The Cold War Experiments
Radiation tests were only one small part of a vast research program that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs
As recently as 1972, U.S. News found, the Air Force was supporting research by Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, who is now dead, in which psychiatric patients at the University of Minnesota Hospital and the University of Missouri--including an 18-year-old girl who subsequently went into a catatonic state for three days--were given LSD to study "ego strength."
Gittinger concedes that some of the research was quite naive. "We were trying to learn about subliminal perception and all the silly things people were believing in at that time," he says. One study even sought to develop extrasensory perception by "training" subjects with electric shocks when they got the wrong answer. But "most of it was exciting and interesting and stimulating, and quite necessary as it happens, during that period of time," Gittinger insists.
Another former CIA official, Sidney Gottlieb, who directed the MKULTRA behavior-control program almost from its inception, refused to discuss his work when a U.S. News reporter visited him last week at his home. He said the CIA was only trying to encourage basic work in behavioral science. But he added that after his retirement in 1973, he went back to school, practiced for 19 years as a speech pathologist and now works with AIDS and cancer patients at a hospice. He said he has devoted the years since he left the CIA "trying to get on the side of the angels instead of the devils."
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