Spies in Academic Clothing

The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture –

And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%

by Jan Irvin

May 13, 2015

Articles in this series:

1) R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth. Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,and the Psychedelic Revolution. By Jan Irvin, May 13, 2012

2) How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes. By Jan Irvin, August 28, 2012

3) Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering, by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin, May 13, 2013

4) Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA, by Jan Irvin, November 11, 2014

5) Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%, by Jan Irvin, May 13, 2015

‘Books differ from all other propaganda media,’ wrote a chief of the CIA’s Covert Action Staff, ‘primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium [such as to] make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda .’ The CIA’s clandestine books programme was run, according to the same source, with the following aims in mind: ‘Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers . Get books published which should not be “contaminated” by any overt tie-in with the U.S. government, especially if the position of the author is “delicate”. Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability . Initiate and subsidize indigenous national or international organizations for book publishing or distributing purposes . Stimulate the writing of politically significant books by unknown foreign authors – either by directly subsidizing the author, if covert contact is feasible, or indirectly, through literary agents or publishers.

The New York Times alleged in 1977 that the CIA had been involved in the publication of at least a thousand books.[1] [Emphasis added] ~ Frances Stonor Saunders

Introduction:

In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders makes startling revelations regarding the CIA’s clandestine books program. Citing the Frank Church Committee and the New York Times, she states that by 1977 the CIA had published over 1000 books, including those, ironically on “indigenous national or international organizations” – which would very likely include neo-shamanism and “native revivalism”.

If you’re a reader like I am, or even if you’ve ever read a book sometime in your life, then that means you may have read a book that was written by an intelligence agent and it’s likely, as Saunders shows, that you were misled. And even though this article pertains to the CIA’s MKULTRA program and the counterculture, it will provide insight into how the CIA (and intelligence community as a whole) influences information in other books and areas – including academia – as well.

As I’ll show in this essay, by 1979 things hadn’t changed much. And even to this day it seems the CIA, et al, is cranking out propaganda in book form (along with movies, music and other forms of pop-culture). And as we’ll see, it wasn’t just in international publications, but in books and media right here at home that intentionally misled the public regarding major issues of concern.

In my study of the CIA’s MKULTRA program I made the startling discovery that all of the early books on the subject, and very many of the later ones, were written by authors of the CIA and intelligence community to misguide the public’s perception of MKULTRA and what it was (and is) really about. This may seem like an outrageous “conspiracy theory” now, but as we go along the evidence will speak for itself.

The typical level of deception in most of these books seems to follow something along the lines of 70/30. If the authors of these books that have mislead public perception, as well as historical research, were entirely inaccurate, they would be easily found out. But by using a general rule of about 70% facts and 30% deception, these authors and academics for the intelligence community are able to tell their version of history while at the same time providing a misleading glimpse into the world of intelligence. And with some effort and research, one is able to stitch together, by little bits from each of these publications, and by digging through university library archives, etc., a much more accurate picture. This essay focuses on exposing the 30% deception and how it works – and how a major aspect of MKULTRA was covered up until the present day.

Over the years I’ve been able to piece together a much different perception of MKULTRA and the counterculture revolution, most of which I’ve revealed on the Logos Media website. In Gordon Wasson, the Man, the Legend, The Myth, 2012; and in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013, and more recently in Entheogens: What’s In a Name?, 2014, and in online videos and documentaries, I’ve revealed a large amount of primary evidence that shows that the official version of the MKULTRA story and psychedelic revolution is just another cover-up, and one that the CIA and intelligence community managed to get away with long after the MKULTRA program was first “exposed” in the 1970s. In doing this research I’ve been able to piece together how this deception works and is perpetuated throughout the intelligence community, and onto, or against, the “public” at large.

As Howard Zinn wrote in The Peoples' History of the United States:

The Church Committee uncovered CIA operations to secretly influence the minds of Americans: The CIA is now using several hundred American academics (administrators, faculty members, graduate students engaged in teaching) who, in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. . . These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities and related institutions. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use of academics on his campus... The CIA considers these operational relationships within the U.S. academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and has strict controls governing these operations. . ..

In 1961 the chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff wrote that books were "the most important weapon of strategic propaganda." The Church Committee found that more than a thousand books were produced, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967.[2]

~ Howard Zinn

The CIA has to create an air of deniability, for if the public knew that the Agency violated its charter each and every day since its inception, and that its real target was largely the American people, they would have a totally different perception of the CIA – one of complete distrust – and that’s one the CIA doesn’t want. Though by now, with past scandals such as MKULTRA, and more recent ones such as the NSA’s spying, people are becoming less trusting, and less likely to blindly follow what they’re told are the facts regarding the intelligence community. Here Saunders (who’s very possibly a British counterintelligence agent exposing the CIA) reveals how the CIA hid funds from Congress and the public:

‘The key to all this is the counterpart funds,’ Lawrence de Neufville later revealed. ‘People couldn’t say in U.S. Congress, “oh, look what they’re doing with taxpayer’s money,” because it wasn’t our money, it was a byproduct of the Marshall Plan.’ In an innovative move under the early years of the Marshall Plan, it was proposed that, in order to make the funds perform double duty, each recipient country should contribute to the foreign aid effort by depositing an amount equal to the US contribution in its central bank. A bilateral agreement between the country and the US allowed these funds to be used jointly. The bulk of the currency funds (95 per cent) remained the legal property of the country’s government, while 5 per cent became, upon deposit, the property of the US government. These ‘counterpart funds’ – a secret fund of roughly $200 million a year – were made available as a war chest for the CIA. […] Now Irving Brown was able to boost his CIA slush fund with Marshall Plan ‘candy’.[3]

~ Frances Stonor Saunders

In fact, the CIA had so much “candy” that:

We couldn’t spend it all. I remember once meeting with Wisner and the comptroller. My God, I said, how can we spend that? There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.[4]

~ Frances Stonor Saunders citing CIA agent Gilbert Greenway

This article seeks to aid readers to understand some newly uncovered facts that anyone may verify. More and more evidence is amassing that reveals that the CIA did, in fact, launch the psychedelic revolution and counterculture, and that it was not blow back as is the common understanding. Here we’ll show how academics, authors, and spies (some were all three), colluded together to mislead everything the public thinks it knows about the MKULTRA program and the subsequent counterculture and psychedelic revolution, as well as how this type of information manipulation bleeds into nearly every area of our lives. By the end of this article it will be clear how the CIA and intelligence community perform this function against the American people.

We’ll be uncovering evidence and citations from the seven main books on MKULTRA and the counterculture that show, it appears, serious ulterior motives behind them, and, as the evidence will show, that they were misleading the American people’s perception of the CIA’s mind control program – apparently intentionally. And the Church Committee cited by Saunders and Zinn for the above quotes was one of the congressional hearings regarding the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program.

Starting with John G. Fuller’s book The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968, regarding what turned out to be pre-MKULTRA-like tests in Pont Saint Esprit, France, I’ll show that it appears that Fuller was doing a follow up study and even does a bogus UFO media stunt to gain acceptance from the local community when he arrives. He’s checking up on the damage done by these early MKULTRA-type experiments performed by the CIA and military intelligence, and further misleading the local population who’d already gone through years of hell.

In Operation Mind Control, 1978, Walter Bowart omits several glaring facts regarding his background, a background which, as we’ll find out, is astounding. Furthermore, Bowart was heavily studied in Marshal McLuhan’s public relations and media manipulation, and staged the famous ‘flower in the rifle’ or ‘flower power’ photo opportunity at the Pentagon that was photographed by Bernie Boston.

If I mention the book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, 1979, many people have heard of it and may even know that it was written by John D. Marks. But unfortunately, for most people, their understanding of these very difficult subjects may stop at only one book – such as Marks’s –and they would only get about 70% truth in the focus of the one book. They may also not know that Marks was the assistant to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for the U.S. State Department. Of course we can hardly expect an unbiased representation of MKULTRA from an intelligence agency. It would be foolhardy to assume otherwise. The MKULTRA files that are available today were originally released by Marks.

As we’ll uncover, the infamous fable of R. Gordon Wasson, the so-called “discoverer” of magic mushrooms, being infiltrated by a ‘mole,’ the CIA’s agent Dr. James Moore, on their search for psilocybe mushrooms in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1956, must have started with Marks’s book. As we’ll see, it’s a story that’s ridiculous – but is repeated over and over in nearly every publication on the topic, including many ethnobotany publications since 1979. As it turns out, Wasson’s trip to Mexico with “personnel” was the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 58, which became ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom,’ in Life magazine, May 13, 1957.

In 1985 Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain published what is, in my opinion, the most misleading and poorly researched book in all the available MKULTRA / psychedelic revolution literature, titled Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. These authors repeatedly claim that there is no evidence that the government had launched the psychedelic revolution and counterculture – while apparently omitting certain evidence and dismissing other evidence out of hand. We’ll track some of this evidence down to the primary citations to show the reader that the authors may have covered up evidence that proved otherwise, while also quoting key CIA players and dismissing their quotes out of hand. Furthermore, the blow back mantra is repeated, as well as the James Moore myth started by Marks.

Jay Stevens is the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, 1987, and this book has some good nuggets, though they’re often misleading and whitewashed, which forces one to realize that Stevens had to be on the inside to get them.

David Black’s book Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, 2001, exposes more, especially with Ronald “Stark” Shitsky, and has some great leads, but he repeats the same themes about how the psychedelic revolution appears to be blow back, and Black’s leads on Mr. Shitsky, unfortunately, run into dead ends.

Hank Albarelli published A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments, 2010, and, again, he continues the James Moore story by Marks and that Wasson was personally unaware - while claiming to have read every page of the MKULTRA files and many more that others haven’t seen. Albarelli focuses on older, smaller, or more irrelevant aspects of MKULTRA, though must include some good material to not expose himself – which, as we saw in Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2013, he does anyway. As it turns out, Albarelli was a lawyer at the Whitehouse during the Carter Administration – when MKULTRA was first being exposed to the public.

A startling discovery, first pointed out to me by my friend, anthropologist Professor Jay Courtney Fikes, in his book Carlos Castaneda: Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties, 1993,[5] revealed that academics Prof. Peter T. Furst, Dr. Barbara Myerhoff, and Dr. Carlos Castaneda, had collaborated together and misled their readers for decades regarding the Huichol Indians, and appeared to have committed academic fraud. The best way I know how to describe this is what seem to be “academic cells” or groups of researchers and academics collaborating together, and citing each other’s misinformation to back up their stories. As I wrote in “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?”:

When Fikes first went public with the information in his book, Furst threatened to sue his publisher. Rather than standing firm, Fikes’ publisher panicked and pulled his book from print. And Fikes and other anthropologists had already brought charges of academic fraud against Furst to the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association in 1992[6], which also backed down due to Furst’s threats. Due to the depth of this scandal as we’ve been revealing here, we’re beginning to understand what was likely what caused the Anthropological Association to back down. Furst will have no such luck here. I’d love to get this scandal on the official record. Attempts to interview Furst have failed.[7]

As seen in this same article, “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” other similar type academic cells started emerging, such as it appears with R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl A. P. Ruck, Jonathan Ott, and their collaborators. And there are still others coming to light. These same tactics have been and are used in MKULTRA research, and furthermore, I’ve noticed a pattern of these academic and research “cells” cross-citing each other to further bury each owns’ frauds. And it spreads far into other areas of our lives as well. Here President Bill Clinton’s professor at Georgetown University, Carroll Quigley, explains this process on a similar, but political scale:

By the interaction of these various branches on one another, under the pretense that each branch was an autonomous power, the influence of each branch was an autonomous power, the influence of each branch was increased through a process of mutual reinforcement. The unanimity among the various branches was believed by the outside world to be the result of the influence of a single Truth, while really it was the result of the existence of a single group. Thus a statesman (a member of the Group) announces a policy. About the same time, the Royal Institute of International Affairs publishes a study on the subject, and an Oxford don, a Fellow of All Souls (and a member of the Group) also publishes a volume on the subject (probably through a publishing house, like G. Bell and Sons or Faber and Faber, allied to the Group). The statesman’s policy is subjected to critical analysis and final approval in a “leader” in The Times, while the two books are reviewed (in a single review) in The Times Literary Supplement. Both the “leader” and the review are anonymous but are written by the members of the Group. And finally, at about the same time, an anonymous article in The Round Table strongly advocates the same policy. The cumulative effect of such tactics as this, even if each tactical move influences only a small number of important people, is bound to be great.[8]

~ Carroll Quigley

With this in mind, the above can be very startling in that it reveals how deep this type of disinformation can run through society, which acts as a web to keep the public misinformed on any topic.

And I should mention that I have no doubt that the intelligence community will launch all forms of vitriolic attack on me for publishing this paper. The typical fallacious tactics used against me since first publishing my article on Gordon Wasson, 2012, include: name calling, public ridicule, slander, straw man arguments, cyber terrorism, and anything but addressing the citations and what my work actually says. Their sophist attacks and deceptions (spin) have further helped me to understand how these cover-ups work – and where to look for evidence – in the opposite direction of their attacks. As the old cliché: “You get the most flak when you’re over the target”.

When we begin to understand how CIA/intelligence disinformation works, how counterintelligence works, we begin to see that all along our questions were incorrect:

If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.[9]

~ Thomas Pynchon

By close study of the documents and history of MKULTRA and the counterculture we realize that (nearly) all of the early psychedelic stars were agents (or assets), and then we see a whole new picture come into focus: CIA agents don’t always wear black, but they often wear tie-dye (or professors’ khaki pants) – talk about plausible deniability. The question was not who was a CIA agent… But rather, who wasn’t?

Aside from tie-dye, we’ll also strip away some of this academic clothing to expose more spies in what was no more than the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Now that we have an overview of how the CIA and intelligence community misleads and misdirects information, it’s time for some real journalism.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.[10]

In chronological order, we begin with John G. Fuller’s The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, about the poisoning of an entire village, Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, with what appears to have been ergot or one of the many Lysergamides extracted at the nearby Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, in Switzerland. This nightmare ended in seven dead, with hundreds of villagers going mad for days, weeks, or months –and some never recovered. The true history of this event continues to be suppressed to the present day. This is but one more chapter in uncovering the atrocious crimes committed against humanity by the intelligence community.

John G. Fuller: The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968

(This section is dedicated to the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France)

John Fuller was an author and writer of several books, including:

The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, 1968, which is a look into the ergot / lysergamide outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in mid-August, 1951. The impact of this event went on for many months. The “official conclusion” of this event was that it was “mercury poisoning,” which Fuller exposes as false – for the simple reason that the effects aren’t all that similar – and there were hundreds of first hand descriptions of the effects.

He’s also the author of Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, which is a look into Zé Arigó, a so-called “psychic surgeon,” from Brazil. In this book Fuller travels to Brazil with MKULTRA doctor and researcher, Andrija Puharich, to investigate Arigó and to supposedly tell his story.

Fuller’s book The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, though misleading, is quite good, and though it’s written as a story or narrative that’s nearly impossible to fact check –like all of his books, it does have an excellent “play-by-play” style. I would assume the letters and records he quotes should be in the official French records, although I have not verified this. No doubt there’s a strong possibility that he made up many of his “quotes”.

In my opinion, Fuller’s story in, well, all of his books, but in the case before us: The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, is a cover story. It appears that Fuller was doing a 15 year follow-up study for the CIA and Military intelligence community on the victims of what was apparently a Project BLUEBIRD or ARTICHOKE experiment (Project MKULTRA wasn’t funded until April 13, 1953):

I arrived in the bitter cold of Paris of January, 1967 […][11]

~ John G. Fuller

Before we continue, I should also point out that LSD does not create the effects of “Saint Anthony’s Fire,” as described in Fuller’s book, and nor does mercury – a very unlikely claim by the French officials, and backed by Albert Hofmann in his book LSD: My Problem Child.[12] However, there is at least one lysergamide that creates the exact effects as described at Pont-Saint-Esprit – Ergometrine – isolated at Sandoz by Albert Hofmann's boss, Arthur Stoll, in 1918. It’s very possible that Sandoz had made a fresh batch. And maybe it’s just in-your-face irony, but its effects are described as “Saint Anthony’s Fire”.

Possible side effects include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, tinnitus, chest pain, palpitation, bradycardia, transient hypertension and other cardiac arrhythmias, dyspnea, rashes, and shock. An overdose produces a characteristic poisoning, ergotism or "St. Anthony's fire" : prolonged vasospasm resulting in gangrene and amputations; hallucinations and dementia; and abortions. Gastrointestinal disturbances such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, are common. [13]

Starting with the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident, after Fuller arrives in France, he worries over the lie he’s going to tell the French villagers in order to build their trust:

I decided that in order to discover the feeling of the town, and to try to get to know some of the people in a calm and unstrained atmosphere, I would have to practice a mild, benevolent deception. I knew no one whatever in the village, and had heard that it was almost certain that no one there could speak English. With my stumbling French it would be impossible to begin any depth-interviewing without getting to know some of the people well enough to beg their indulgence. I counted heavily on the tape recorder, so that I could listen and relisten to the interviews in French, and pick up the phrases I would lose in the thick Provencal and Languedoc accents of the Midi.[14]

~ John G. Fuller

He comes up with the idea to pretend to write about bridges, and then pretends that one of the villagers gave him another story –that he’s really there to investigate UFOs (more on this below):

“Vous avez raison,” I said, still wondering how he had penetrated my guise so quickly and easily. “You are absolutely right. I apologize” “Why did you not come right out and tell me the real story you are here to investigate?” he said. I stumbled around awkwardly, trying to find the right French words to express the subtleties of my apprehension and concern. “So you come here to write the story of the Unidentified Flying Objects which have been reported,” he said. “I did not know that they had received such international attention. But obviously they have.” I was completely stunned. […] I fell right into the accusation gladly. “Yes,” I said. “You have uncovered my benevolent guise with impossible speed. I apologize profusely.”[…] Although the subject was digressionary in my present situation, I felt that it would be an excellent way to get to know the village before beginning the research on the story of the “accursed bread.”[15] ~ John G. Fuller

So Fuller believes that deceiving the local villagers will be a good way to “get to know the village before beginning the research” on the “accursed bread”.

As a result, I did not hesitate to go along with M. Boudenne’s assumption that I was in Pont-Saint-Esprit to explore the UFO story.[…] Within days my picture had appeared in all the newspapers of southern France in regard to the UFO story, and O.R.T.F., the national television network of France, sent an eight-man documentary film crew to the village to interview me on the parallelisms between the Pont-Saint-Esprit UFO sightings and those of Exeter. […][16]

~ John G. Fuller

Serendipitously, if you can believe it, Fuller had previously written two books on UFOs (Incident at Exeter, and The Interrupted Journey), but M. Boudenne was completely unaware of this fact.

I was completely stunned. I had said nothing about the subject of UFO’s—or soucoupes volantes as they are called in France. I had not even hinted at the subject, which was one I wanted to avoid getting further involved in, after the two books on it.[17]

~ John G. Fuller

Don’t you just love it when that happens? You show up in a strange, small town in a foreign country, where you’re trying to make up a lie, and a town local makes up a story for you that you’re there writing about UFOs, and, serendipitously, even though you’re trying to avoid the subject, you’ve written two books on UFOs, and, serendipitously the local didn’t know, and suddenly all of the newspapers and the national TV are promoting you! I’m sure it happens all the time. And it’s probably a really good thing that M. Boudenne’s assumption was so much better than Fuller’s “benevolent” lie about bridges.

After the newspaper and television publicity, I became somewhat of a pseudocelebrity in the town, which was helpful in getting to know the tradesmen, the bartenders, the villagers more quickly.[18]

~ John G. Fuller

How serendipitous that the TV and newspapers could be so helpful in making him a pseudo-celebrity overnight, because, without them, by Fuller’s admission, he couldn’t have done his study nearly as quickly, hence why he made up a lie in the first place planning to deceive the townsfolk. I suppose it didn’t matter what the lie was, as long as he got on national TV and in the papers. I’m sure his idea of writing about bridges or whatever (it could have been wine, butterflies, or bat guano), would have likewise made him just as popular a celebrity with the townsfolk and would have also gotten him on the national news, because, by Fuller’s logic, in order to: “discover the feeling of the town, and to try to get to know some of the people in a calm and unstrained atmosphere, [he] would have to practice a mild, benevolent deception.” –in other words, being a national news pseudo-celebrity creates a natural environment where one may “discover the feeling of a town” in a “calm and unstrained atmosphere” – if you can believe that.

And then, serendipitously, Fuller later just changed the story that he was there to research the “accursed bread”:

As the research began in earnest, and after confessing that the story of the bread was now my major objective, I learned that there were many ambiguities in the case, that the general feeling persisted that the entire case was squashed by the government of that time in order to avoid the possibility of having to pay out the millions of francs the indemnification would total.[19]

~ John G. Fuller

So no one was bothered that he just suddenly wasn’t a UFO researcher even after he was on national French television? I’m sure that would be a great trust builder in a town where seven people died and hundreds were driven crazy for days, weeks, or months from the OSS/CIA’s secret tests, since he’s now the talk of the town and he’s no longer talking about UFOs, but instead inquiring about every detail of the poisoned ergot derivative/LSD bread episode.

Serendipitously, these acts also got him a translator who helped him with his research on the bread, apparently without pay, and who also apparently wasn’t bothered that he suddenly switched from UFOs to bread research:

I was also lucky to find a British journalist from Cannes, Ted Clark, who spoke French fluently, and who came up to Pont-Saint-Esprit, Nimes, and Montpellier with me on several occasions to help out in the research. Even with the taped interviews I had done, I still had trouble translating their subtleties, and Clark and I spent long hours trying to unravel them.[20]

~ John G. Fuller

What’s that I smell? Is that… bullshit? What’s crazier is that no one’s exposed this since 1968. Such incredible luck for a guy who lied to get onto national television in a small town in a foreign country!

Further evidence that Fuller was in France to do a follow up study is in the fact that he worked on Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, in Brazil, with Dr. Andrija Puharich. Serendipitously, Puharich happened to work at the Army’s chemical center at Edgewood, Maryland, and is now known to have worked with Project MKULTRA:

[…] Dr. Henry Karl Puharich, later known as Andrija Puharich, the man who introduced the controversial Israeli psychic Uri Geller to the world. […] was an Army officer in the early 1950s. During that time, Puharich was in and out of Edgewood Arsenal and Camp Detrick, meeting with various high-ranking officers and officials, primarily from the Pentagon, CIA, and Naval Intelligence. The purpose of the meetings was Puharich’s relentless attempt to convince the military and Intelligence agencies to take the potentials of parapsychology seriously. […] Recently uncovered document fragments from the mostly destroyed MKULTRA collection reveal that Puharich had far more contact and interaction with the CIA and Army concerning drug experimentation than he indicates in any of his books. Indeed, it appears that Puharich participated in a number of secret experiments with Amanita muscaria, the species of psychoactive mushrooms mentioned in his book. The experiments took place at prisons for men in New Jersey and Maryland, as well as at Spring Grove mental hospital in Catonsville, Maryland.[21]

~ Hank Albarelli

However, Albarelli only briefly mentions that the two men were associated:

In the late-1960’s, American writer and investigative journalist John G. Fuller, an associate of Dr. Henry Andrija Puharich, began researching the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak.[22]

~ Hank Albarelli

That Puharich and Fuller were associated is of great concern. As Uri Geller, the infamous “spoon bender” admitted, who was also one of Puharich’s promotions: he, too, was an agent – for both the Mossad and the CIA.[23] Shall we assume, when Puharich and Fuller were promoting Arigo, that it was any different?

It was almost dark as the Volkswagen microbus twisted along the serpentine road from Rio de Janeiro, four hundred kilometers to the south, toward the village of Congonhas do Campo. The green mountains, rolling like a rumpled billiard table, had turned to a purple-gray as the hot Brazilian sun deserted them. […] Inside the microbus were four men: two interpreters, university students from the University of Rio de Janeiro, and two Americans of widely divergent backgrounds. Henry Belk, a rangy, congenial, fiftyish Southerner from North Carolina who was both a successful businessman and an intellectual adventurer, had been at the wheel for nearly ten hours, dodging over exuberant Brazilian drivers and maneuvering around the precipitous hairpin turns with considerable skill. Beside him was Dr. Henry K. Puharich (he rarely used his given name, Andrija) with a medical degree from Northwestern University and a specialty in bioengineering. He further had a proclivity for trying to fuse and consolidate his extensive scientific background with little understood psychic phenomena.[…] They had also encountered John Laurance in Rio, a systems engineer in RCA’s space program, and an executive who had served on the advisory committee in setting up NASA.[24]

~ John G. Fuller.

Don’t you just love it when that happens? You’re cruising around a foreign country with an MKULTRA doctor and expert in “parapsychology” – (a field of psychology in which you get your victim(s) to believe in magic so as to take advantage of their credulity), and you just finished a follow-up study on a mind control experiment in France, and what do you know? Suddenly you’re meeting up with one of the men from the advisory committee in setting up NASA.

As Aldous Huxley states about dianetics and magic (10 December, 1950):

[…] Meanwhile we have been looking into dianetics. […]Basically it seems to be a procedure by which one obtains age regression without putting the patient into deep hypnosis. The aim is to get at the words and phrases, heard by the patient at moments of lowered consciousness, and accepted by him as obsessive commands, like post-hypnotic suggestions. The sub-conscious seems to take these verbal commands literally and unreasoningly, without regard to their context. The result can be disastrous, both mentally and physically. (If this is really the case, we may have here the rationale of magic spells, curses, and anathemas and the like.)[25]

~ Aldous Huxley

And, serendipitously, Huxley had worked with Puharich. Here are two of the many letters confirming this fact from The Letters of Aldous Huxley:

#691, 18 March, 1955

[…] Dr. Puharich was here for a few days last week, with Alice Bouverie, and we had talks about his latest preoccupation—amanita muscaria, which he thinks will open the doors of ESP in a big way, (provided always it doesn’t first open the doors of an untimely grave). Puharich is a lively bird, and I look forward to seeing what he does when he gets out of the army.[26]

~ Aldous Huxley

#714, 2 August, 1955

[…] On Friday I go to Boston and on Sunday to Maine (c/o Dr. Puharich

Round Table Foundation

Glen Cove, Main). Shall stay there a few days and then, perhaps, go to Woods Hole for a day or two. Then back to Guilford. Love to all.[27]

~ Aldous Huxley

And Puharich confirms Huxley’s participation in his book The Sacred Mushroom:

On August 7, 1955, Harry was giving a demonstration of telepathy for Aldous Huxley. In the middle of the demonstration Harry spontaneously slipped into a deep trance.[28]

~ Andrija Puharich

Remember what Albarelli said, above? “it appears that Puharich participated in a number of secret experiments with Amanita muscaria” – Obviously Aldous Huxley was authorized by the CIA to sit in on these, and many other, MKULTRA experiments. It’s also clear from Huxley’s letters that he recommended many of the MKULTRA studies. We’ll get back to that later, so let’s not digress too far. Getting back to Fuller – it gets better. Way better.

By the time Jorge Rizzina, the intense, thirty-five-year-old Brazilian journalist, arrived from Sao Paulo, Puharich had plotted the best possible way for shooting both stills and motion pictures the next day.[29]

~ John G. Fuller

So not long after they get to Brazil the journalists are showing up there, too? This isn’t going to turn into a national media spectacle, is it?

The whole complex phenomenon was in the wind almost everywhere in Brazil, and some of it filtering to Europe and North America. But harnessing that wind was another problem. By the time Belk and Puharich were preparing to leave Rio, the press had seized on Arigo’s operation on Puharich, and the story was spread across the country in blazing headlines.[30]

~ John G. Fuller

I’m sure glad we haven’t heard that story anyplace before. You show up in a foreign country and do a PR stunt and staged operation to popularize a folk healer, start a study on how a mestizo Brazilian curendeiro does his work and you get on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the country. Don’t you just love it when that happens? I’m sure it happens all the time – if you’re John Fuller, or Andrija Puharich.

And then, over the years, you do some “studies” to back up your “research,” and as it serendipitously turns out, Dr. Timothy Leary’s student, Dr. Walter Pahnke – of the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project, happens to be involved.[31]

But it gets better. The faith healer gets arrested, is convicted for practicing illegal medicine and gets sentenced to 15 months in prison. But Puharich and Fuller had previously staged various healings with Brazilian senators and the President! Don’t you just love it when you get to go to a foreign country to study a faith healer, create another media spectacle, and then take him to the president of that country, who, later of course, gets your faith healer out of criminal charges with a presidential pardon?

But in May 1958 President Kubitschek learned that Arigo was waiting for the ax of the jail sentence to fall on his neck. Kubitschek lost no time going into action. Within minutes, a presidential pardon was dispatched to Congonhas do Campo authorities. It stated that as President of the Republic, Article 87, Number 19 of the Constitution gave him the power to pardon Jose Pedro de Freitas, more commonly known as Arigo, and that the defendant was to immediately be relieved of his jail sentence by presidential order.[32]

~ John G. Fuller

How serendipitous! But after Arigo’s pardon, he gets into trouble with the law again, but this time his life ends in a freak car accident. Do you like fiction? I never liked fiction much. Reality is way better because you can’t make stuff up as well as the intelligence community’s slapstick.

Back in the United States, Fuller would have his manuscript verified by Puharich and the rest of the team before it was published:

Back in the States, I reviewed my research and fattened it with additional interviews with Belk, Puharich, Laurence, Cortes, and other members of the medical team of the Congonhas expedition. They were most helpful, especially because my mind was so full of what I had absorbed in Brazil that it needed better focus.[33]

~ John G. Fuller

There’s nothing like adding some post trip propaganda from the MKULTRA boys to further embellish the story.

Before we finish with Fuller, I thought it would be fun to check into his other books to see if there were any other serendipitous stories regarding media spectacles, alien abductions, and UFOs. And as it turns out, it was Fuller who popularized the “alien abduction” psy-op with psychiatric patients Betty and Barney Hill in his book The Interrupted Journey, – which is touted to this very day as proof of alien abductions. In reality, however, the couple had likely been drugged and hypnotized by MKULTRA doctors.

As we saw above with Carroll Quigley’s quote on politics, here we’ll see how MKULTRA and psychological operations also overlap into other areas – such as with UFOs. And surprise! There was a media spectacle with that, too:

Several weeks later, a series of articles broke in a Boston Newspaper, telling without the full background material the story of Barney and Betty Hill and how, while under hypnosis by a Boston psychiatrist, they had told of being abducted aboard a UFO, given a physical examination, and released with the assurance that they would not be harmed.[34]

~ John G. Fuller

Remember that Aldous Huxley quote, above?

The aim is to get at the words and phrases, heard by the patient at moments of lowered consciousness, and accepted by him as obsessive commands, like post-hypnotic suggestions. The sub-conscious seems to take these verbal commands literally and unreasoningly, without regard to their context. The result can be disastrous, both mentally and physically.

~ Aldous Huxley - 10 December, 1950

In Fuller’s book Incident at Exeter, I found lots of good media-stunt slapstick:

This book was no sooner completed, when UFO reports began to break out in unprecedented numbers all over the country. After my research in Exeter, I was convinced that this would happen, surprised that it had not happened sooner. For the first time, the general press began treating the subject with respect.[35]

~ John G. Fuller

Gee, how serendipitous! It’s a good thing we haven’t seen that one before. Did Fuller have anything to do with the press “treating the subject with respect”?

I had lunch that same day, with Conrad Quimby, editor and publisher of the Derry (N.H.) News, Ken Lord of the Amesbury (Mass.) News, and June Miller of the Haverhill Gazette. […] They were as interested as I was in the progress of the research, but unfortunately I was not far enough into it to give them any real pattern of the scene as it unfolded.[36]

~ John G. Fuller

So let me get this straight: Fuller calls a meeting with a bunch of newspaper people about UFOs in Exeter that he hasn’t yet completed the research on? And then there’s a media spectacle? How serendipitous! No wonder he was convinced UFO reports would “break out in unprecedented numbers” – as he PR’d the whole thing, and there was the press – just as above.

I don’t suppose that Fuller would have had any connections to other, previous, UFOs in the media, would he? What would be the chances of that? In Incident at Exeter:

At this time, I knew nothing about the incident at Exeter and little, if anything, about Unidentified Flying Objects. At one time several years before, I had helped produce a CBS-TV show which had, as guests, some technicians who had sighted UFOs—but that was the extent of my knowledge.[37]

~ John G. Fuller

CBS-TV and technicians – I wonder if they were CBS’s own special effects technicians? Of course he’s unclear. And how serendipitous that Fuller just so happened to help produce that one, too! No wonder he was convinced that there would be a media spectacle. But as it turns out, in reality, in 1964 Fuller had received a book from the NICAP, The UFO Evidence, which he claims:

In the spring of 1964, it issued a scholarly and well-documented book titled The UFO Evidence which analyzes 746 reports from among 5,000 signed statements it has in its files. I had received a press copy of this volume when it was first published, well over a year before, but had never bothered to look at it.[38]

~ John G. Fuller

And apparently the NICAP was founded by the CIA to give credibility to the entire UFO charade, and Fuller just so happened to be getting their press releases, while claiming, of course, that he “never bothered to look at it”. But we’ve no reason not to believe Fuller at this point, do we?

And CBS-TV had nothing to do at Exeter, had it?

We piled into Kimball’s car, a big Chrysler especially equipped for his newsreel and documentary camera work, with a shortwave radio, a mobile telephone, cameras, lights and a film stock. It carried a license plate CBS-TV, although he worked for all three networks.[39]

~ John G. Fuller

Well, so much for that.

Obviously Fuller was heavily involved in making these “UFO sightings” happen and marketing them to the public. And being that we may now see a clear path between UFOs and MKULTRA, we may now see the overlap between the drugs, hypnosis, and UFO “sightings” and “abductions,” and the manipulation of reality – not only for the victims themselves, but also of public perception of reality by the intelligence community.

As anyone who’s studied logic and epistemology knows, it’s impossible to prove a negative. Anyone who makes a claim must provide their own evidence to support it – which is known as the onus of proof. At one place in Incident at Exeter, Fuller makes the absurd argument:

Regardless of official proclamations, the Air Force offered no definite proof of nonexistence (a paradox, of course, but everything in this case was a paradox, an ambivalence, a dichotomy).[40]

~ John G. Fuller

Of course it’s a logical impossibility to provide the “definite proof of nonexistence” of something – in this case, UFOs. For instance, if I claim that there is a green fairy sitting on my shoulder, it’s on me to prove that it’s there; not on you to prove that it’s not. If I can’t prove it’s there, it’s known as arguing the arbitrary, and is dismissed automatically. I don’t, instead, turn and attack you and say “well, you’re just stupid or not spiritual enough,” or blame the other side for my own claims. It was on Fuller to provide his own evidence for his own claims, not on the Air Force to prove that something does not exist. In fact, in US courts, this is the exact reason why we’re supposed to have “innocent until proven guilty” – as it’s on the prosecutor, the accuser (Fuller in this case), to provide their own evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Fuller, to explain away his obviously ridiculous statement, adds the part about paradoxes and dichotomies.

On page 86 of Incident at Exeter Fuller lets the truth slip out about the psychological operation:

The threat of the UFO was still psychological , however. No instance of any physical harm befalling a human being had been reliably reported in the twenty-year history of the phenomenon’s most yeasty occurrences.[41] [emphasis added] ~ John G. Fuller

On the following page he also states:

The Orson Wells [sic] “invasion” in the late thirties, a single dramatized radio program resulted in mass hysteria. Would the same thing—or worse—happen if official government sources announced blandly that we definitely had visitors from another planet?[42] ~ John G. Fuller

And if the UFOs were real, wouldn’t they cause a real threat?

He felt that since even the Air Force admitted that the UFO’s seemed to pose no threat to national security , the investigation and dissemination of information about the phenomena should be turned over to scientific agencies.[43] [emphasis added] ~ John G. Fuller

Obviously they weren’t a threat to national security because the intelligence community made them up.

Citing the Tavistock Institute’s sister organization, the Brookings Institution, on pages 33-34 Fuller explains the real agenda behind the psychological operation and the creation of the UFO hysteria:

He went into the report from the Brookings Institution, which suggested that grave social consequences might follow from contact with highly evolved life beyond the earth. The report had given considerable attention to this possibility. “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies,” it said, “sure of their place in the Universe, which have disintegrated when they came to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different ways of life … It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are mostly clearly associated with mastery of nature. …”[44] [emphasis added] ~ John G. Fuller

Fuller continues on the next page:

The warlike nations of the world might become suddenly more amenable to working out their differences amicably. The suicidal collision course of the Great Powers might be shifted in the interest of overall world welfare [communism]. The petty quarrels of man might be submerged into the interest of the wider Universe. The fear of alien visitors would obviously cause a disruption in the pattern of normal life . But what greater fear is there than the potential incineration of the earth by hydrogen bombs? [created by the same intel / military]. And how could any super-civilized visitors match or exceed man's inhumanity to man? The choice between even total dislocation of civilization (if UFO's were proven real and interplanetary) and total incineration (Atomic War) would be easy to make. The former is curable, the latter is not."[45] [emphasis added] ~ John G. Fuller

In other words, giving our autonomy up to the intelligence community’s newly manufactured alien gods. And of course it’s government, and not the general populace, that manufactures and releases atomic bombs. Blaming the general public for the actions of politicians, military personnel, and the elite, is about as preposterous as it gets.

And when we go back to France, we see that Fuller manipulated the whole scenario with UFOs to do his Pont-Saint-Esprit follow up study for the intelligence community.

Now that we’re done with Fuller’s slapstick jesting, we’ll get a little more serious as we turn to the first major book to address the government’s mind control program: Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control.

Walter Bowart: Operation Mind Control, 1978:

If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down. It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs.[46]

~ Walter Bowart

Walter Bowart was known as the world’s first yippie/yuppie. He’s mostly known for his 1978 book Operation Mind Control, which was one of the first books, if not the first, “exposing” the CIA and intelligence community’s mind control operations.

As we’ll discover, Bowart’s background is highly suspicious. For starters, Bowart was married to the Mellon banking empire heiress, Peggy Mellon Hitchcock. He was also the owner and publisher of the East Village Other, where he promoted the psychedelic “counterculture” to unsuspecting youth in the New York area. Bowart often hung around with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Marshall McLuhan, Andy Worhol, and many others in the psychedelic arena, including those at the Millbrook mansion – owned by his in-laws.

Bowart even went with Leary (and Arthur Kleps and Allen Ginsberg) before congress in 1966 when Leary recommended LSD’s regulation (below), revealing much of their agenda. And any one of us would go to speak to Congress on LSD, right? Why them?

However, what is likely Bowart’s biggest claim to fame is that he’s the one who PR’d the famous “flower power” media spectacle at the U.S. Pentagon:

As told by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in their book Acid Dreams:

What happened next was not something anyone had expected—in fact, it might never have happened had it not been for the FBI, which attempted to disrupt the antiwar gathering upon learning of a plot to sky-bomb the Pentagon with ten thousand flowers. Peggy Hitchcock (the sister of William Mellon Hitchcock, owner of the Millbrook estate) gave Michael Bowen and friends money to purchase two hundred pounds of daisies for the occasion, but the plan never got off the ground because of a dirty trick by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's men answered an ad for a pilot in the East Village Other but never showed up at the airport. Bowart was stuck with more flowers than he knew what to do with, so he turned around and drove back to the demonstration. Distributed among the crowd, the flowers were subsequently photographed by the world press protruding from the muzzles of rifles held by the soldiers guarding the Pentagon.[47]

~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain

And as just mentioned, Bowart was the owner of the East Village Other. What does Bowart have to say about this event in his book? Absolutely nothing. Also notice that Lee and Shlain don’t bother to mention that the East Village Other was owned by him.[48] And, serendipitously, Marshal McLuhan – the media and public relations (PR) expert, was a regular feature of the publication.

Here Bob Dean/Neveritt, a.k.a. “Bob Dobbs,” who’s possibly Canadian intelligence (though he denies it), and promotes Julian Huxley’s trans-humanism and eugenics/dysgenics, and is the archivist for Marshall McLuhan, as well as having recorded long interviews with both Peggy and Walter Bowart, states:

Go back to 1967 with the levitating of the Pentagon, led by people like Abbie Hofmann and that. Well a little-known part of the story is that Bowart is the publisher of the East Village Other. He got the idea of dropping planeloads of flowers over the Pentagon and protesters when that was happening. Which would be October ‘67. So, if I recall he went… He put an ad in the paper for flowers, or for something. So he put feelers out there. So he started getting weird phone calls. So he suspected that the FBI or somebody was monitoring him. So when he went out to get the flowers and the plane at some airport, on the appointed day, he noticed there was no one around, it was totally empty at the hangar or wherever it was, and he just felt that there were people watching him. Now I can't remember the next details. I know that the flowers ended up in the Pentagon, and you have the famous picture of the girl, the hippie girl putting a flower in some Pentagon soldier’s rifle. […] Well Walter used to say those were his flowers. So somehow he got the flowers there, and I can't remember right now… he thought he was surveilled and something happened, and he got around it, and he got the plane off and they dropped the flowers. I may be wrong on the exact precision of that, but to me it was interesting to find out that the whole flower icon was stimulated by Walter's idea, and the suspicious activities around him once he put the idea out in his paper, and what happened that tried to frustrate them.[49]

~ Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs.

And though on his show, “Bob Dobbs” seems to want his listeners to believe that conspiracies don’t really happen, the CIA had every motive to mislead LSD and MKULTRA exposure, to make people think it was only about a Manchurian Candidate, that it was just a few thousand people – and to limit the scope of the investigation.

From Pont Saint Esprit and John G. Fuller, to Walter Bowart and John Marks, to Marty Lee and Bruce Shlain, and Jay Stevens - all of these original MKULTRA/psychedelic revolution researchers have, it appears, intentionally misled some amount of their MKULTRA research. These correlations are difficult to ignore. However, I want to mention too that each of these authors, especially Bowart and Stevens, have contributed vast amounts of valuable research and insight and their works should be studied regardless – at minimum to study how they spin information. We’ll see more of this tactic later in this article, but here we see Bowart cite some of those who assisted him with his book:

A number of professional people gave valuable technical assistance and patient explanations. My thanks to Harry Arons, Robert Brauers, Dr. and Mrs. Sidney M. Cohen , Dr. Remo Dicenso, Betty Dumaine, Dr. Milton E. Erickson, Morris Ernst, Bernard Fensterwald, George Griffin, Col. Laird Guttersen, Dr. Paul Henshaw, Edward Hunter, Hon. Louis K. Lefkowitz, John MacDonald, V. R. Sanchez, Alan W. Sheftin, Dr. Edgar Schein, Mrs. E. D. Yeomans, and Col. Joseph H. Ziglinski. I received a great deal of assistance from a number of researchers and writers around the world. Thanks to Chip Berlet, Nancy Bressler, Jeff Cohen, Loren Coleman, Richard Crowe, William Grimstad, Paul Hoch, L. Ron Hubbard , Larry Lee, Charles Maierson, John Marks , David McQueen, Sandra Meiersdorff, Janet Michaud, Beverly Ogden, George OToole, Richard Popkin, Jeff Quiros, William Stevenson, Scoop Sweeny, Harold Weisberg, David Williams, and Peter Watson.[50] [emphasis added] ~ Walter Bowart

Bowart’s list contains a few names that are very interesting, such as L. Ron Hubbard – founder of the Church of Scientology. We also see two other names listed that will be recurrent throughout this essay: Dr. Sidney M. Cohen, and John Marks. A paragraph later, Bowart adds:

My understanding of the intelligence community was molded by exchanges with a number of intelligence and military people. They shall remain nameless.[51]

Some of the strongest evidence of Bowart’s collaboration with MKULTRA begins on page 79 of his book Operation Mind Control:

Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard in 1963, ostensibly for giving LSD to an undergraduate, but basically because of increasing controversy over the nature of their research. Leary and Co. retreated to Mexico, where they attempted to carry on LSD experiments outside the U.S. government's purview. In June of 1963 they ran afoul of even the notoriously corrupt Mexican government and were expelled from that country for "engaging in activities not permitted to a tourist." From Mexico they moved to Millbrook, New York, and established the International Federation for Internal Freedom (later the Castalia Foundation), which served as a platform for Leary to propagandize for LSD which, he now believed, could save the world from nuclear perdition by 'blowing the mind." Leary frequently took LSD himself. His speeches, which were addressed to overflow audiences, were tailor-made for true believers in the new drug cult. Leary issued many public statements on the benefits to the individual and society of LSD. Always politically naive, he predicted that there would come a day when "a new profession of psychedelic guides will inevitably develop to supervise these experiences." Finally, in the mid-sixties, Leary coined his famous slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and spoke at college lectures to the legions of young people who had illegally experimented with LSD and other psychedelic substances. Through magazine interviews, television appearances, movies, records, and books Leary projected himself as the culture hero of a new generation which was fighting for an individual's right to alter his own consciousness—a right which Leary maintained was guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 and obtained by John Marks under a Freedom of Information suit in August, 1977, featured Dr. Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert and their organization which advocated the expansion of consciousness through psychedelic chemicals, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In alarming tones the memo ordered all CIA groups involved in mind control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA.[52]

~ Walter Bowart

From The Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited for the book Moksha, by Michael Horowitz, we find:

1960 Huxley and Osmond visited Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard, where the Psychedelic Research Project had gotten underway. Here is Leary’s account of his impressions of Huxley upon the occasion of their first meetings in Cambridge.

~ Michael Horowitz We talked about how to study and use the consciousness-expanding drugs and we clicked along agreeably on the do's and the not-to-do's. We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness. Avoid labeling or depersonalizing the subject. We should not impose our own jargon or our own experimental games on others. We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a detached schizoid; nor Christ as an exhibitionistic masochist; nor the mystic experience as a symptom; nor the visionary state as a model psychosis. Aldous Huxley chuckling away with compassionate humor at human folly. And with such erudition! Moving back and forth in history, quoting the mystics. Wordsworth. Plotinus. The Areopagite. William James.[53]

~ Timothy Leary

Serendipitously, Huxley’s everywhere! As I exposed in my last article, “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” Humphry Osmond was in fact MKULTRA, and it’s well known that he worked directly with Huxley:

As it turns out, Dr. Hoffer was a CIA MKULTRA doctor and worked with Dr. Osmond performing human experiments in Saskatchewan; as was Dr. John Smythies, who contributed to MKULTRA subproject 8 at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. As a CIA MKULTRA document of March 25, 1964, exposes, Osmond was further involved with Subproject 47 with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, who wrote the letter on Osmond’s letterhead.[54]

From the reunion video A Conversation on LSD, 1979, we find Osmond and Tim Leary discussing Leary’s hiring. Osmond’s been drinking and discloses some important and vivid revelations: that he and Huxley had hired Dr. Timothy Leary to take on the persona of ‘Tim Leary’ the hip drug pusher:

Humphry Osmond: Remember the first time we met, which was in Cambridge? On the night of the Kennedy election. Tim Leary: 1960. Humphry Osmond: 1960. We went out to this place. And Timothy then was wearing his gray flannel suite and his crew cut. And we had this very interesting discussion with him. And when we went.. . and I don’t think I told you this, Timothy. But the night we went we both said “what a nice fellow he is”. He says “he’s a very nice man”, and Aldous said “it’s very very nice to think that this is what’s going to be done at Harvard”. He said “it would be so good for it”. And then I said to him, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” [laughter] Aldous said “you may be right”, he said “but after all isn’t that what we want?” [laughter] Timothy, when I’m discussing the need for understanding human temperament this is the story I tell. Because I said, yeah Aldous and I were deeply interested in the nature of human temperament and we meet someone who I think that was probably the least satisfactory description of you ever made, Timothy. I think even your greatest enemies would never make that description. And we made it. We were very very concerned because we held that perhaps you were a bit too unadventurous. You see what insights we had. Al Hubbard: Well, you sure as heck contributed your part, but uh... [8:26]

Leary sees the subject of his hiring as off limits and switches the subject.

Tim Leary: I've always considered myself very square. Humphry Osmond: So we were right in a way!

Later in this same conversation Leary describes the organization as having cells, which I’ve described, above, –an accurate description of the various groups that were recruited to create the counterculture.

Sydney Cohen: You're talking about Gerald [Heard] and Aldous? Tim Leary: Yes, right right. Yeah. And, uh, Ivan. Uh, of course…uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angeles, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell , whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh… Sydney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster! Tim Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow [Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are here identified as undercover agents]…. [33:20ff]

Later, in an interview with Bowart himself, Leary would reveal that he accepted the CIA’s job offer, which, it appears, came via Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond:

"I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the control of consciousness."

[...] "Yes," he answered strongly. "I was a witting agent of the CIA..."

[...] "So, you work for the Central Intelligence Agency?" I asked. "Is it the Deputy Director of Plans you work for? Who makes out your checks?"

"It's none of your business to know how those things work. I'll answer you no questions that have to do with business. I'll answer you any question about history or people..."[55]

~ Walter Bowart interviewing Timothy Leary

Discussing different types of intelligence cells, in Acid, David Black states:

The conspiracy starts with three people […]. These three in turn recruit two other people to form three new cells. This recruitment process continues until a large network of cells is built up. The advantage of the structure is that if cell members do not know each other’s sub-cells, then they cannot give them away if captured. The drawback is that if a single cadre is arrested and cannot resist interrogation, then the enemy can arrest the half-a-dozen comrades he or she knows and thus reach the sub-cells. […] A more sophisticated system discussed in Heinlein’s book [The Moon is a Harsh Mistress] is a pyramid-of-pyramids set-up – a sort of ‘Internet’ without the computers […]”[56]

~ David Black

Regarding this pyramid-of-pyramids set-up, Robert Heinlein writes in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

“Ought to take your money. Take same cells, arranged in open pyramid of tetrahedrons. Where vertices are in common, each bloke knows one in adjoining cell—knows how to send message to him, that’s all he needs. Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net. It’s why you can knock a hole in a man’s head, take chunk of brain out, and not damage thinking much. Excess capacity, messages shunt around. He loses what was destroyed but goes on functioning.” […] “Each vertex of each triangle shares self with zero, one, or two other triangles. Where shares one, that’s its link, one direction or both—but one is enough for a multipli-redundant communication net. On corners, where sharing is zero, it jumps to write to next corner. Where sharing is double, choice is again right-handed. “Now work it with people. Take fourth level, D-for-dog. This vertex is comrade Dan. No, let's go down one to show three levels of communication knocked out-- level E-for-easy and pick Comrade Egberg. “Egbert works under Donald, has cellmates Edward and Elmer, and has three under him, Frank, Fred, and Fatso … But knows how to send messages to Ezra on a zone level but not in his cell. He doesn't know Ezra's name, face, address, or anything-but has a way, phone number probably, to reach Ezra in emergency. “[…] Casimir, level three, finks out and betrays Charlie and Cox in his cell, Baker above him, and Donald, Dan, and Dick in sub cell-which isolates Egbert, Edward, and Elmer. And everybody under them. “All three reported-redundancy, necessary to any communication system-but follow Egbert's yell for help. He calls Ezra. But Ezra is under Charlie and his isolated, too. No matter, Ezra relays both messages through his safety link, Edmund. By bad luck Edmund is under Cox, so he also passes it laterally, through Enwright … And that gets it past burned-out part and it goes up through Dover, Chambers, and Beeswax, to Adam, front office… Who replies down other side of pyramid, with lateral pass on E-for-easy level from Esther to Egbert and onto Ezra and Edmund. These two messages, up and down, not only get through at once but in way they get through, they define to home office exactly how much damage has been done and where. Organization not only keeps functioning but starts repairing self at once." [57]

~ Robert A. Heinlein

So in 1960 Huxley and Osmond went to Harvard to hire Leary for MKULTRA, and we saw Leary and Osmond discussing their meeting and “cells,” and “undercover agents,” above. Leary admits that he was an agent by 1962, and we know from the title of the “Harvard Psychedelic Research Project,” that he’d already been using Osmond’s word, “psychedelic,” by 1960. As I wrote in “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?,” regarding Osmond’s creation of the word psychedelic, and Leary’s subsequent adaptation of it at Harvard:

Notice that Leary named Harvard’s “Psychedelic Research Project” after Osmond’s newly created term. Though Osmond coined the word [psychedelic] in 1957, in 1960 Leary at Harvard had already made full use of it. In fact, the Psychedelic Research Project would eventually recruit more than 40 Harvard doctors and hundreds of students. Leary had already been testing this new word – and he was successful.[58]

David Black in Acid, states:

Back at Harvard in the autumn of 1960, Leary learned that the Swiss Sandoz company had synthesized the active ingredient of psilocybin, so he obtained a batch of pills. He got some advice on using them from Aldous Huxley, […] Leary began to organize experimental sessions with the drug for his staff members and some of their graduate students . They were impressed.[59] [emphasis added] ~ David Black

Now back to Bowart. The reader may have noticed he doesn’t mention that it was his own wife that funded IFIF and was the New York director, and that his in-laws, Peggy’s brothers, including Billy Hitchcock, owned the Millbrook mansion. Peggy is only briefly mentioned at the beginning of Bowart’s book:

Kudos to Dr. Robert M. Thomson, Johanna Moore G., Martha Sowerwine, my mother Fenna, and my wife Peggy for their patience and support.[60]

~ Walter Bowart

Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain reveal more of the details:

Thanks to a sizable inheritance and a family trust fund that provided him with $15,000 per week in spending money, Billy Hitchcock was in a position to offer a lot more than moral support to the psychedelic movement. He first turned on to LSD after his sister, Peggy, the director of IFIF’s New York branch, introduced him to Leary. They hit it off immediately, and Hitchcock made his family’s four-thousand-acre estate in Dutches County, New York, available to the psychedelic clan for a nominal five-hundred-dollar monthly rent.[61]

~ Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain

Regarding Peggy Hitchcock, in Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens admits:

Of all the socially prominent people that they met during these months, the most important, in terms of our story, was Peggy Hitchcock, the artistically inclined twenty-eight-year-old jet-setting heir of the Mellon millions. Peggy, as Leary later wrote, "was easily bored, intellectually ambitious, and looking for a project capable of absorbing her whirlwind energy." Mind expansion fit the bill and she joined Flo Ferguson as the unofficial patronesses of the psilocybin project.[62]

~ Jay Stevens

About Millbrook, Stevens also notes:

In less than three months they had been thrown out of three countries and one world-class University. Their plans were in disarray; they were deeply in debt; it was not an auspicious beginning for the ancient game. All they wanted was a hole they could crawl down and sleep for a few weeks. And it was then that Peggy Hitchcock mentioned an estate her twin brothers, Tommy and Billy, owned in Millbrook, New York, a village ninety miles north of New York City.[63]

~ Jay Stevens

Stevens also identifies others (probable agents / assets) on the IFIF Board of Directors:

In early January 1963, IFIF filed incorporation papers with the state of Massachusetts. Leary was designated president, Alpert, director, with Gunther Weil, Ralph Metzner, George Litwin, Walter Houston Clark, Huston Smith, and Alan Watts listed as members of the Board of Directors.[64]

~ Jay Stevens

Also, since Bowart’s wife was on the board of directors for New York IFIF, this point is especially interesting since it’s omitted from his book.

The entire MKULTRA era is riddled with banking families, and there is evidence that the CIA was aided in its founding by these families.

JP Morgan Bank and Gordon Wasson ran MKULTRA subproject 58. The Warburg family funded and ran Sandoz Pharmaceuticals – the makers of LSD, where Wasson was a director.[65] The Mellon family funded the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project, IFIF, owned the Millbrook mansion, and Billy Hitchcock LSD Enterprises, and was tied back to JP Morgan Bank. The Mellon family was also tied directly to the head of the CIA. As David Black exposes in Acid:

The CIA’s Director from 1966 to 1973, Richard Helms, was a regular guest at the Mellon family mansion in Pittsburgh. Even Tim Leary thought that the ‘liberal CIA’ were ‘the best Mafia you could deal with’.[66]

~ David Black

One thing that is difficult to understand is the fable regarding Tim Leary’s getting fired from Harvard in 1963 and the exposure by Dr. Andrew Weil. It appears from the evidence that Weil’s “exposure” was just an old trick using the Hegelian dialectic: problem, reaction, solution; – or thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Without Leary having been fired from Harvard he’d never have been able to create the appearance of the hippie guru he’d later use to promote the psychedelics to the youth for the CIA and Huxley and Osmond. Weil’s so-called “exposure,” and Leary’s subsequent “firing” (along with Dr. Richard Alpert), created the illusion, in my opinion, that Harvard, et al, were trying to suppress Leary’s “spiritual message”. This gave Leary and the CIA the psychological advantage they’d need to use against the public. And, after all, Leary and the others were nearly all out of the Harvard Social Relations Department under the well-known MKULTRA conspirator, Dr. Henry A. Murray – who headed the department.

Above we also saw Bowart cite a CIA memo regarding Leary:

A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 and obtained by John Marks under a Freedom of Information suit in August, 1977, featured Dr. Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert and their organization which advocated the expansion of consciousness through psychedelic chemicals, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In alarming tones the memo ordered all CIA groups involved in mind control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA.[67]

However, with the realization that those “buses running around the country painted in dayglow,” above, meaning Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, were agents, it makes the theory that it was only Leary doing this and that he’d gone rogue, ridiculous.

Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, uh, and it's never been as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country painted in dayglow.

~ Timothy Leary

In the same reunion video at roughly 30 minutes, Dr. Sydney Cohen, yet another of the CIA’s specialists, who played the role of nemesis to Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert, admits that it was all a show:

Sydney Cohen: Well I think we need people like Tim and Al. They're absolutely necessary to get out, way out way out, too far in fact, in order to move the shit … move things around. And we need people like you to be reflective about it, and to study it . And, uh, little by little a slight movement is made in the totality. So, you know, I can't think of how it could have worked out otherwise . Uh, I must confess that when I studied LSD, and then I heard that it was getting out on the streets, I said this this’ll never sell. It's too intense, people will be too shook up. But it didn't work that way at all. I'm not quite sure I know why. But apparently people were able to sustain it - this intense response. So my record as a prophet is about one down and s…

A CIA document from November 1, 1963, (Mori ID # 146149) discusses how Alpert got them fired from Harvard and that Leary went too, but that IFIF was really supposed to be undercover for experimentation. However, it does not make clear if the experimentation was for the CIA, but we may see from Cohen’s above admission that it was:

These professors had been using hallucinogenic drugs in experiments involving undergraduate students... Drs. Albert and Leary had set up an organization known as the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which obviously was a cover for additional experimental work in the hallucinogenic drugs . [emphasis added]

We also saw the true meaning of Al Hubbard’s words: “Well, you sure as heck contributed your part, but uh...”

Other letters are cited from Huxley and Osmond on this issue with Leary, too, and though there may have been some internal disagreement, Leary was not the originator of this plan to “turn on” the masses. In reality it was Allen Ginsberg, the “indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs,”[68] who wanted to give LSD out to the masses.[69]

Giving more of the secret away, as well as exposing more agents, in the same reunion video at roughly 35 minutes:

Tim Leary: Well, Of course we have to mention Ken Kesey. and of course Allen Ginsberg was a, Allen Ginsberg was an indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs, and the, uh, uh, so they… Sydney Cohen: At the very beginning what would you say? What turned you on, Tim? I don't remember. Tim Leary: And Gordon Wasson! [MKULTRA Subproject 58] Don't ever underestimate the effect of that wonderful, respectable, far out mind he has. In Life magazine, there he is, a banker, a Morgan Guaranty Trust banker, lying on the mud hut, of a Mexican uh… you know… Saying “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!” Someone: Oh boy! Tim Leary: Talk about Joe Namath, uh, commercials! [laughs]

Leary exposes that it was all public relations when he says “Talk about Joe Namath, uh, commercials!” Serendipitously, Ginsberg was cousin to Oscar Janiger, who, serendipitously, hosted the same reunion party. And, serendipitously, Ginsberg was first dosed by Gregory Bateson – who helped to found the CIA. With all of these psychedelic “heroes” being agents, it appears that someone may have slipped in a few documents and letters to mislead the public regarding Leary and his assignment (more below). Leary, as the evidence now shows, was just a scapegoat – a covers story. By putting all the blame on Leary the CIA was able to keep the larger operation under wraps – for another 40 years.

What is clear is that from there the CIA took its MKULTRA tests on the road – with IFIF, then to Millbrook, etc, and with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ “Acid Tests,” – aided by the Grateful Dead – until successfully launching the so-called “psychedelic revolution” a few short years later.

And as “Bob Dobbs” admits, Peggy Hitchcock provided the funds necessary to get the Grateful Dead’s first album produced:

One of the things Peggy told me she did was, when the Grateful Dead made their first album they had, you know, budget problems. And she provided money to get that first album out. So she's key in that whole Grateful Dead scenario. So one of the things Peggy did in her life was, she helped the Grateful Dead get out their first album - she gave them some extra money, they were starving, and it wasn't looking good for the album. So she helped get the Grateful Dead myth started. She’s there. So there’s Walter involved with the Grateful Dead, and here's LaRouche saying the Grateful Dead is an MKULTRA scenario. And Walter’s in between. He's not fooled by hippie naivety . He's sophisticated. He's also a journalist. And his East Village Other is mentioned in the history of journalism. Any books on the history of the 50s or 60s, what he did is part of journalism history that students learn. So he's not naïve. He understands it could be, could be, a subtle ruse. [70]

~ Bob Dean/Neveritt, aka Bob Dobbs.

Typically researchers without an agenda would disclose to their audiences that they have a conflict of interest in such matters as these. The fact that Bowart doesn’t mention that his wife and in-laws funded all of this research (including the Psilocybin Project, IFIF, the Millbrook mansion, and the Grateful Dead’s first album), and that his own brother in-law ran Billy Hitchcock LSD Enterprises, and that his wife and in-laws were directly related to the Mellon banking empire, which also helped to found the CIA, forces the conclusion that there’s an intentional cover-up going on here – and Bowart was involved.

By 1968, society seemed to become divided into those who had taken illegal drugs and those who hadn't. Eventually LSD, marijuana, and cocaine were available on street corners and schoolyards throughout the land. If the government had covertly supported the unwitting Leary and associates, the snowballing effects of their LSD propaganda now caused a reversal of policy.[71]

~ Walter Bowart

Furthermore, Bowart claims that there was “a reversal of policy,” but he doesn't mention that he went with Leary before Congress in 1966 when Leary requested LSD's outlaw – furthering the apparent dialectic started by Weil with Leary getting “fired” from Harvard. In “The Narcotic Rehabilitation Act of 1966. Hearings before a special subcommittee, Eighty-ninth Congress, second session,” we find Leary’s testimony. Serendipitously, I should point out that these quotes were omitted from all of the books that I could find that mentioned Leary’s congressional testimony, forcing a trip to the local university’s Congressional archives to discover the best, omitted parts:

Senator Dodd. Don't you think that the drug needs to be put under control and restriction? Dr. LEARY. Pardon, sir. Senator Dodd. Let me rephrase my question. Don’t you feel that LSD should be put under some control, or restriction as to its use? Dr. LEARY. Yes, sir. Senator Dodd. As to its sale, its possession, and its use? Dr. LEARY. I definitely do. In the first place, I think that the 1965 Drug Control Act, which this committee, I understand, sponsored, is the high water mark in such legislation. […] Dr. Leary. Yes, sir. I agree completely with your bill, the 1965 Drug Control Act. I think this is--- Senator Dodd. That the Federal Government and the State governments ought to control it? Dr. Leary. Exactly. I am in 100 percent agreement with the 1965 drug control bill. Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts. So there shouldn’t be--- Dr. Leary. I wish the States, I might add, would follow the wisdom of this committee and the Senate and Congress of the United States and follow your lead with exactly that kind of legislation. Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts. So there should not be indiscriminate distribution of this drug should there? Dr. Leary. I have never suggested that, sir. I have never urged anyone to take LSD. I have always deplored indiscriminate or unprepared use. [72]

Bowart wants his readers to believe that the “snowballing effects of their [including his own] LSD propaganda now caused a reversal of policy”. In fact, they needed Leary to popularize the drugs to a certain extent, which Bowart’s wife and in-laws helped to facilitate. And then in a PR move they outlawed the drugs to make them much more popular and widespread with rebellious teenagers - Bowart himself having gone before the US Senate Subcommittee with Leary in 1966 while Leary recommended this very action.

Bowart continues in Operation Mind Control:

It became obvious to them that LSD and the other psychoactive drugs were politically dangerous. They allowed people to see through the indoctrination of the government, the credibility gap, and the government propaganda for the Vietnam War. The "acid heads" adopted a visionary fervor and began actively criticizing the war in Vietnam and calling for many social reforms.[73]

~ Walter Bowart

I’ve exposed the following quote from the CIA’s Dr. Louis Jolyon West in prior articles. This quote is important because it provides insight into how the CIA and intelligence community uses hallucinogens to control the population (it’s repeated again, below):

The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations. But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways. To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome--and less expensive--if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. […] The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[74]

~ Louis Jolyon West

While Bowart claims that the drugs “allowed people to see through the indoctrination of the government,” he doesn’t disclose that he and Leary perpetuated the “visionary fervor” and that they, and his own billionaire wife, Peggy Hitchcock, and his billionaire in-laws, were using them as systems of control, as well as to kill the very active anti-war movement he mentions here.

If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down.[75]

~ Walter Bowart

Here Bowart wants us to believe that the huge explosion in the use of LSD that happened after the ruckus began at Millbrook, and after he went with Leary to congress who requested LSD’s regulation in 1966, was the government “shutting it down” – rather than funding the entire thing and creating a Hegelian dialectic. In fact, the party wasn’t in full swing until 1967 – with the infamous “Summer of Love”.

Several months after the subcommittee hearing, LSD was banned in California. In Storming Heaven, Jay Stevens reveals:

Although the Summer of Love officially began on June 21, the summer solstice, its actual beginning occurred the previous fall, specifically on October 6, 1966, the day the California law making possession of LSD a misdemeanor went into effect.[76]

~ Jay Stevens

The University of Richmond, Virginia, website also confirms this:

Leary was one of many experts who testified at the 1966 subcommittee hearings, which showed both ardent support and uncompromising opposition to LSD.[…] Just several months after the subcommittee hearings, LSD was banned in California.[77]

Again, Bowart doesn’t admit that he, and Leary, and his wife, and his brother-in-law, were all a part of those who helped to make it popular in the first place. In fact, it appears that it was Leary who introduced Bowart to Peggy Hitchcock.

Here Bowart describes his version of how the government shut down the LSD supply –and fueled the subsequent drug epidemic:

It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs. Underground LSD labs were raided, and it wasn't long before its quality degenerated and the supply dried up. Several studies have shown that when LSD became illegal (October 6, 1966) real LSD ceased to be available on the street . What was sold as LSD was every other kind of chemical, including several forms of veterinary tranquilizers! Often methedrine was sold as LSD, as well as heroin mixed with amphetamines. Simultaneously, as the LSD supply dried up, large supplies of heroin mysteriously became available . It was strong heroin, imported from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia (largely under CIA control) . Many young people who had had their "consciousness expanded" too far to distinguish between one drug and another turned to heroin. The government-inspired hysteria over drugs had led many to think, "Well, they lied to us about pot, they must be lying about heroin." And so when psychedelics were no longer easily obtained, and heroin was, many young people became addicts.[78] [Emphasis added] ~ Walter Bowart

Bowart describes how the government “shut down” the psychedelic revolution. However, it’s well understood that children don’t rebel with legal substances, and that LSD had to be outlawed (as well as remarketed – see “Entheogens: What’s in a Name?”), in order to launch the psychedelic movement, should now be clear. The additional impact was that American streets were now rampant with CIA drugs. As Time Magazine admitted in 2007:

After Wasson's article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America to "turn on, tune in, drop out." In other words, you can draw a woozy but vivid line from the sedate offices of J.P. Morgan and Time Inc. in the '50s to Haight-Ashbury in the '60s to a zillion drug-rehab centers in the '70s. Long, strange trip indeed.[79]

Now we’ll turn to John D. Marks and his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979, which is considered the most “respectable” work on MKULTRA to date. As Walter Bowart states about Marks:

Following the release of the Rockefeller Report, John D. Marks, author and former staff assistant to the State Department Intelligence Director, filed a Freedom of Information Act appeal on behalf of the Center for National Security Studies requesting documentation from the CIA. Marks requested documentation for the evidence cited in the Rockefeller Report on the CIA's mind-control activities conducted within the United States.[80]

~ Walter Bowart

John Marks: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979:

It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame on—or give all the credit to—the CIA for spreading LSD. One cannot forget the nature of the times, the Vietnam War, the breakdown in authority, and the wide availability of other drugs, especially marijuana. But the fact remains that LSD was one of the catalyst of the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s. No one could enter the world of psychedelics without first passing, unawares, through doors opened by the Agency. It would become a supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous research for weapons among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture.[81]

~ John D. Marks, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, U.S. State Department.

John Marks was the assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research under the US State Department, and the author of the book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, 1979. Again we have an obvious conflict of interest and an issue with disclosure. How can the intelligence community investigating itself possibly be unbiased? It was Marks who got the bulk of MKULTRA documents available to the public today, released in 1977.

As I showed in Entheogens: What’s In a Name?, 2014, as well as in my video Psychedelic Intelligence, Marks’s quote is completely unfounded.

Just one fallacy that Marks exemplifies, above, is that the counterculture was not created by the Agency. You may have also noticed that he used what is known as an appeal to ridicule to force his readers to agree with his conclusions:

It would become a supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous research for weapons among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture.[82]

Having investigated Gordon Wasson for years, I know how he operated. I have many hundreds of his letters which reveal his moves and activities, and I’ve studied what he’d done to other scholars who told the truth, such as with John M. Allegro. I’ve also shown how Wasson faked historical research.[83]

We have:

The background.

The motive.

The history to show that he’s done it before.

The evidence that he did it again.

Just the notion that Marks had all of the MKULTRA documents, including JP Morgan on the “Institutional Notifications”[84] documents, and even more so, that Marks wrote about Subproject 58 and Wasson (pp. 114), but doesn’t mention JP Morgan’s involvement, is very revealing:

Institutional Notifications:

National Philosophical Society (Subproject 58 – Cosponsor)

Unable to locate – not sent J.P. Morgan and Co., Inc. Subproject 58

[Redacted – Gordon Wasson?] 23 Wall Street

New York, N.Y. 10015

Marks just omits that little, itsy, detail about JP Morgan Bank (Where Wasson was VP of propaganda) being on MKULTRA Subproject 58 documents, as well as the American Philosophical Society where Wasson lectured in 1956.[85] Furthermore, it’s very clear that it’s Wasson’s own letterhead requesting the infamous $2000 from the Geschickter Fund in the Subproject 58 documents (below), which proves that Marks knew that JP Morgan and Wasson were guilty, and likewise he would have known that Wasson had directly requested the $2000, which Marks then covers up with the James Moore scapegoat story:

James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists on the lookout for the magic mushroom. For three years after Morse Allen’s man returned from Mexico with his takes of wonder, Moore and the others in the Agency’s network pushed their lines of inquiry among contacts and travelers into Mexican villages so remote that Spanish had barely penetrated. Yet they found no magic mushrooms. Given their efforts, it was ironic that the man who beat them to “God’s flesh” was neither a spy nor a scientist, but a banker. It was R. Gordon Wasson, vice-president of J. P. Morgan & Company, amateur mycologist, and co-author with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms, Russia and History. Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian born wife had become fascinated by the different ways that societies deal with the mushroom, and they followed their lifelong obsession with these fungi, in all their glory, all over the globe. […][86]

A few pages later Marks embellishes the story further:

A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that reached both CIA headquarters and then James Moore. During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote Wasson—"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls—and expressed a desire to look into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore eventually suggested that he would like to accompany Wasson's party, and, to sweeten the proposition, he mentioned that he knew a foundation that might be willing to help underwrite the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter Fund, made a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for the divine mushroom became Subproject 58.[87]

– John Marks

The letter Wasson wrote to the Geschickter Fund requesting the money was written in 1956. The $2000 requested in 1956 is worth over $17,300 in 2014 dollars, and was comparatively valued at $6884 by 1979 when John Marks wrote his book. The point is that $2000 sounded far less in 1979 than it was in 1956 and sounds far less today. It is likely that that much money in 1956 funded the entire trip – though Marks and Wasson’s collaborative efforts claim that it only covered part of the trip.

February 8, 1956 Attention, Dr. [redacted – Sidney Gottlieb or Charles Geschickter?] Dear Sirs, Over recent months, as Dr. [redacted] will inform you, I have had conversations with him and Dr. [redacted – James Moore?] of the [redacted – Geschickter Fund?] concerning certain pioneering inquiries that we are [unintelligible] hallucinatory fungi used by some of the more remote [redacted – Mexican Indian cultures] in association with their indigenous religious practices. I am planning a fourth expedition to the mountains in the [redacted – Oaxaca region of Mexico] for July. I should like to hope that the expenses involved with this expedition would be borne by a [redacted – fund?] in the medical aspects of the research. With this in mind, I take the liberty of applying to you by this letter for a grand-in-aid of $2000 for the purpose of gathering the specimens in the field, identification thereof, their conservation either in liquor or in the dry state, and their conveyance to [redacted – CIA or Albert Hofmann?]. For your further information, Professor [redacted – Roger Heim], leading [redacted – French] mycologist and Director of the [redacted – Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle] has committed himself to accompany us on this trip. His great experience in mycology generally and in tropical mycology in particular will be of very great value to us. In order that we may plan accordingly, I should hope that your decision on this matter could be communicated to me before too long. I am leaving for a trip to [redacted – Europe] at the end of March to be gone for two months, and before my departure for [redacted - Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico] I should like to settle on all details concerning the equipment we shall take and the personnel of our expedition . I remain Respectfully Yours ~ Gordon Wasson [redacted in the original] [emphasis added]

It appears that Marks and those involved in “assisting” with his book’s writing had a meeting and coordinated their cover-up. They were all agents. The only reason to throw Dr. James Moore under the bus was as a cover – for the other agents and the larger operation – which we now know is fact.

On a side note, I should mention that with Leary as a scapegoat in the last section, and the issue with Wasson and Huxley and the rest supposedly not wanting to make psychedelics popular with the public, but only to select elite – well Wasson had popularized “magic mushrooms” across the nation in Life magazine (1957), where on the front cover was cleverly placed: “The Discovery of Strange Mushrooms that Cause Visions,” directly followed by the words “Teen-Age Allowances,” –long before Leary had joined their efforts in 1960. Furthermore, Huxley had published the popular book The Doors of Perception, 1954, wherein he popularized mescaline – only on