But the authorship of this
enterprise cannot reasonably be assigned to the CIA, per se. Even
before we review other agencies’ direct involvement, we must understand
that the CIA chief during
MK-Ultra, Allen Dulles, was
thoroughly attached to British Empire geopolitical aims. Introduced to
British spies by his uncle Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson’s
secretary of state, Dulles had had a strong personal identification
since childhood with the British Secret Intelligence Service.
The Dulles family’s upper class-status in America began when
ancestor William Dulles arrived in South Carolina from India.
With a fortune made in India by providing financial and security
services for the British East India Company army, he bought a slave
plantation which the family held through the American Civil War. The
family’s mental life was always that of the British Empire and its
American colonial subordinates. Allen Dulles’s main corporate activity
was as a director of the J. Henry Schroder banking company in
London, a prime instrument in Montagu Norman’s nazification of
Germany. As partners in the Sullivan and Cromwell firm,
Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles represented
the Rockefeller-Harriman- Warburg combination, I.G. Farben,
and virtually every other Nazi corporate organization that danced on
London’s marionette strings.
It was disclosed that for MK-Ultra, particularly for the
experimental use and distribution of LSD, the CIA operated
through another front, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. But the
geometry of the "front’’ really worked the other way around. The Macy
Foundation represented the British psychological warfare executive, as
extended into U.S. and related institutions. In the midst of launching
MK-Ultra, during 1954-55, the Macy Foundation’s medical director
Frank Fremont-Smith was president of British General Rees’s
World Federation of Mental Health. Under Rees as the
director, the two together,
"made a journey to a
number of countries in Asia and Africa to establish contacts and
seek ways in which the organization may extend its activities in
those regions.’’
Through official military
and intelligence conferences over which it presided, and through various
informal and secret operations, the Macy Foundation directed the
spread of LSD by U. S. agencies during the 1950s. The
Macy Foundation’s chief LSD executive, Harold Abramson,
was a psychiatric researcher at Columbia University and at the eugenics
center in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. It was Abramson
who first "turned on’’ Frank Fremont-Smith. Abramson also
gave LSD for the first time to British anthropologist Gregory
Bateson, sometime husband of Margaret Mead. Then in 1959, Bateson
gave LSD to Beat poet Alan Ginsburg at Stanford
University, under controlled experimental conditions. Following this,
Dr. Leo Hollister at Stanford gave LSD to mental patient
turned author Ken Kesey and others, and thus it was said to have
spread "out of the CIA’s realm.’’