Story on CIA and LSD
MichaelP
Then one night he shared a drink with some fellow
Americans, and his life fell apart. Did the CIA spike his drink with LSD?
By Russ Baker
OBSERVER SUNDAY February 14, 1999
Some of his New York neighbours knew him as Paul Galan, some knew him as
Paul Stanley. To others, he was just Paul, a quiet man who could usually
be found on his doorstep with his dog and an ever-present cup of coffee.
But in retrospect, all agree that there was an air of mystery about the
man who invariably greeted passers-by with a smile and a friendly word.
When 'Paul' died in 1992, people in his neighbourhood gathered in the
rain, on the step, to toast him with coffee and pastries from the nearby
Ukrainian restaurant. What none of them knew was that their neighbour's
real name was Stanley Glickman, and that he had once been a promising
young artist, a dashing American in Paris on his way to great things. But
then a most peculiar event transpired, one that would change his life
forever.
This coming Tuesday in a US court, Stanley's past will be the focus of a
lawsuit pitting the Glickman family against the US Government. At issue
will be exactly what happened in a Paris cafe in November 1952 when,
according to the family, a CIA official slipped a large dose of LSD into
Stanley's drink, triggering a psychotic episode and transforming him into
a neighbourhood 'character' with a secret.
Glickman was born in New York City in 1927, the son of a modestly
successful furrier. The youngest of three children, he began showing an
aptitude for drawing and painting in his pre-teen years, attending classes
outside school and winning many prizes. In the summer of 1951, he sailed
for Paris, where he began studies at the Academy de la Grand Chaumier, and
later at the studio of the renowned French modernist Fernand Leger. He
also travelled to Florence to study fresco painting, and won a national
competition to have one of his paintings hung in New York's Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
In autumn 1952, he set himself up in a studio on the outskirts of Paris.
'My days were spent working in my studio, my evenings usually spent
drinking coffee at the Cafe Dome in Montparnasse,' he would later recall.
His friends were young people from various countries with whom he got into
passionate discussions about ideas, events and plans for the future. He
also met and fell in love with Ruth Edelman, a young Canadian making a
grand tour of Europe. Her father came to visit, the three dined together,
and Mr Edelman pronounced Glickman very suitable for his daughter. The two
became so wrapped up in each other that Glickman had trouble concentrating
on his work.
Reluctantly, he urged Ruth to continue on her tour, with plans to resume
the relationship when she returned to Paris.
One evening soon after her departure, as Glickman was enjoying his
habitual coffee at the Dome, he was invited by an acquaintance across the
street to the Cafe Select, where they were joined by another group of
Americans whom Glickman did not know.
Glickman and the conservatively- dressed strangers disagreed over
politics, power and patriotism; a heated debate ensued. At length, a
fed-up Glickman settled his bill and prepared to leave.
But one of the men insisted on buying him a drink - a peace offering.
Glickman, who had been drinking coffee, reluctantly agreed to accept a
liqueur, and although the group had been enjoying waiter service, the
stranger insisted on getting the drink personally. Halfway through his
Chartreuse, Glickman began to feel strange: his perceptions of objects,
sounds and dimensions became distorted.
This hallucinatory state must have been particularly frightening for
Glickman, since it was more than a decade before LSD became easily
available and its effects widely known.
At this point, according to an affidavit Glickman filed in 1983, the men
around him leaned in, fascinated. One suggested that he was capable of
performing miracles. Fearing he had been poisoned, Glickman broke free and
made his way home; it seemed to him that shadowy figures were following
him. In the morning, he woke to intense hallucinations. The next two weeks
found him wandering the streets of Paris in a feverish haze.
Seeking to backtrack through this nightmare, he returned to the Cafe
Select, sat down at a table and promptly collapsed. Strangers revived him
and drove him to the American hospital in Paris. There, according to
medical records, he was given an EEG and a calming dose of sodium amytal.
Not so, according to Glickman, who claimed in his affidavit that he
received electroshock therapy via a catheter up his penis, and was dosed
with what seemed to be more hallucinogenic substances. He panicked and
checked himself out of the hospital, but soon had himself readmitted,
remaining for another seven days - during which time he believes he was
given yet more hallucinogenic drugs. At this point, Ruth Edelman returned
from her travels and signed him out of the hospital. She wanted to stay
and nurse him, but Glickman told her to go home to Canada because he
didn't want to ruin her life.
For the next 10 months, he remained a terrified recluse in his Paris flat,
not painting and barely eating for fear of being poisoned again. His
relatives in the US knew nothing about his condition until a visiting
friend of the family saw how thin Stanley was and alerted his parents.
Almost immediately, his brother-in-law arrived to bring him home. Under a
doctor's care, his physical health slowly revived, but he never regained
his mental equilibrium. He avoided old friends. Once an avid student, he
stopped reading books. He never held a steady job, never had another
romantic relationship, and never painted again.
'In 1952, the only explanation was madness,' Glickman would later write in
an affidavit.
Although one psychiatrist suggested that he be institutionalised,
Glickman's family helped him settle into a small apartment in New York's
East Village. At first he found it difficult even to leave the apartment;
every time he urinated, he thought of the catheter and the events at the
Cafe Select. But after a while he tried, falteringly, to get on with his
life. He cleaned furniture in a local antique shop, filled in occasionally
for his sick father at the family shop, designed fabrics, and even opened
a small, unprofitable antiques shop of his own.
'He would never really try to sell you anything,' recalls Marilyn
Appleberg, a neighbourhood association chairman. '[His shop] was a place
for him to be, to socialise.' Just getting through each day seemed a
challenge. He would walk his two big red dogs Charlie and Gent, and, after
they died, a smaller black one called Kuma. Even in an area known for
street characters, he cut a striking figure, with his shock of white hair
and a red-and-black silk scarf, knotted like a cravat. But most of the
time, he just sat on his step with a cup of coffee. There were two names
on his mailbox: Glickman and Galan. Nobody knew for sure who he was. No
neighbour ever entered his apartment.
Yet someone else did share Glickman's secret: his sister Gloria. In 1977,
she was watching televised Senate hearings about CIA abuses, chaired by
Ted Kennedy, and she called Stanley, urging him to turn on his television.
One of the witnesses described a government drug-testing programme known
as MKULTRA, which had used innocent Americans selected as human guinea
pigs. 'There was no advance knowledge or protection of the individuals
concerned,' the witness said.
The CIA's mandate is to preserve and protect the liberties guaranteed in
the American constitution, yet this CIA-sponsored 'research' directly
violated the Nuremberg Code, established in the years after the Second
World War to deal with the 'crimes against humanity' committed by the
Nazis during their notorious medical experiments. The Code stipulates that
patients must give 'informed consent' before any experimentation may
begin.
The witness before the Kennedy committee went on to justify the CIA's
experiments on grounds of national security. With the Soviets looking into
the possible use of hallucinogens as 'brainwashing' agents, the United
States had to be prepared to fight back - even if it meant giving drugs
like LSD to unsuspecting American citizens. 'Harsh as it may sound in
retrospect, it was felt that in an issue where national survival might be
concerned, such a procedure and such a risk was a reasonable one to take,'
he said.
Shortly after watching the hearings, Glickman began seeking answers on his
own. He contacted Kennedy's staff and the office of the US Attorney
General, to no avail. He was advised he needed a lawyer, but that would
take money. Unable to raise funds on his own and perhaps seeking further
catharsis, he decided to write a film treatment.
One day in 1981, the movie Ragtime was filming down the block, and one of
Glickman's neighbours, Dean Corren, was working as an extra in it.
Glickman approached Corren and asked him if he would try and get his film
treatment to Ragtime's director, Milos Forman. Corren agreed, and took the
story home to read. He was stunned: 'There was something about it that
defied fiction.' Then Glickman, who had apparently never told anyone
outside his family about the Paris experience, told Corren the whole
story.
Nothing came of Glickman's treatment. He was no writer, and as for the
story itself, perhaps even Hollywood found it too fantastic. But Corren
became intrigued by Glickman's account, and spent the next five years
looking into it. In 1981, on an unrelated trip to Washington, he visited
the Centre for National Security Studies and read about the architect of
MKULTRA - Sidney Gottlieb, the same man who had testified before the
Kennedy committee about the policy of spiking the drinks of unsuspecting
Americans.
After reading a description of Gottlieb, Corren telephoned Glickman in New
York with a question: did one of the men in the cafe, by any chance, have
a club foot? Glickman's response was immediate: he recalled the man who
had gone to get him the Chartreuse, and, as the man stood at the bar,
noticing that he had a misshapen foot. That's curious, Corren replied. So
does Dr Gottlieb. Gottlieb, the antagonist in this drama, is a well-known
figure: Norman Mailer devoted a whole section of Harlot's Ghost, his
novelisation of the history of the CIA, to him. With a doctorate in
biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, Gottlieb was a
rarity among higher-echelon CIA officials, who tended to be Ivy League
graduates with equal parts self-assurance and naivety. As well as being
born with a club foot, which left him with a noticeable limp, the New York
native was also plagued by severe stammering. Nevertheless, Gottlieb
became head of the CIA's Chemical Division at 33, and quickly impressed
colleagues with his curiosity and energy. 'He was one of the most
imaginative, creative people I've ever worked with,' says Dr John
Gittinger, who worked under Gottlieb and later became chief psychologist
in the CIA's Clandestine Service.
In a 1953 memo to a researcher, Gottlieb gave an indication of the kinds
of mind control issues he was interested in - for both offensive and
defensive purposes: 'Disturbance of memory; discrediting by aberrant
behaviour; alteration of sex patterns; eliciting of information;
suggestibility; creation of dependence.' He seemed driven to excel in the
Cold War battle against the Soviets, working with a zeal that Gittinger
attributes to guilt that his disability kept him out of the War.
Ultimately, Gottlieb would admit that MKULTRA tested an array of
techniques and substances on dozens of unsuspecting people, and there may
well have been hundreds. Most striking to all who knew him in those days
was the ease with which he overcame his disability. A keen dancer, while
travelling, he seized every opportunity to learn new dances and steps,
which he eagerly demonstrated to friends and colleagues on his return.
When not trying to find out whether a person could be coerced into
changing his or her political loyalty, the head of MKULTRA enjoyed life on
his Virginia farm, raising goats, Christmas trees and corn. Ironically,
Gottlieb - who has never been willing to discuss his role in MKULTRA in
any great detail, or to apologise for its excesses - would years later
turn to Zen Buddhism and become a volunteer in Aids hospices. He would
only grudgingly admit to the Senate committee that MKULTRA was a failure:
'In looking backward now, the real possibility of the successful and
effective use [of mind control] either against us or by us was very low.'
In the 1950s, though, Gottlieb was sufficiently supportive of
unanticipated ingestion of LSD that he personally spiked the drinks of
scientists working with him. In one incident, an Army scientist, Frank
Olson, was given a massive dose and, in a delayed reaction some days
later, ended up jumping through the 10th-floor window of a Manhattan
hotel. President Gerald Ford later apologised, and Congress authorised a
$750,000 payment to the family. (In Manhattan, a grand jury is currently
looking at Olson's 'suicide' - new evidence, not linked with Gottlieb,
indicates that he may have been hit with a blunt instrument before his
body hurtled out the window.)
Shortly after finding the CIA documents in Washington, Dean Corren began
searching for a lawyer to take up Glickman's case. At least a dozen firms
said no before their luck turned. Then, one after another, firms accepted
but later handed the case on when their approaches were thwarted by
government obfuscation. Time and again, courts simply took the agency's
word on what information could be safely released from its files. Even
45-year-old documents were not made available without heavy editing.
The US government has over the years issued various qualified denials in
the course of seeking to have the case dismissed. In one brief, government
lawyers assert that 'there is no evidence that TSD [the Technical Services
Division, whose Chemical Division was headed by Gottlieb] ever engaged in
or funded LSD testing or research overseas'. But the Glickmans,
distrustful of such claims, eventually found someone with impressive
credentials to back them up. In 1988, Glickman's then-counsel Ramsey Clark
called Dr Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor of psychiatry at
Harvard University and one of the world's leading authorities on LSD and
hallucinogenic drugs. Grinspoon had himself tried to get CIA records about
the testing programme back in the 1970s while working on a book; he too
had been stonewalled. So when the call came from the Glickmans, he readily
agreed to examine Stanley. Grinspoon saw Glickman on several occasions,
and spent a good deal of time with him. He examined old film footage of
Glickman going to Italy shortly before the events in Paris. 'As far as I
can tell, Stanley was a very healthy young man,' says Grinspoon. 'He's not
a person who could have been said to be mentally disturbed.'
Glickman told Grinspoon that, after accepting the fateful drink, he saw
the walls in the cafe moving and halos around the lights, and became
convinced he could levitate wine bottles on the shelves. 'When he got back
to his apartment, he began to feel that the whole world could see through
his eyes,' says Grinspoon. 'He thought his voice was transmitted back
through the radio to the people who were broadcasting. He looked at the
lines on his hands and saw all kinds of meaning in them. The colours
became bright and intense.' Grinspoon, who has written two books on
psychedelic drugs, says this is unquestionably a description of what is
commonly known as a 'bad trip'. Bad trips afflict a relatively small
number of people, but can be prolonged and cause permanent damage.
According to Grinspoon, the personality of the user, the environment in
which the drug is taken, the dosage, and whether or not the user is aware
that he or she has ingested LSD, all affect the outcome. Giving LSD to
someone surreptitiously could seriously aggravate the harm - especially in
1952, when few people, even doctors, were aware that such a drug existed.
'No wonder he suffered so terribly,' says Grinspoon.
Glickman's hospital records revealed other intriguing clues. When Glickman
collapsed at the Cafe Select, he was brought to the American hospital,
where earlier that year the same attending physician had treated Glickman
for hepatitis. This fact took on much greater significance for Glickman's
legal team when they learned that CIA files from that period contained a
1951 Swiss research article addressing the effect of LSD on people with
hepatitis.
The CIA and Gottlieb were apparently aware that when LSD was given to
hepatics, its effect was heightened. A CIA Information Report, summarising
intelligence acquired during an 11-month period beginning in November 1952
(when Glickman entered the hospital), notes that 'subjects in whom only a
slight modification of hepatic function is present make a marked response
to LSD'. This sentence might have been written about Glickman himself.
Certainly, he would have been an ideal guinea pig.
Another physician listed in the hospital records as having treated
Glickman had previously published an article in the Revue Neurologique,
describing experiments he had conducted on rabbits using LSD.
Furthermore, the CIA has been forced to admit that there were other cases
in which it used [LSD]
In the late 1950s, for example, a CIA-funded psychiatrist in a Montreal
psychiatric hospital administered an array of drugs and electric shocks to
people who had checked themselves in for problems ranging from anxiety to
post-natal depression. A long-running lawsuit resulted in payment by the
US government of more than a million dollars in total to nine Canadian
citizens. Even assuming Glickman ingested LSD in October 1952, was it the
CIA that slipped it to him? It is known that in the summer of 1952, nearly
six months before the Cafe Select incident, Gottlieb asked a government
narcotics agent named George White to begin testing hallucinogens on
unsuspecting citizens. Nobody but the CIA and the Swiss company Sandoz
(which discovered LSD accidentally in 1945) had access to the drug at that
time, and Sandoz had agreed to help control the supply by notifying the
Agency every time it shipped the substance.
Tests on consenting volunteers were already under way. White, a
hard-drinking, fast-living man who had failed in his efforts to join the
Agency, worked for the National Bureaux of Narcotics (forerunner of
today's DEA), and was deliberately chosen as an outside operative for the
CIA. He began dosing unwitting guinea pigs in autumn 1952, following his
summer discussion with Gottlieb. (He would later, with Gottlieb's
approval, set up safe houses in New York and San Francisco where he played
host to prostitutes, drug dealers and their customers and handed the
unsuspecting guests drinks laced with LSD.)
Records indicate that Gottlieb and White met on 20 October, 1952, in New
York and again in Washington on 30 October to discuss the plan to
administer LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting targets. The Glickman team
points out that there was plenty of time for Gottlieb to get to Paris,
spike a Chartreuse, and be back for his subsequent meeting with White.
Gottlieb says he wasn't in Paris at all in 1952. But both he and the CIA
have been unable to locate his passport to verify that.
And, more significantly, Gottlieb and his boss, Richard Helms, had - in an
unprecedented and controversial move - ordered all MKULTRA records
destroyed in 1973. A few financial records survived, but in the absence of
any other documentation, the case is dependent on the defendant's word
against an abundance of compelling, but circumstantial, evidence.
Towards the end of 1992, Glickman's physical health began to deteriorate.
The 62-year-old's stomach became distended. 'I told him a thousand times
to go see a doctor,' says Scott Wolfeil, a neighbour. But Glickman would
always refuse, saying he did not trust doctors. Finally, he couldn't even
make it down the steps to walk his dog. Eventually, his sister Gloria came
with her husband Ed, and despite Glickman's protestations, took him to a
doctor. Weeks later, on 11 December, Gloria called to tell Wolfeil the sad
news: his friend Paul had died of heart failure.
The struggle, however, was not over. Gloria replaced Stanley as plaintiff,
and the roller-coaster legal ride began once more. Since then, various
hearings have left the Glickmans unable to press their case against the
government or former CIA director Richard Helms, but they have been given
leave to proceed against Gottlieb.
And so, after 16 years of legal struggle and nearly half a century of
uncertainty, the family of Stanley Glickman will finally get their day in
court. The trial is expected to be brief - it may be over in a week. The
Glickman side has continued seeking new witnesses, and surprises are
possible, even likely. The government is expected to stress seeming
inconsistencies: for example, the fact that Glickman only 'remembered' the
club foot after being prompted. And there is the matter of the stutter:
Gottlieb's former CIA colleague Dr Gittinger says that, if Gottlieb had
been there, Glickman would have noticed his stutter - something he never
mentioned. Yet every person interviewed describes Glickman as scrupulously
honest. 'Even Dr Klein, who examined him for the government, would agree,'
says Dr Grinspoon, the LSD expert. 'He was a straight shooter. He said,
yes, yes Gottlieb had a club foot, but he didn't remember the stutter, and
wasn't going to say he did.'
Glickman's family and friends believe he would have wanted them to
continue the case. 'Stanley had no interest in a monetary settlement,'
says Grinspoon. 'He wanted the American people to know there was an Agency
that could act so arrogantly, so irresponsibly towards one of its
citizens. He was terribly concerned that the story get out.'
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