most important atomic energy region. Because the production of fissionable materi
als from a plant was directly proportional to the amount of power consumed, information on power supplied was used to estimate nuclear material production. Starting with a single picture of the Sverdlovsk Central Dispatching Station of the Urals Electric Power System that appeared in the Soviet press, Reeves examined 103 articles in Soviet newspapers and technical journals, 4 reports of visits by delegations, 11 POW returnee reports, approximately 25 local photographs, as well as aerial photography. As a result, in April 1959, Reeves was able to map out the power distribution network in the Urals and determine the approximate power supplied to the U-235 production plant at Verkh Neyvinsk, to the plutonium reactor at Kyshtym, and to the unidentified complex near Nizhnyaya Tura.
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After dinner on November 19, 1953, Frank Olson, a scientist with the Army Chemical Corps’s Special Operations Division, based at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, shared a drink of Cointreau with several of his colleagues—Cointreau that had been spiked with LSD. Ten days later, Olson jumped to his death. The hallucinogen was added to his drink at the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the Deputy Directorate for Plans (DDP), established in 1952 to consolidate CIA operational activities in one component.
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Gottlieb, whose scientific credentials included a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cal Tech, had joined the CIA two years earlier, at the age of thirtythree. Despite being born with a clubfoot and a stutter, he had become an expert folk dancer and achieved academic success. Along with his wife, he lived on a farm, rose at 5:30 a.m. to milk the goats, drank only goat’s milk, made his own cheese, and grew Christmas trees that he sold from a roadside stand.
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Although the primary job of the TSS was to devise devices and methods—bugs, recorders, disguised weapons, forged documents, special cameras, and secret writing techniques—Gottlieb did not spike Olson’s drink as a prank or out of hostility. He was simply conducting an experiment.

Even before Gottlieb joined the CIA, the agency had already investigated exotic ways in which Soviet agents might affect human behavior. In summer 1949, OSI chief Willard Machle had made a special trip to Western Europe to investigate Soviet interrogation methods. By spring 1950, several CIA branches were considering employing hypnosis for opera
tional use. At that time, Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s director of security, moved to centralize all activity in the behavioral sciences under his control, although OSI continued to provide support to the effort. In April, DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter approved project BLUEBIRD, whose objectives included “discovering means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by known means,” and “establishing defensive means for preventing hostile control of Agency personnel.” Three months later, a team traveled to Japan to try out behavioral techniques on human subjects. Subsequently, the examination of the possible offensive uses of hypnosis and drugs was added to BLUEBIRD’s charter. By December 1950, the BLUEBIRD team had employed drugs to induce a hypnotic-like trance.
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Between 1950 and 1952, the responsibility for such activities passed from the Inspection and Security Office to OSI and back to Security, and BLUEBIRD was redesignated ARTICHOKE. One goal of the ARTICHOKE team was to be able to induce amnesia. According to a 1952 agency document, “the greater the amnesia produced, the more effective the results.” While Security searched for interrogation aids in the form of a truth drug or hypnotic method, TSS explored a broader topic—the application of chemical and biological techniques to covert operations.
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On April 13, 1953, Allen Dulles accepted a suggestion from senior DDP official Richard Helms to establish a program under Gottlieb for “research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.” In addition to giving the United States an offensive capability, such research, Helms wrote, would provide “a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are.” The initial budget was $300,000; the program was designated MKULTRA. Use of MKULTRA materials abroad, which began no later than 1953, was designated MKDELTA.
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TSS proceeded to investigate the effect of hundreds of drugs, including cocaine, nicotine, and probably hallucinogens such as mescaline. But LSD held the most fascination, in part because only a minute amount could produce a tremendous effect. The CIA wanted to know if the drug could distort a person’s loyalty in addition to his sense of reality. Could LSD induce treason as well as hallucinations?
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In November 1953, Gottlieb decided to test the drug on a group of scientists from the Army Chemical Corps’s Special Operations Division
(SOD), despite two warnings from high-level officials in DDP not to conduct such tests without their approval. There was a certain irony, poetic justice, or cold-bloodedness—depending on one’s point of view—in the selection of SOD personnel. Under a program designated MKNAOMI, SOD had been enlisted by Technical Services to produce germ weapons for the CIA’s use. The Army scientists had developed darts coated with biological agents and pills containing several different biological agents that could remain potent for weeks or months. SOD also developed a special gun for firing chemical-coated darts to incapacitate guard dogs. Gottlieb later explained that the investigation “was started . . . [at] the height of the Cold War . . . ; with the CIA organizing resources to liberate Eastern Europe by paramilitary means; and with the threat of Soviet aggression very real and tangible.”
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Olson’s death was not a roadblock to Gottlieb’s eventual rise to become head of the Technical Services Division (TSD), as TSS would become later in the 1950s. Nor did Olson’s suicide, which the CIA secretly concluded was “triggered” by the LSD, end the MKULTRA program. The use of hallucinogens was only one element of MKULTRA; it eventually had 182 subprojects, 33 of which had nothing to do with behavioral modification, toxins, or drugs. Subprojects included electrical brain stimulation and the implanting of electrodes in the brains of several species of animals to enable experimenters to direct the animals by remote control, in the hope they could be further wired and used for eavesdropping. Various elements of MKULTRA would continue until 1963, when the CIA Inspector General discovered the program during an inspection of TSD operations.
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Seven years to the day after Harry Truman signed legislation establishing the CIA, Dr. James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a letter from Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower. The president wrote that he understood Killian had been asked by the Office of Defense Mobilization “to direct a study of the country’s technological capabilities to meet some of its current problems”—a project that was most directly prompted by a meeting the committee had with Eisenhower in late March. He went on to express his hope that “you will find it possible to free yourself of your many other heavy responsibilities . . . long enough to undertake this important assignment.”
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Two CIA historians would subsequently write that “when the Central Intelligence Agency came into existence in 1947, no one foresaw that, in less than a decade, it would undertake a major program of overhead reconnaissance, whose principal purpose would be to overfly the Soviet Union.”
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But the assignment Eisenhower asked Killian to undertake would lead to precisely that outcome.

The panel was designated the Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) and Killian would serve as its chairman. The TCP’s Project One focused on offensive capabilities, Project Two on the application of technology to defense, and Project Three on intelligence. The intelligence panel’s membership consisted of Edwin Land and Allan Latham Jr. of Polaroid; lens designer James G. Baker and physicist Edward Purcell, both of Harvard; Washington University chemist Joseph W. Kennedy, who had helped isolate plutonium; and John W. Tukey of Princeton and Bell Telephone. Land served as chairman.
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