56 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
“make” you solve problems on a black-
board can “make” you jump out a win-
dow. Even a “Get Smart”-style suicide
device that Gottlieb helped create for
U-2 pilots in the event of capture—a
poison-tipped needle hidden in a silver
dollar—seems never to have been used.
At one point, a now forgotten ma-
gician was lured into the MK-ULTRA
program to write a manual on misdi-
rection, with the intention of helping
agents sneak toxins into some sloe-eyed
target’s wine. Even weirder, Gottlieb
hired an eccentric cop, George Hunter
White, to be a chief operative. White
was an alcoholic leather fetishist who,
Kinzer reports, “bought his second wife
a closet full of boots, and patronized
prostitutes who bound and whipped
him.” (With the hypocrisy typical of his
kind, White had also worked as a nar-
cotics agent, ruining the lives of jazz
musicians, including Billie Holiday.)
The C.I.A. gave White money to rent
a “safe” house at 81 Bedford Street, in
Greenwich Village, where he helped
fight world Communism by slipping
acid haphazardly into the drinks of his
peculiar circle of friends, including the
publisher of Vixen Press, which had a
specialty in fetish and lesbian pulp fic-
tion. Later, White took his act to San
Francisco, where he expanded his re-
search to include observing the effects
of LSD on prostitutes and their clients
during sex—the C.I.A. called this proj-
ect Operation Midnight Climax; it re-
ally did—and was thus able to invest in
a major library of pornography.
Your tax dollars at work. Gottlieb
and White spent years discovering that
if you bribe and abuse people you can
induce them to do things they other-
wise wouldn’t do; that lonely people are
likely to surrender information in ex-
change for sexual favors; and that peo-
ple who have been tortured are likely
to do whatever the torturer asks, a truth
known to Torquemada. What might
be a rational goal of such a research
project—to identify forms of interro-
gation that would not require the slow
and brutal uncertainties of torture, or
the unreliability of sexual bribes—was
never seriously pursued. Many of the
LSD experiments were administered
in harsh, isolated environments, with-
out warning and in ways that would
induce extreme panic.
As a social history of LSD, Kinzer’s
book is compelling, not least in the way
it illustrates how the law of unintended
consequences in covert action can work
with an almost delirious vengeance. By
secretly subcontracting LSD-related
experiments throughout American ac-
ademia, Gottlieb inadvertently seeded
the great wave of psychedelia in which
half of young America turned on, tuned
in, and dropped out. Although Gott-
lieb had, by the early sixties, rightly con-
cluded that LSD was “too unpredict-able” to be a mind-control drug, at that
point it was too late. “LSD had escaped
from the CIA’s control,” Kinzer writes.
“First it leaked into elite society. Then
it spread to students who took it in
CIA-sponsored experiments. Finally it
exploded into the American counter-
culture, fueling a movement dedicated
to destroying much of what the CIA
defended and held dear.” It was blow-
back at hurricane force. A clued-in John
Lennon remarked, “We must always
remember to thank the C.I.A. and the
Army for LSD, by the way. That’s what
people forget. Everything is the oppo-
site of what it is.”
This story, like most monocausal sto-
ries, is probably too neat. It’s true that
acidheads like Ken Kesey and the Grate-
ful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter were
first exposed to LSD in research pro-
grams ultimately linked to Gottlieb’s.
But other histories of the drug, most
recently Michael Pollan’s, have LSD
flowing in from many other, non-C.I.A.
sources, with hundreds of non-Gott-
lieb-sponsored research papers docu-
menting its benevolent effects. LSD was
used as a weapon in the fifties, but it
was also used openly at the same time
as a therapy for alcoholism; the relation
of the C.I.A. to the acid boom was real,
but hardly exclusive.
The oddity is that Gottlieb and his
circle saw acid as causing breakdowns
and psychosis—and, indeed, their
stealthy experiments produced such
symptoms, even in the relatively benign
premises of the Village and North
Beach. It’s a very different picture of
the drug’s effects than the one popu-
larized by Pollan and the other new
acid evangelists—or, for that matter, the
kind recorded in the blissful testimony
of countless hippies of the time. Surely
this discrepancy reinforces the sociol-
ogist Howard Becker’s point, introduced
in his now seven-decade-old studies of
marijuana-smoking among jazz musi-
cians, that intoxication is always a so-
cial enterprise: take acid in welcoming
circumstances and it produces mystical
visions and “Lucy in the Sky with Di-
amonds”; have it forced down your
throat in prison or isolation and it’s
scary and psychosis-inducing.
The ugliness of MK-ULTRA’s ex-
periments seems to have caused a reac-
tion in Gottlieb himself, who eventually“O.K., but first tell me what a great ally I am.”