Through his research on the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, Tom O’Neill learned that yet another shadowy researcher kept an office there — as he explains in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties — and this researcher’s work with LSD had clearer, more nefarious ties to the CIA than any of the others:
At least his name wasn’t Smith this time: he was Dr. Louis Jolyon West. His friends called him “Jolly,” for his middle name, his impressive girth, and his oversized personality.
[…]
Born in Brooklyn in 1924, West had enlisted in the army air force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. He came to my interest when I learned that he’d accepted an office at the Haight-Ashbury clinic from David Smith himself to recruit subjects for LSD research.
Earlier in his career, West researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. During the Korean War, he helped to “deprogram” returning prisoners of war who’d allegedly been brainwashed. His success earned him national attention. Around the same time, he achieved still more fame when he joined civil rights activists like his friend the actor Charlton Heston, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in marches demanding equal rights for African Americans. Ironically, while he was fighting for the rights of some, he was suspected of infringing on those of others. His detractors alleged that through the fifties and early sixties, at air force bases in Texas and Oklahoma, he performed experiments on unwitting subjects using LSD and hypnosis.
After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, West psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, who’d murdered Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Not long before Ruby was due to testify for the Warren Commission, West examined him alone in his jail cell. He emerged to report that Ruby had suffered an “acute psychotic break.” Sure enough, Ruby’s testimony before the commission succeeded only in making him sound unhinged. He could never fully explain why he’d decided to kill Oswald.
Through the seventies, journalists linked West to the CIA’s mind-control research program, MKULTRA. He denied all involvement, vigorously attacking anyone who suggested otherwise. He kept up those attacks until his death in 1999. Then seventy-four, he’d been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, and he prevailed on his son to help him commit suicide with a cocktail of pills.
[…]
West had spent the last decades of his career at UCLA, where he’d become something of an institution, heading the psychiatry department’s renowned neuroscience center; the university had named an auditorium in his honor. When I called the school, I learned that he’d donated his papers to them, but since no one had asked to see them, they’d never been processed. No one had so much as opened the first box. I would be the first reporter to look at them.
[…]
Late in the fall of 1966, Jolly West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies and LSD. The Bay Area had seen an unprecedented migration of middle-class youth and an explosion of recreational drug use. West felt he had to witness it firsthand. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Oklahoma, nominally to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his participation in a program there.
West was a square—tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past. If he wanted a good glimpse of the hippies, he’d have to blend in. He started cobbling together a new wardrobe and skipping haircuts.
At least he had a solid knowledge base. The summer of love had yet to come, and the Tate–LaBianca murders were still years away, but West would effectively predict them both. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, he’d contributed a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities across the United States. It was LSD, known to leave users “unusually susceptible and emotionally labile” as it caused a “loosening of ego structure.” That language was reminiscent of the “reprogramming” spiel that Charles Manson would soon develop, urging his acid-tripping followers to “negate their egos.”
When West cautioned against the “LSD cults” springing up in America’s “bohemian” quarters, he described exactly the kind of disenchanted wanderers who’d flock to a personality like Manson’s in the years to come. West had a hunch that alienated kids “with a pathological desire to withdraw from reality” would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.”
Another paper by West, 1965’ s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their moral codes. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were impossible.
West cited two cases to back up his argument: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. He “personally knew” of two other instances, and he’d “heard on excellent authority” of three more, but he didn’t elaborate. Later, I’d get a sense of what, or who, he might have had in mind.
When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, then, West was the only scientist in the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults.” How had he learned so much about acid? You’d never know from his published writing that he’d conducted innumerable experiments with it. In San Francisco, he hoped to conduct more still.
In the Haight, West found a group of kindred spirits at David Smith’s new clinic, where plenty of shrinks from the “straight world” were basking in hippiedom. Getting his bearings at the HAFMC, he arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on nearby Frederick Street, where he opened what he described as a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad.” This would serve as a “semi-permanent observation post,” granting him an up-close-and-personal look at the youth. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,” telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking copious notes on their behavior.
The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. West took pains to ensure that it felt realistic, decorating it “with posters, flowers and paint.” Thus was born the Haight-Ashbury Project, as he called it, or “HAP,” for short. For the next six months, he undertook “an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the hippies.”
To drum up hippie business, West stopped by the HAFMC, where David Smith could furnish willing subjects. Smith even gave him an office. Having a nationally recognized researcher like West working out of the HAFMC would attract sorely needed government funding.
“We helped him with research,” Smith told me. He was sympathetic to West’s project, even though he admitted that he never bothered to find out what it was, or what its objectives were. He assumed that West, like himself, was diagnosing “psychedelic patterns in the counterculture,” trends that others had dismissed as boorish fads.
“They came over and interviewed kids that came into our clinic,” Smith said of West and his students. “He wanted to know, ‘What is a hippie?’” Smith reminded me that “this was a very new population… the fact that large numbers of white middle-class kids would use illicit drugs was a total mindblower.”
Who was paying for all this? According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.
This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first “disguised laboratory” in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men—something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment. White so enjoyed the proceedings that he had a portable toilet and a mini-fridge installed on his side of the mirror, so he could watch the action and swill martinis without taking a bathroom break. He later wrote to his CIA handler, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!”
West knew better than to commit such sentiments to paper, but by 1967 he’d “toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards,” too. Before he moved to the Haight, he’d supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
[…]
Bob Conrich, a cofounder of the HAFMC, saw through the ruse right away. West “walked into the clinic one day and my first reaction was that he’d read too many Tim Leary interviews,” Conrich wrote to me. West was a careerist in hippies’ clothing. “What I remember is his enthusiasm for the whole ‘summer of love’ thing, which seemed exaggerated and insincere.”
[…]
He soon concluded that the constellation of sex, drugs, and communalism shining over the Haight that summer was “doomed to fail”: “The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death.” He called this an “ineffable tragedy,” but it’s hard to imagine he saw it that way. For West, the failure of sixties idealism was the most desirable outcome—one that he was quite possibly working toward. A copy of his résumé from this period hints at the thrust of his research. He was at work on a book called Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. But he never published it. Nor, on the surface, would “the induction of abnormal states” dovetail with the stated goals of his HAP. By the early seventies he removed the title from his résumé and never mentioned it again.
Stephen Pittel, the forensic psychologist, worked briefly with West in 1968 and referred to him as “the only benevolent psychopath I ever met.” The man could “charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.”
[…]
The grad students hired to man West’s “crash pad” laboratory were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all these students admitted that something didn’t add up. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasn’t there.
[…]
When West made one of his rare appearances, he was “dressed funny,” like a hippie; sometimes he would have friends in tow, costumed just as poorly. Collins wrote, “The rest of us tended to look to them in trying to understand what we were supposed to do or what Jolly wanted. Their general reply was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. I gather that they did. They spent a good deal of the time stoned.”
[…]
Pressed for specific guidelines, West exuded “phoniness and dishonesty,” suggesting that the students answer sweeping, high-flown questions about the Haight, such as “Is this an asphalt Sherwood Forest?” She “got the impression that this question had already been answered.”
[…]
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who’d discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a “sacred drug” that gestured toward “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.” The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties, experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”
Charles Fischer, a drug researcher who worked with David Smith, described to me the early perceptions of acid, when “trips” were planned like literal journeys. “Very few people took LSD without having somebody being a ‘trip leader,’” Fischer said. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to hypnosis—and Jolly West, of course, had known well enough to study the two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being… [It] could result in some violent activity, even though LSD was considered a love drug.”
[…]
Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that the Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command.
The CIA, then in its infancy, saw mind control as a natural extension of communism, spreading like fire where the forces of unreason prevailed. In 1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control program whose chipper name belied its brutal ambitions and its propensity for trampling on human rights. In its yen to best the Soviets, the CIA tested drugs on American citizens—most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases—who didn’t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.
Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed Communists: the POWs must have been “brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didn’t appear in English before 1950.
[…]
Once the Korean War was over and the American POWs returned, the army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was a young psychiatrist from Cornell, Dr. Louis J. West. He would later claim to have studied eighty-three prisoners of war, fifty-six of whom had been forced to make false confessions. West interviewed them at length, undoing the treacheries of the “thought reform” they’d undergone in enemy hands. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.
West’s success with the POWs gained him entrée to the upper echelons of the intelligence community. As the Cold War bred paranoia, the CIA accelerated its mind-control efforts, and West, I learned, carved out a niche he’d occupy for decades to come. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further brainwashing by the Soviets. But the extraordinary power of psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD, was hard to ignore. Thus a defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, that mind-control ops were the future. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality had earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything. Mind control became Gottlieb’s pet project. Dulles, convinced that the American dream was at stake, ensured that Gottlieb was well funded. In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that Communist spies could turn the American mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.” Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.
The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.
In their defense, CIA spooks weren’t above experimenting on themselves. The same substance that held the promise of controlling minds and quashing communism was used in churlish office pranks, with agents quietly slipping LSD into their colleagues’ drinks to achieve much needed “firsthand knowledge.” A plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party was quashed when higher-ups reminded the office that it could cause insanity.
The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley—farmed out to scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes, including those of their unknowing subjects. Feeling that it was their patriotic duty, the scientists accepted their secret missions in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”
In 1949, at the Nuremberg trials that adjudicated the crimes of World War II, the United States adopted the International Code for Human Experimentation: “A person must give full and informed consent before being used as a subject.” MKULTRA scientists flouted this code constantly, remorselessly—and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches.
[…]
Operated on a strict need-to-know basis, MKULTRA was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in 1961 he was not informed of its existence. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of MKULTRA at any period during its twenty-year history. When Gottlieb retired, in 1972 or ’73, the project retired with him.
[…]
Director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKULTRA files. In January 1973, the Technical Services Staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens, including every known copy of a manual called “LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications.”
[…]
In their haste to purge their misdeeds, the agents forgot about a cache of some sixteen thousand additional papers in an off-site warehouse. Even internally, those files would remain undiscovered for several years, but it was only a matter of time until the story broke; MKULTRA had become fodder for rumors around Washington.
In December 1974, the project finally came to light in a terrific flash of headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.”
[…]
First came the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, each mentioned earlier regarding CHAOS and COINTELPRO. The Church Committee’s final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general. “Precautions must be taken,” the document warned, “to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.” A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: “A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.”
In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)
[…]
Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of the Senate. Gottlieb claimed that his heart condition precluded the possibility of his addressing the whole chamber; instead, he was installed in an anteroom, where he answered questions from a select group while the masses listened over a public address system.
As the New York Times pointed out, Gottlieb “managed to elude the lights and microphones and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate hearing room.” He was spared the sight of the incredulity that spread over their faces as he admitted that he had destroyed MKULTRA’s files not to cover up “illegal activity,” but “because this material was sensitive and capable of being misunderstood.” He resented the harm done to his reputation, and he was loath to provide specifics about MKULTRA experiments, saying that he’d never witnessed any himself.
Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, “quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total criminal immunity.
[…]
Surviving records named eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among them Louis J. West. The New York Times identified him, in a front-page lead story, no less, as one of seven suspected scientists who’d secretly participated in MKULTRA under academic cover. And yet not one researcher was ever federally investigated, and only two victims were ever notified. The Times had called MKULTRA “a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.” It looked like no one would suffer any consequences for it.
Griffin Bell, the Attorney General at the time of the revelations, told me the files never arrived at the Justice Department, despite Stansfield Turner’s sworn claim to the contrary. Bell said they must’ve just “fall[ en] through the cracks.” As for Turner himself, he told me he could no longer remember having testified that the CIA sent the files. “I’m just drawing a total blank here,” he said. I read his remarks back to him. “I guess I did testify about this,” he said. “Somebody fed me the stuff and I played it back.”
The New York Times ran twenty-seven stories on MKULTRA, eight on the front page. But no one in the press corps, and none of the senators involved, followed up to see that the promised investigations took place.
[…]
West’s archive comprised two hundred boxes, most of them full of ephemera. There were tons of press clippings. West had tracked the media’s coverage of assassinations, the CIA, aggression in cats, psychosurgery, capital punishment, alcoholism among Native Americans, behavior modification, and the civil rights movement, among other subjects. I was intrigued to see many clippings on the Manson murders, and papers by Roger Smith, David Smith, and Alan Rose.
[…]
On August 25, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis, I found them: letters between West and his CIA handler, “Sherman Grifford.”
I didn’t recognize the name, so as soon as I got home, I began tearing through every book I had that mentioned MKULTRA, hoping that it would jump out at me. In the first and most definitive of the bunch, John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, there it was, buried in a footnote: “CIA operators and agents all had cover names,” it said, “even in classified documents. Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’”
So West really had lied all those years. Not only was he a part of MKULTRA, he’d corresponded with the “Black Sorcerer” of MKULTRA himself. Preserved in his files, the letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first one was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKULTRA started. West was then chief of psychiatric service at the airbase at Lackland, Texas.
Addressing Gottlieb as “S.G.,” he outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. Enumerating short-and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list, beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/ or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects… or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” West wanted to reverse someone’s belief system without his knowledge, and make it stick. He hoped to create “couriers” who would carry “a long and complex message” embedded secretly in their minds, and to study “the induction of trance-states by drugs.” All of these were the goals of MKULTRA, and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.
“Needless to say,” West added, the experiments “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”
West’s colleagues wouldn’t approve of his activities. He yearned to “cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account.” Because he’d be using drugs that were “not on the Air Force list of standard preparations,” he wanted to secure “some sort of carte blanche.” (He would go on to suggest a number of security measures in his letters, including disguised funding, double envelopes, and false names.)
Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups—basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and “others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.” Only the volunteers would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasn’t spelled out, unwitting. It’d be easier to preserve his secrecy if he was “inducing specific mental disorders” in people who already exhibited them. “Certain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments.”
As if to prove his thoroughness, he affixed two addenda to his four-page letter, begging Gottlieb to get one of his superiors, a Major Robert Williams, “transferred to another base.” Williams was “an uncomfortably close scrutinizer of all my activities” who believed that hypnosis was “tampering with the soul,” West complained.
Gottlieb’s reply came on letterhead from “Chemrophyl Associates,” a front company he used to correspond with MKULTRA subcontractors. “My Good Friend,” he wrote, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real… you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.” He would arrange top-secret clearances for anyone who might become ensnared in their work, giving West “a separate sum” for the purchase of materials.
Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: “We have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.”
West returned the camaraderie. “It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me ‘an asset,’” he replied. “Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”
With that, the record of their correspondence ceased for nearly nine months. When it resumed, in April 1954, West had begun arrangements to relocate to the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, which wanted him to head its psychiatry department. He would be a civilian again. Gottlieb commended his “new look,” noting, “it appears at the moment to be a move which would in the long run be beneficial for us.” He signed off intimately, “Give my regards to your family.”
West had lied to his prospective employer, writing, “My present job is purely clinical and I have been doing no research, classified or otherwise.” The university took him at his word. Now performing his duties for Gottlieb at both the university and the air force base, West asked the judge advocate at Lackland for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called “a non-profit private research foundation.” In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another of Gottlieb’s fictions, enabling him to keep West and other researchers properly paid.
[…]
In a paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”
The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.”
As in his initial experiments, West performed most of these psychiatric feats on mental health patients. “The necessity to obtain most of the subject material from a population of psychiatry patients made standardized observations very difficult,” he groused. In the report, which doubled as a request for continued funding—a successful request; West received government backing through 1965 at the least—he enthusiastically described a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would include “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.”
West had hypnotized mental patients and “normal subjects” and exposed them to a host of drugs, including chlorpromazine, reserpine, amphetamines, and LSD—the same ones that David Smith would inject in his confined rodents about a decade later. Of course, at least two of these, LSD especially, would prove instrumental in the Manson Family’s group psychology.
[…]
Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, “a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken place… so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss… An individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite.”
Since West’s paper was light on specifics, it’s hard to know if it was only a ploy for more funding.
[…]
At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”
In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents.
