Laurence Layton, the man charged with killing Congressman Leo Ryan and four members of his fact-finding party in South America, displayed increasingly peculiar behavior even before he left for Guyana last May, according to members of his family.
Three members of the Layton family discussed their decade-long association with the Peoples Temple this past weekend, and pondered last week's numbing events in Guyana.
The relatives said Larry, 32, acted as if he were in a "post-hypnotic trance" as he was drawn further into the Peoples Temple, which he joined in 1968. Shortly before he traveled to Guyana, his father recalled, Larry showed up at the family's East Bay home one afternoon dressed in a full surgical gown and promptly dived into the backyard swimming pool.
This close-knit Quaker family is now torn between the agony of losing Larry, in spirit and mind, to the sect, and the slim familial hope that his "very peaceful" nature rendered him incapable of participating in the Port Kaituma shootout.
There are no comfortable conclusions.
"The thing I wonder about," said Tom Layton, 36-year-old brother of the suspected gunman, "is if the Peoples Temple ordered Larry to do whatever he's done. I wonder if the Peoples Temple is in any way going to support his defense in court, since he was a loyal servant following orders..."
"He was a robot," said father Laurence Layton, a flat distant timbre in his voice.
Larry's character became even more "rote," as family members describe it, when he arrived in Jonestown shortly after his sister Deborah, 25, fled the jungle outpost.
The conditions at Jonestown -- the beatings, the armed surveillance, the rehearsals for mass suicide -- were subsequently reported by Debbie.
From the very moment she entered the Peoples Temple agricultural mission in Jonestown last December, Debbie thought of plans to escape.
The day I got there, I knew I had to leave," she recalled, gently stroking the hand of her middle-aged father as she sat at his feet. "It was horrendous, all these people with all these guns, watching you while you worked. I knew I had to leave."
Debbie said she detected a "small initial paranoia" in the temple's San Francisco headquarters before sect leader Jim Jones shifted the group to Jonestown in 1977.
"But when you got into Guyana and then got into the interior, you had no contact with the outside world," she said. "The only thing you heard was what Jim Jones said over the loudspeakers.
"At night, you heard guns being shot in the jungle," she continued. "Jim told us it was mercenaries coming after us. He had you believing the whole world was against you."
Beyond the paranoia that poisoned the fate of the sect as surely as the cyanide that ultimately killed more than 900 disciples, Debbie Layton also realized that Jim Jones' egalitarian utopia was disintegrating in the jungle.
"Jim was the only one to have a king-sized bed, the only one to have a refrigerator," said Debbie. "He was even the only one to have a mosquito net."
She also said that church policy played favorites, "so certain pretty women were assigned to certain men."
And despite the temple's reputation as a champion of racial equality, Debbie admitted that "the people who made the rules were all upper-middle-class whites."
All three daily meals consisted almost solely of rice, with meat and vegetables served once every three weeks, she said. Temple members grew to relish visits since Jones put on a show on those occasions.
"Everyone was glad when a guest came because for once the work hours were shortened, you could wear clean clothes and the food was good," Layton recalled. "It was a relief."
When Debbie first arrived at Jonestown, she spent a month and a half working in the fields. Then Jones transferred her to 12-hour work days in the radio room, where she maintained contact with Georgetown headquarters of the Peoples Temple.
Her first step toward freedom came last March, when Jones appointed Debbie and several other temple members to chaperone a group of temple children for a trip to Georgetown, where they would present a cultural program for Guyanese officials.
She did not reveal her escape plans even to her mother, Lisa, who also lived at Jonestown.
"She didn't know I was going to leave," said Debbie, remembering their final farewell. "I hugged her good-bye. And she said, 'I know I'm never going to see you again.'"
"But thank God she didn't tell on you," whispered the elder Layton.
Debbie's able management of the Georgetown temple during the visit prompted Jones' wife, Marceline, to recommend her for a permanent post there. Once based in Georgetown, Debbie began placing clandestine telephone calls to brother Tom and sister Annalisa, 33, in Northern California.
Final departure plans were arranged with the U.S. Embassy in Guyana, which provided Debbie with an emergency passport and escorted her to the airport.
But there was a final nerve-wracking delay. Debbie was prepared to leave May 12, but a dispute with Guyanese officials at the airport delayed customs clearance and the Pan American World Airways jet took off without her. She threw off Peoples Temple members who spotted her at the airport by telling them she was on a special mission.
Debbie left Guyana for good the next day.
"When I went up the steps of the plane to leave," she said, "I couldn't believe I wasn't being shot in the back."
Upon arrival in the Bay Area, she immediately went into hiding.
The Layton family believes that son Larry was then whisked from the Peoples Temple in San Francisco to Guyana so that his defecting sister would have no chance to talk to him.
"I tried to get in touch with him at the temple," said Larry's father. "Well, hell, they'd already shipped him out."
Larry called up the family from Guyana several days later. His father recounts, "I said, 'Laurence, don't go into the interior! Don't go into the interior!" He'd never been in the interior, but he kept telling me how beautiful it was. Obviously they were telling him what to say. Since then, it was just insanity."
Debbie Layton has heard from temple survivors that Larry was further distressed when his mother, 63-year-old Lisa Layton, died at Jonestown about three months ago. Debbie believes her mother had falled out of favor with Jones because she expressed opposition to the violent beatings that marked jungle discipline.
"This is our only consolation in the whole thing," said Laurence Layton. "She didn't live to see the collapse of the whole thing, the end of all her hopes. They all believed they were doing good things."
Once repatriated, Debbie began informing the State Department and the press about conditions in Jonestown. A radio-phone call from Larry to his brother was an attempt to discredit his sister's revelations.
"But I could hear Laurence go into his rote," said Tom. "Everything he said was prepared as a response to everything negative in the press up here, whatever they were currently getting attacked for."
Suddenly, after Layton senior came on the line, the phone connection was cut off.
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Robot, Schmobot. Larry was a self-indulgent downer head--so stoned he couldn't even get up in a plane. I mean what else is there to do out in the jungle except drink, drug and fuck? The "Rev." Jim Jones' placing rules and strictures on sexual relationships is pure bull crap. He barely came out of his room in the daylight. Look below to see how nice Larry cleans up. Like a nellie Englishman! (I have a pink pith helmet, so I'm one to talk.
Title: People's Temple Cult Commits Mass Suicide In Guyana
Caption: GUYANA - NOVEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) People's Temple follower Larry Layton (C) stands with police following his arrest November 18, 1978 in the shooting of two people on a remote Guyana airstrip. That same day, precipitated by the shootings, over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Reverend Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana of mass murder and suicide. Larry Layton was convicted in 1986 by a federal jury in San Francisco of conspiring in the 1978 murder of California congressman Leo Ryan and aiding and abetting in the attempted murder of Richard Dwyer, a U.S. diplomat wounded in the attack. Layton's sister Debbie's departure from the Peoples Temple and denunciation of Jones in May 1978 led her brother to leave California to join the settlement in Guyana. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
Title: People's Temple Cult Commits Mass Suicide In Guyana
Caption: GUYANA - NOVEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) People's Temple follower Larry Layton (C) stands with police following his arrest November 18, 1978 in the shooting of two people on a remote Guyana airstrip. That same day, precipitated by the shootings, over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Reverend Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana of mass murder and suicide. Larry Layton was convicted in 1986 by a federal jury in San Francisco of conspiring in the 1978 murder of California congressman Leo Ryan and aiding and abetting in the attempted murder of Richard Dwyer, a U.S. diplomat wounded in the attack. Layton's sister Debbie's departure from the Peoples Temple and denunciation of Jones in May 1978 led her brother to leave California to join the settlement in Guyana. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
Title: People's Temple Cult Commits Mass Suicide In Guyana
Caption: GUYANA - NOVEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) People's Temple follower Larry Layton (C) stands with police following his arrest November 18, 1978 in the shooting of two people on a remote Guyana airstrip. That same day, precipitated by the shootings, over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Reverend Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana of mass murder and suicide. Larry Layton was convicted in 1986 by a federal jury in San Francisco of conspiring in the 1978 murder of California congressman Leo Ryan and aiding and abetting in the attempted murder of Richard Dwyer, a U.S. diplomat wounded in the attack. Layton's sister Debbie's departure from the Peoples Temple and denunciation of Jones in May 1978 led her brother to leave California to join the settlement in Guyana. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
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1969, Prentice-Hall, Inc., The Second Genesis - The Coming Control of Life by Albert Rosenfeld, Prentice-Hall, Inc., - hardcover, second printing
September 29, 1973, San Francisco Chronicle, page 1, A Radio Shocker: Jim Dunbar Is Shot At While He's On the Air,
July 21, 1977, New York Times, C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior, by Nicholas M. Horrock, Special to the New York Times,
August 2, 1977, New York Times, page 16, Mind-Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty,
August 3, 1977, The Sun, Lowell, Mass. / N.Y. Times, page 60, CIA Used Institutions in Mind-control Effort,
November 20, 1978, Monterey Peninsula Herald, Beatings, Threats Reported by Woman Who Attempted to Interview the Rev. Jim Jones, page 1,
November 29, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, page 1, Toward the end, Jones slipped from reality into fantasy world, By Pete Carey, Staff Writer,
November 27, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, page 17A, Jones lived well, kept to himself during mysterious Brazil stay,
November 30, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle / AP, Reagan Says Jones Favored Democrats,
November 30, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle, page 5, A Growing List of Temple 'Hitmen',
December 7, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, Mark Lane, FBI meet secretly; Guyana probe enters San Jose, by Knut Royce, Staff Writer,
December 18, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle, page 2, Survivor Heard Cheers After Temple Death Rite,
December 18, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle/ Reuters, page 2, 700 Temple Dead Were 'Murdered',
December 28, 1978, San Francisco Examiner, page 1, Narcotics as a control; How Jones used drugs, by Peter King,
February 5, 1979, San Francisco Chronicle / UPI, page 10, Mind Control: The CIA's Plan to Create a Nuisance,
November 16, 1979, San Francisco Chronicle, 918 Died — No One Yet Convicted, by Ron Javers,
February 28, 1980, Monterey Peninsula Herald, Berkeley Killings Revive Fear Of Peoples Temple Revenge,
December 25, 1987, Washington Post, page A29, German Settlement Stirs Controversy in Chile, by Bradley Graham, Washington Post Foreign Service,
November 20, 1992, San Francisco Chronicle / Reuters, Brainwashing Compensation By Canada,
November 20, 2012, USA TODAY, Pentagon overseas propaganda plan stirs controversy, by Tom Vanden Brook,
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November 20, 1978, Monterey Peninsula Herald, Beatings, Threats Reported by Woman Who Attempted to Interview the Rev. Jim Jones, page 1,
Los Angeles Times Service
LOS ANGELES — Mysterious visitors, assaults in her home and threats against her family have haunted freelance reporter Kathy Hunter since she returned from a futile attempt to interview the Rev. Jim Jones at his Peoples Temple settlement in the Guyana jungle.
Her trek to the tropics last May turned into a bizarre nightmare, she said, when fires were set three times in rooms adjoining her quarters. Mrs Hunter, who shifted suites after each blaze, said the fires started after an argument with Peoples Temple aides.
Mrs. Hunter, 58, of Ukiah, spent 11 days in Georgetown under government protection from Peoples Temple, she said.
"The temple members are paranoid," she said in a telephone interview Sunday. "They have a thing about conspiracies. They feel everyone who asks about them is against them."
Beaten Three Times
In the five months since she returned, Mrs. Hunter said she has been beaten three times, the last incident occurring in October.
"Three men jumped me in my living room. I'll never forget their faces," she said. The intruders repeatedly warned her not to write anything more about Peoples Temple, she said.
Earlier, a lone assailant grabbed her when she went into her backyard one night to see why her dog was barking.
"I was pulled into my garage, choked and told that if I kept investigating the temple, the next time I would be killed," she said.
When she flew to Los Angeles to supply information about Peoples Temple to the district attorney's major frauds unit, two men confronted Mrs. Hunter in her hotel room.
Threatened Husband, Son
"They said they wanted to talk about Peoples Temple. I don't know how they found me, but they threatened my husband and my son," Mrs. Hunter said, her voice faltering. "You couldn't print the things they said they would do to my family.
"They said I would have to live with it, that they wouldn't touch me," she recalled.
Mrs. Hunter went to Guyana on assignment for several newspapers in the Ukiah area in northern California, where the temple once had a branch. She wanted to interview Jones and temple members who had relatives in Northern California.
A San Francisco temple administrator told her she would be welcome in Guyana, so Mrs. Hunter flew to South America on May 17.
Pleasant Talk
"The afternoon after I arrived, the temple people called. We had a pleasant talk. I invited them over to my hotel," she said.
Three of Jones' aides met with Mrs. Hunter in the hotel restaurant.
"At first everything was lovey-dovey, but when I told them I wanted to interview Reverend Jones alone and in person, the chill set in," Mrs. Hunter remarked.
"Then I said I wanted to talk to each of the relatives alone and outside — where we couldn't be overheard," she said.
The conversation became heated, with one of the temple men saying that "all newspaper and television reporters were bad," Mrs. Hunter said.
After that interview, the fires were set in rooms adjoining Mrs. Hunter's hotel suites.
Visa Cut
"My visa was cut to one day from the original 11, and I was told to leave the country on the next plane," she said. "Apparently, the temple is in contact with Guyanese immigration officials."
Mrs. Hunter stayed on, missing the flight. She later found out from Guyanese friends that temple members were waiting for her on the airport road. She believes they planned to kill her.
"The government gave me an armed guard after the second day. I got an escort to the airport when I finally did leave," she said.
In addition to the attacks and threats since her return, which she believes have come from Peoples Temple, she said attorney Mark Lane visited her home and tried to link her to a conspiracy against the group. Lane is a lawyer for Jones.
Will the threats keep her from writing more about Peoples Temple?
"No," Mrs. Hunter said. "I'm Irish. They can't stop me."
NBC'S HARRIS (LEFT), PHOTOGRAPHER ROBINSON (RIGHT) SHOWN MINUTES BEFORE SHOOTING...film taken by NBC's Robert Brown, who also died in ambush
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November 29, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, page 1, Toward the end, Jones slipped from reality into fantasy world, by Pete Carey, Staff Writer,
Last of a series
JONESTOWN, Guyana -- Toward the end, the Rev. Jim Jones was two men -- the man he thought he was and the man he had become.
Surrounded by a following that, through fear and increasing dependence, showered him with personal attention, Jones slipped away from reality.
Maybe there never was a solid reality in the rain forests for a fast-talking minister-hustler from Lynn, Ind., who expanded his vision to Indianapolis, Ukiah and then San Francisco before moving on to Guyana.
Jones increasingly used drugs, and as the morphine oozed through his veins he stumbled around his empire in a daze.
"I watch your pain and it tears me up," wrote Tish Leroy, a key committee member at Jonestown. Her thoughts were in a self-analysis sent to Jones in May or June of this year.
"You complain that we watch your every move and judge you -- and it's true," she wrote. "Certainly I am guilty of that . . . I make allowances for what I see you doing that seems other than it should be, and on the other hand I watch your pain and it tears me up inside."
Nearly all of the approximately 1,000 members of the camp had watched their "father" with growing concern after he arrived with his flock in June 1977.
By that time his paranoia was full blown. Alarmed at media investigations of his organization and consumed with hatred for the United States, he finally decided to leave for the South American jungle hide-away he had first heard about in 1961 in an article in Esquire. It was written when The Bomb was the monster and sudden death by nuclear blast appeared to be the human race's most likely post mortem.
There were nine places in the world, according to the magazine, where it would be safe to live in an atomic war. One was Guyana.
All planned out
"He told me he had been thinking about coming to this place for 16 years, and he showed me on a map," said Richard Clayton, one of the survivors of the final cyanide-laced Kool-aid holocaust. "I think he had this planned out all the time."
Now, after the bloody extinction of a sect that was 80 to 90 percent black, Clayton thinks Jones may have been a secret racist determined to enslave and kill as many blacks as he could.
There is no question that the hierarchy of Jonestown was designed along racial lines.
But was he designing a plantation or was he simply a demented man whose beliefs had begun to twist crazily -- a philosopher of death holding a knife at the throat of his students?
"Hey, man, I don't know the answer to that," said another survivor, Robert Paul. "All I know is I was a field nigger."
Blacks held the laboring jobs in Jonestown and whites had the office jobs.
"He really only trusted whites," said Juanita Bogue, a 21-year-old survivor who was one of two whites out of 75 persons who worked in the fields. Her sister was the other.
"If a black person accused a white person of being a racist, the way Jones responded would make you think he was a racist himself. His most trusted workers in the radio room, the office, were all white. It seemed like he's pit the whites against the blacks."
Pushed racism
On one of his harangues, with the flock assembled in the meeting area they had constructed, Jones would argue that whites should be consumed with guilt because they had made the blacks suffer. At the same time, he'd say that his best workers were white.
"To me, that was pushing racism," said Ms. Bogue. But there was no objection.
"People thought Jones could read their minds," she said. "When they passed by him, they would put all the bad thoughts out of their minds, so he wouldn't know. You have to understand that there were some fairly simple people out there."
Once he arrived in Guyana, as best as can be determined, Jones never left his jungle empire. He had drawn a crowd with religious proclamations on the steps of a Georgetown Catholic Church when he first arrived, had met with people in the Guyanese capital, and then had left for the interior and Jonestown.
Looks like island
Through the window of a plane droning over Guyana's northwest section the eye takes in two colors: blue, the sky, and a deep green, the jungle. It is thick, and stretches away for miles. The little cleared strip at Port Kaituma, where U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan and his party arrived to touch off the beginning of the end, appears as an island. There is no escape. Jones apparently wanted it that way to control his flock.
The combination of isolation and power did strange things to Jones. His sect had always meted out discipline. At Redwood Valley near Ukiah, infractors had to strip nude and swim across a pool in front of the congregation. In San Francisco there were beatings -- and rumors of worse.
But in Jonestown the discipline became an end in itself.
"They never did kill anybody, but they'd torture the hell out of them," said Paul.
"You didn't have n freedom. You couldn't leave, and if you talked about it you'd get a beating and be put on public service," one of Jones' punishments.
Gerald Parks, 45, from Suisun, recalls a tour of public service. "The crime was talking about the United States, and about going back to it. I really got hammered for it, and then they put me on public service."
Had to dig ditches
Parks was dragged out of bed at 5:30 after sleeping on the floor in his little jail, and his assignment was digging ditches under guard -- all day long, without a break.
"You couldn't raise up to rest," he said.
Behind it all was Jones' need to build a productive society. He wanted more and more from his people, and he got it. The incredible fact is that Jonestown, with its $7 million is assets, was constructed in less than 6 months, starting in August 1977.
The work left people exhausted. As the village took shape they would struggle back to camp and eat, listen to Jones lecture for the evening, do whatever else he bid them, and then fall exhausted into bed.
The most skilled carpenters in the community built their leader a house. Down a meandering garden path, away from the community, Jones could sit in it and pore over his files, use his drugs, dream up new fantasies to practice on his flock, and meet with his male and female lovers.
It had a screened porch, an unthinkable luxury in a community where people were housed 14 to a room in 10 by 12 foot cottages.
Isolation, power and worship. Jones used the combination to create fantasy.
"The first time I saw you, Father, I knew my life would be changed," wrote one young woman camp member. "I was caught up by a ray of sunshine, filled with gold dust motes, as warm and comforting as honey, was literally saturated with it, found myself above the congregation, turning in this warm ray of love . . . thank you, Father, thank you for the freedom I feel."
Jones began to brag to his followers that some of them were begging him for sexual favors. He had to grant them, he said, but only to keep them from leaving.
Gerald Parks recalled that "all of us had to admit to being homosexuals. Then we found out it was him. He was going with guys. The leaders of the whole show were his lovers, and they'd brag about it right up front to us."
Jones began to lecture the group about the virtues of homosexuality. He urged people to pair off with persons of the same sex, explaining that it didn't produce babies.
Sexual politics
The sexual politics of Jim Jones reached a crescendo during one camp meeting when, seated on his throne, swathed in blankets that even covered his head, he announced that a man who worked as a mechanic and a young woman who worked in the bakery had touched one another.
"We weren't supposed to have a relationship without clearing it through a screening committee first," recalled Ms. Bogue. "Most people didn't pay any attention to that, and the main thing was that no one had any time for relationships. After working in the fields, attending meetings, and going to lectures, all you had time to do was fall in bed.
"At any rate, these two people were called in front of everyone. Jones said they had been seeing each other. Apparently someone saw the boy over at the bakery and had reported that the girl had given him a cookie. That became a big rumor, and pretty soon people were saying they were in love. The funny thing about it is that they weren't. They hardly knew each other.
"But Jones wouldn't hear that. He said if they were so excited by each other, they could make love right here and now. They brought in a mattress, made them take off their clothes and get down on it, but it didn't work."
Toyed with people
In the isolation of his jungle empire, Jones had begun to use his people like playthings. He toyed with them, these simple people with only a rare high school graduate among them, telling them ghostly stories about the world outside and tightening discipline with rough twists of the screw.
His handpicked guards carried guns around the camp. People were forced to conform to every thought that Jones proclaimed.
Meanwhile, Jones was lost in a cloud of pharmaceutical vapors. The camp began to smell like a drug cabinet.
Fluttering in the muck of the meeting hall a few days ago was a tiny corner of paper with a note jotted on it. The paper had been used on one side to answer a quiz on a socialist revolutionary activities.
"1. Fifth anniversary, Allende. . . . 2. Socialist destabilize. . . . 3. French guillotine. . . . 4. Organized rebellion in Nicaragua."
On its back was the note, probably passed to someone at the meeting:
"I keep smelling a whiff of formaldehyde. Do you have any idea where it might come from? Jack."
Legal proceedings
The last chapter of the Jonestown story really starts 150 miles to the south, in a Georgetown courtroom, where a case was brought by Grace Stoen, who had fled Jonestown without her child, John. She wanted him back. But Jones believed he was the child's father and said he would die rather than give him up.
In early September, legal proceedings began.
On Sept. 9, horns and sirens ripped through a muggy jungle day and guards with guns ran through the camp, ordering everyone to meetings.
A wild-eyed Jones faced his rag-tag army. The village was about to be attacked by mercenaries, he said. They were trying to take some of the children away, including his son John. It would be a fight to the death.
The camp advanced to its perimeters, waiting through the night for an attack that never came.
"We were supposed to kill the person next to us, if they ran away during the battle," Juanita Bogue said.
Defending children
The alarms and attacks were repeated again and again during coming weeks. Jones told them he was defending the children.
"This was set up to look like it was over the custody case of a lot of children. But you had the feeling it was just over John," said Ms. Bogue.
The tensions in the camp became almost unbearable, as one white night -- Jones gave the alarms this name -- followed another.
At the white night meetings, they would rehearse taking poison. Suicide had become Jones' obsession.
Jonestown also had become a financial drain. The Social Security checks for the elderly, the checks for the mentally disabled and veteran's benefits for others came to $60,000 a month. It wasn't enough.
Members of the People's Temple canvassed Georgetown for contributions. The Jonestown band played at dances. Jones still wanted more money.
He finally crawled into the shell of his house and muttered piteously to his flock over a field telephone hooked to the public address system:
"I love you. I'm working so hard. I stayed up for 14 hours for you, doing paper work. I'm weak. I'm dying. But I love you."
In an already disordered psychological milieu, the broadcasts of a sick leader were like sandpaper on ray nerves. And when he emerged from his house occasionally, the camp was confronted by a man who looked physically healthy and rested. He would insult and abuse and conduct punishments for anyone who talked of returning to the states.
'Wrong ideas'
"Humiliation from one we love is much harder to handle than humiliation from an outsider," wrote Tish Leroy to her "dad," the Rev. Jones. "Though I can always justify the lies that get told, I deeply resent being told them. I understand the end justifies the means.
"The undersurface of me resents being stifled and stopped in expressing. We are not really allowed to give honest opinions for these are dictated as policy, and it is treasonous to have differing thoughts. Yet I can give you a whole list of 'wrong ideas' I did express to the tune of being blasted and humiliated for it and told how wrong I was, only to watch events prove me right. But I grow weary of humiliation, and am no longer willing to be blasted for honesty."
Ms. Leroy, dissenter, warned Jones that she would invite confrontation but only at the worst impasse, only when "there is really a desperate loss endangering the collective." Then, "I will speak out regardless."
The time undoubtedly came soon.
Ms. Leroy was unusual. People were normally afraid to be honest with Jones. But the self-analyses were the one place where they were afraid not to be.
"They thought he could read minds," said Jim Bogue, 46, of Suisun. "My kids put me wise to him. We were planning an escape for two months and they said he sure as hell would have picked it up. So I realized he couldn't do it."
It's possible that Jones had just the opposite trait. He was so wrapped up in his own mind and its fantasies that he had barely any perception of what his people were thinking. The self-analyses were his only chance to find out, to weed out dissent, to calculate his risks.
Feared attack
Toward the end, his risks were growing. Dissent was running high. By now, he believed that Grace Stoen had hired mercenaries to attack the camp, and he told people that bullets had been fired past his head.
Tim Carter, 28, of Burlingame, a farmer heroin addict who became Jones' "PR" man in Georgetown, said he was standing beside Jones one day when a bullet whisked past him.
Jones made plans for leaving. Not alone, but with everyone.
"He said we had a pretty close working relationship with Cuba," recalled Mr. Bogue. "He said we could go to Cuba any time." Any time turned out to be a few weeks later. "He started loading people onto trucks to go to the boat. The old folks were supposed to ride in the trucks and the others were going to walk 15 miles to Port Kaituma," she said.
"He was so crazy. Off we went. He took one trailer load out and the rest of us stood in line for hours."
The trip was canceled, and the line forming in the heart of the Guyana jungle for a trip to Cuba broke up and everyone went back to bed.
Then Jones announced the group was leaving for North Korea. And then for Africa.
At this point, after a successful life of drawing thousands of dollars and people to his side, Jones faced the bitter end. Grace Stoen had drawn attention to his jungle hell. Rep. Leo Ryan was planning an excursion to Jonestown and a congressional investigation.
Jones fidgeted and protested the visit. He wavered, and finally allowed Ryan to enter. It was the end when he allowed Ryan to walk in the crack the spell.
Package arrived
Jones had known it would happen this way. A package he'd ordered had arrived the week before Ryan's visit, and Richard Clark, a laborer, stored it away in the warehouse.
It was a box of cyanide.
Ryan came to Jonestown with a group of reporters and television cameraman. He stayed overnight, spoke with campmates, and received an ovation when he observed that most camp members seemed happy.
But Ryan faced an enemy, not a host. Jones had decided to have him and the others killed.
The roar of the happy crowd was rehearsed, the chats with camp members had been carefully staged in advance, with one camp member playing Ryan and the other playing the role of a contented citizen of Jonestown.
Even so, people broke ranks when Ryan was about to leave. Nine of them wanted to leave with him.
"You should have seen Jones. He offered us money not to leave. Anything. He couldn't believe it. He begged us to stay," said Ms. Bogue.
But they left with Ryan and walked directly into an ambush at the nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma. Ryan and four others were killed, and Jones prepared his camp for death. The time had come for the final white night.
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August 2, 1977, New York Times, page 16, Mind-Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty,
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1—In the summer of 1977, it may be difficult for Americans to comprehend the frame of mind of the men who nearly 30 years earlier started the Central Intelligence Agency's effort to manipulate human behavior.
As some of the former high-ranking C.I.A. men recall now, they had looked into the vacant eyes of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty at his treason trial in Budapest in 1949 and had been horrified.
They had been convinced that his confession had been wrung from him while he was either under the influence of some mysterious mind-bending drug or that he was standing before the dock in a post-hypnotic trance. The sight touched off memories of earlier "show trials" in the Soviet Union.
The C.I.A. leaders were certain the Communists had embarked on a campaign to control men's minds and they were determined to find a defense, setting out in earnest the next year—1950—with Project Bluebird, which evolved into Project Artichoke, then became MK-ULTRA - MK-DELTA. With each code name change, they broadened their sweep, until there remained virtually no avenue of human behavior control they were not exploring.
Fears Seemingly Confirmed
Subsequent developments seemed to confirm their fears: The arrest in Germany of two Soviet agents armed with identical plastic cylinders containing hypodermic needles, said to cause a victim "to become amenable to the will of his captor." Then, the startling confessions of downed American airmen to false charges of carrying out germ warfare against North Korea.
A short time later, however, in 1953, a high level military study group determined that events had not been what they seemed. Neither the Russians nor anyone else had devised a means of turning men into robots and there was "little threat, if any, to national security," the study said.
The intelligence community rationalized: They would go ahead anyway, against the chance that the Communists might some day live up to their dread. Furthermore, they saw great potential in developing these tools for their own offensive use.
There was an "urgent need," the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies argued, to develop "effective and practical techniques" to "render an individual subservient to an imposed will or control."
The C.I.A. men, who led the way, enlisting the support of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Departments of Agriculture, Health, Education and Welfare and several other agencies, acknowledged among themselves that much of what they were setting out to do was "unethical," bordered on the illegal and would be repugnant to the American people. So they made certain that these activities were tightly held, known only to the director, Allen W. Dulles, and a handful of operatives and high-ranking aides.
"Precautions must be taken," one agency official wrote in an internal memo, "not only to protect the operation from exposure to enemy forces, but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general," adding that this information "would be detrimental to the accomplishment [of the agency's] mission."
Fragmentary accounts of the C.I.A.'s efforts to control men's minds have been published in the past. But a far more comprehensive picture has emerged from a study of more than 2,000 pages of freshly released agency documents and an investigation by a team of New York Times reporters.
The behavior control, undertaken by men who presumably saw themselves as sincere and patriotic, takes on in retrospect the appearance of a bizarre grope into the world of science fiction. The C.I.A. investigators let their imaginations run: Was there a way to dissolve the Berlin Wall? What about a knockout drug that could incapacitate an entire building full of people? A pill that would make a drunk man sober; a way to manufacture food that looked and tasted normal but, when eaten, would create "confusion-anxiety-fear."
Rubber From Mushrooms?
One long discussion focused on whether rubber could be produced from mushrooms. Another on whether water witching could locate an enemy submarine.
They worked on ways to achieve the "controlled production" of headaches and earaches; twitches, jerks and staggers. They wanted to reduce a man to a bewildered, self-doubting mass to "subvert his principles," a C.I.A. document said. They wanted to direct him in ways that "may vary from rationalizing a disloyal act to the construction of a new person."
One of their longest running goals was to develop a way to induce amnesia. They wanted to be able to interrogate enemy espionage agents in such a way that neither the agents nor their superiors would know they had been compromised, and they wanted to be able to wipe clean the memories of their own agents after certain missions and, especially, when they were going into retirement.
They were interested in simple destruction, too. As with the other business that made amnesia so attractive, they wanted to be able to get away with murder without leaving a trace.
An Expert's Suggestions
One apparent medical or scientific expert, whose identity has been deleted from the documents, suggested that the agency might kill a man by putting him in a small, air-tight room with a chunk of dry ice, giving off suffocation carbon dioxide gas. He also proposed reducing a victim's body temperature to below freezing or exposing him to a lethal dose of X-rays. Or, he said, there were two "techniques" that required no special equipment: smothering the victim with a pillow case or strangling him with a bath towel.
In attempts to develop ways to administer lethal and mind-altering drugs surreptitiously through clothing as thick as a leather jacket, they tried out small spray guns and pencil-like injectors.
They conducted interviews with scientists and doctors and members of other intelligence agencies around the world. They studied the writing of the psychologist who worked with Adolf Hitler, wondered about the use of the "occult" and of "black psychiatry," and of course pored over their own stream of intelligence data.
There was an agent's report of a "confession gang" that had arrived in Shang-hai, and, without the use of "old-fashioned torture or drugs," could obtain "any confession they desire." In one case, the report from China went, "the prisoner was not allowed to close his eyes for 26 days."
Most of the ideas the C.I.A. considered never got off the drawing board. For a few years in the early 1950s, though, the agency had one or two "special interrogation" teams that went on operational missions in Europe and Asia. A team was supposed to consist of a psychiatrist, a hypnotist and an interrogator and was to elicit information through the use of drugs and hypnotism.
In actual practice, the size of the teams and the procedure they followed varied. In one series of interrogations in Europe, for example, they employed neither hypnotism nor a combination of drugs and hypnotism—the very essence "of special interrogation" at the time—because the psychiatrist was in a hurry to resume an interrupted vacation and no hypnotist was available.
11 Days of Questioning
Working in the basement of a suburban home, guarded at times by armed military police in civilian clothes, the team questioned three European espionage agents who had been working for the C.I.A. "behind the Iron Curtain" and whose loyalty had become suspect.
Over 11 days, the three agents were individually given intravenous injections of an unidentified drug—possibly sodium pentothal—then engaged by the interrogator and the psychiatrist in fantasies.
The team decided that all three agents had responded to questions truthfully and should be continued in operational use. But they reported in the document that one of the agents who had resisted the effects of the drugs and later disappointed his interrogators by making reference to the "solution" that was injected, thus giving no indication of "amnesia," seemed a "poor operational type."
They said they felt that "if ever taken into custody by the Soviets he would also tell them the truth as he knew it under the slightest duress" and should not be trusted with important assignments.
A former senior intelligence official told of another "special interrogation" effort in Europe in which the C.I.A. tried to determine whether a Viennese count who had been promising information on Soviet cipher codes was telling the truth. The count was given sodium pentothal and hypnotized, the official said, but "it was a complete bust; he just laughed at us." Some time later the count was subjected to the C.I.A.'s "old reliable," the lie detector, and the agency concluded he had been lying.
The C.I.A. was fascinated by LSD and other psychochemicals that they thought might be useful in getting people to talk or in temporarily putting them out of action. They were aware that it was considered unethical to experiment on people with drugs without their knowledge, but they decided that "unwitting" testing was essential if accurate information on LSD and other substances was to be obtained.
Fatal LSD Experiment
In the C.I.A.'s very first experiment with LSD on a group of unwitting men, one of them, Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian working on top secret germ warfare in a unit at Fort Detrick, Md., which provided data for both the Army and the C.I.A., went into a depression that ended in his leap from a 10th-story hotel room window in Manhattan in the fall of 1953.
Earlier in the same year, in the first experiment with psychochemicals that the Army had sponsored at a civilian facility, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, had been given a fatal dose of mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan.
The fact that both men died in Government experiments was kept secret from their families and the general public for more than 20 years. Two years after the deaths the C.I.A. made an arrangement with the agents of the Bureau of Narcotics to test LSD surreptitiously on unwitting patrons of bars in New York and San Francisco, some of whom became violently ill and were hospitalized, never knowing exactly what had happened to them.
Some of the C.I.A. officials—past and present—and former military men who worked on the behavior control project, look back at their endeavors with a measure of disappointment that they had accomplished so little, but they had no regrets. "I think it was certainly worthwhile," said one former agency official who agreed to speak only with the promise of anonymity. "People had quite a lot of fears, and if nothing had been done, people's imaginations could have gone most anywhere. I think what we did helped. It proved that things weren't as bad as people might have thought."
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July 21, 1977, New York Times, C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior, by Nicholas M. Horrock, Special to the New York Times,
WASHINGTON, July 20 -- The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a 14-year program to find ways to "control human behavior" through the use of chemical, biological and radiological material, according to agency documents made public today by John Marks, a freelance journalist.
Mr. Marks, an associate of the Center for National Security Studies, asserted at a news conference that Adm. Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, "seriously distorted" what the C.I.A. research programs involved.
Mr. Marks said that, based on documents about the program he had received under the Freedom of Information Act, he had concluded that Admiral Turner "seems to be practicing what used to be called 'a modified limited hangout'" when he called the agency's activity "a program of experimentation with drugs."
"To be sure, drugs were part of it," he said, "but so were such other techniques as electric shock, radiation, ultrasonics, psychosurgery, psychology, and incapacitating agents, all of which were referred to in documents I have received."
The documents made public today and the disclosure by the C.I.A. last week that it had found another cache of previously undiscovered records suggested broader experimentation on unwitting humans by the intelligence agency or its paid researchers than had been publicly known before. Mr. Marks said he had obtained or read about 1,000 C.I.A. documents, many of which were never turned over to the Senate intelligence committee for its 1975 investigation of agency activities.
C.I.A. spokesmen declined comment on Mr. Marks's charges. However, Admiral Turner told newsmen after leaving a meeting with senators that the agency was moving swiftly to review the documents it had found.
Mr. Marks distributed 20 documents that described the following incidents, among others:
In 1956, the C.I.A. contracted with a private physician to test "bulbocapnine," a drug that can cause stupor or induce a catatonic state, on monkeys and "convicts incarcerated at" an unnamed state penitentiary. The agency wanted to known [sic] if the drug caused the "loss of speech in man," "loss of sensitivity to pain -- loss of memory, loss of will power."
A letter from an unnamed C.I.A. official in 1949 discussed ways of killing people without leaving a trace. "I believe that there are two chemical substances which would be most useful in that they would leave no characteristic pathological findings, and the quantities needed could be easily transported to places where they were to be used," the letter said. The letter also suggested exposure of an individual to X-rays or to an environment in which he would freeze to death. If these methods were too difficult, two methods needing no special equipment, the letter said, would be to "smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel."
Aware of Questionable Nature
In 1952, two Russian agents who were "suspected of being doubled" were interrogated using "narcohypnotic" methods. Under medical cover, the documents said the two men were given sodium pentothal and a stimulant. One interrogation produced a "remarkable" regression, the papers said, during which "the subject actually relived certain past activities of his life, some dating back 15 years while, in addition, the subject totally accepted Mr. [name deleted] as an old and trusted and beloved personal friend whom the subject had known in years past in Georgia, U.S.S.R."
A summary of a 1953 meeting reported a suggestion that the C.I.A. work with scientists of an unidentified foreign government, since "that country allowed experiments with anthrax," a disease contracted from infected cattle and sheep, and the United States did not.
The documents given to Mr. Marks were heavily edited, apparently for security reasons, but they showed that even while the C.I.A. was operating this program it was conscious of its questionable nature.
One 1950 memorandum, on finding psychiatrists to conduct experiments, noted that one applicant's "ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate in certain more revolutionary phases of our project." But it said another candidate's "ethics are such that he would be completely cooperative in any phase of our program, regardless of how revolutionary it may be."
A 1963 inspector general's report that apparently resulted in a program being discontinued noted "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the agency to be distasteful and unethical."
According to Mr. Marks's documents and an earlier Senate investigation, the C.I.A. conducted secret medical experiments from 1949 through 1963 under the code names Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Ultra and MK Delta. The C.I.A. inspector general's report in 1963 described the program as the "research and development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior."
5,000 New Documents
Last week, Admiral Turner announced that the agency had discovered some 5,000 documents pertaining to the program that were not available to the Senate intelligence committee in 1975. They are financial records of the various experiments and include the names of doctors and medical institutions that performed the tests.
Today, Admiral Turner gave the members a closed-door briefing on the new material. He will appear before a joint public hearing of the intelligence committee and Senator Edward M. Kennedy's health subcommittee on July 29 to more fully describe the new findings. The intelligence committee staff will begin studying the documents later this week.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, private citizens can obtain heretofore secret government documents, provided they do not endanger current national security matters or disclose matters that could invade the privacy of other individuals.
Mr. Marks charged that it had taken him nearly two years of legal pressure to dislodge the material he had received. He said he had been promised the additional 5,000 documents before the end of the month.
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December 25, 1987, Washington Post, page A29, German Settlement Stirs Controversy in Chile, by Bradley Graham, Washington Post Foreign Service,
Court Blocks Effort by Bonn to Investigate Allegations of Forced Labor, Sexual Abuse
The settlers came from West Germany looking for a hideaway and found one down a long, dusty road in the sparsely populated foothills of the Chilean Andes.
But the sullied past of their spiritual leader, the secretiveness of the vast enterprise they built here and the recurring horror stories about their lives have kept them in the news and under suspicion for more than two decades.
Leaders of the settlement, known as Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony), insist that it is nothing more than a disciplined agricultural community whose members want privacy. But chilling declarations from the few who have fled from behind the colony's double barbed-wire fences tell of forced labor, sexual abuse, mind-altering drugs, corporal punishment and the segregation of men from women and parents from children.
A former secret police agent and a police informant have backed up claims by several one-time detainees that political prisoners were tortured and killed at the colony in the early years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973.
After a quarter-century of either ignoring the colony or at times even fraternizing with its members, many of whom are German, West German authorities have decided to try to lift the veil surrounding it. The West German ambassador and chief consular officer visited the colony in early November to conduct interviews. According to Bonn officials, the diplomats came away with the impression that colony members were not able to speak to them freely.
A special commission appointed by the West German government arrived in Chile Dec. 13 to probe further. The colony blocked the investigation with a court order and the delegation left Chile Dec. 18.
A West German Embassy spokesman said the mission, despite its failure to gain access, would present a report to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
A parallel effort by a German judge to sort fact from fiction is moving forward after years of delay, now that a Chilean court has approved a request to take depositions from 33 individuals connected with the settlement.
"There have been investigations before, ending with our society being cleared," Harmut Hopp, a doctor who serves as colony spokesman, said in a telephone interview. "We don't understand why so many German authorities are interested in us now. We don't have any importance in international politics."
As part of an apparent response to the probe, the settlement, which usually is closed to journalists, allowed a reporter from the pro-Pinochet Chilean newspaper El Mercurio to visit earlier this month. The resulting double-page spread portrayed an austere commune whose ways may be a bit eccentric but not sinister.
According to the article, family life there takes a back seat to work, and relations between the sexes are regimented. Youths are discouraged from marrying until they are 21. Children are kept in single-sex dormitories until they leave to marry. Young people are not permitted to watch television or listen to the radio. Women do not wear trousers or short skirts.
Colony members put in long hours without pay.
"Work should be the purpose of human life, and one should not feel that one must rest after eight hours of work," Hopp was quoted in Mercurio as saying. "There is a malformation in modern man that makes him think he is obligated to rest and have fun after eight hours of work."
In a departure from past practice, the Catholic University television station was allowed to show scenes of children playing and members of the colony working in the bakery and dairy. On its news show Dec. 16, it quoted the colony's president, Hermann Schmidt, as saying criticism was "all lies."
The settlement's strict ways and its bitter confrontations with critics over the years have instilled a sense of unease among some Chileans who live nearby.
"People here are afraid," said Sister Paulina, one of three nuns who were legally evicted from property claimed by the colony after months of harassment in 1984. "People know they can buy the colony's products and even go to its hospital for medical care. But they also know that confronting the colony past a certain point means danger."
The colony was founded by Paul Schaefer, leader of a breakaway Baptist sect who left West Germany in 1961 as police sought him on charges of sexually abusing children at a youth home he ran in Sieburg, near Bonn. Schaefer turned up in Chile in 1962, bringing about 60 adults and children. Some of the youngsters had come with their parents' consent; others, according to filed complaints, were taken under false pretenses.
Since then, the colony has grown into what its critics describe as "a state within a state." It maintains its own airfield, 65-bed hospital, wheat mill, bakery, meat processing factory, dairy and cemetery, according to visitors and colony officials.
According to witnesses, the settlement has a fleet of heavy trucks, a mechanics workshop, a power plant and facilities for making bricks and slate tiles. It also has a powerful radio communications system, with which it stays in touch with ancillary operations, including an office in a house in Santiago.
It operates a school and provides free medical attention to neighbors, a service that supports the settlement's claim to be a charitable organization.
The colony opened a roadside restaurant near Bulnes two years ago, where its brown bread, honey, cheese, sausages and cakes are sold. The colony also changed its name recently, to Villa Baviera (Bavarian Village), reflecting its affinity for the southern German state of Bavaria and the governing party there, the conservative Christian Social Union, whose chairman, Franz Josef Strauss, is prominently displayed on posters at the colony.
About 250 adults and 100 children live at the settlement, according to colony officials, but no public record exists of births and deaths there.
Invited guests are often treated to banquets and choral singing in a pastoral mountain setting. The uninvited are brusquely turned away.
At a remote-controlled gate some distance from the colony's main entrance, a woman's voice warns visitors through an intercom not to take photos from the road of the colony's property without written permission. The main entrance is 22 miles east of Parral and the settlement sprawls across 12,000 acres.
The colony first broke into the news in 1966 when Wolfgang Muller, then about 20, escaped and accused Schaefer of a reign of terror. Muller said he had been forced to work long hours in the fields for no pay and was frequently beaten. He also told authorities that he had been sexually abused by Schaefer before they came to Chile and that Schaefer had used memory-altering drugs on him when he became rebellious.
According to Muller's accounts, children were separated from their parents in the settlement and later instructed to address them as aunt and uncle. Muller said a number of former Nazis lived in the settlement, but he denied that Nazi or anti-Semitic ideas were part o the community's ideology.
If Muller's declarations sounded fantastic, those of the second person to flee that year, Wilhelmine Lindeman, were supported by medical evidence. She told of being drugged and was found to have had several injections.
Days later, however, Lindeman denied her statements and agreed to return to the colony. Her decision came after a visit by Schmidt, who informed her that her husband had just arrived from West Germany and was waiting for her at the settlement. Nothing more was heard of the Lindemans.
The outcry caused by the two cases led to questions in the Chilean Senate and an official inquiry. A commission entered the colony but said it found nothing. Amid accusations of bribery, the inquiry was dropped.
Three years after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power, a United Nations human rights report referred to testimony about dogs at the colony trained to attack intruders' sexual organs, experiments testing torture tolerance limits and the use of drugs to break detainees.
"It seems," the report said, "that in Colonia Dignidad there is a specially equipped underground torture center with small soundproofed cells, hermetically sealed. The detainees' heads are covered with leather hoods, which are stuck to their faces with substances that are supposedly chemicals. In these cells, interrogations are carried out through electronic equipment, including loudspeakers and microphones, while detainees are tied naked to metal frames to receive electric shocks."
Allegations that the colony had become involved in political repression under the Pinochet government received dramatic support in 1977 from Juan Rene Munoz Alarcon, a former Socialist Party member who turned collaborator with Pinochet's secret police and was later imprisoned by the government for trying to protect a one-time leftist colleague.
In a taped deposition to the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Catholic Church's human rights group in Santiago, Munoz identified the colony as one of several places where persons who had disappeared after being seized by security forces were held. He later was found stabbed to death.
Also in 1977, the West German magazine Stern and the human rights organization Amnesty International published reports accusing the colony of being a site of secret-police torture of political prisoners. Supporting the allegation were statements from several former prisoners. An ex-agent, Samuel Fuenzalida, testified that he had delivered prisoners to the colony on two occasions in 1974, where he was received by a man known as "the professor," whom he later identified from photographs as Schaefer.
The colony sued Stern and Amnesty International for libel, accusing them of a leftist-inspired campaign of lies. But the colony has since dodged requests by the West German court hearing the case to inspect the camp.
Last month, Stern published harrowing accounts from several people who had escaped the colony three years ago. One was Hugo Baar, a Baptist minister and a Russian-German exile who fled the Ukraine, established a religious colony in Germany's Westphalia in 1955, then moved to Siegburg-where he met Schaefer and helped organize the colony. After a falling out with Schaefer, Baar slipped away from the colony in December 1984.
Three months later, Georg and Lotti Packmor also bolted, leaving an adopted son behind. In testimony to West German authorities that Stern quotes, the Packmors recounted beatings, drug injections and other sadistic treatments that they said were intended to destroy individual personalities and turn colony members into virtual slave laborers.
These fresh reports, on file at the West German Foreign Ministry since 1985 but kept confidential, prompted the German Embassy in Santiago to cool what had for years been rather cordial ties with the colony. Foreign Minister Genscher is said to be intent on exposing it. The Bonn government sends $48,000 to $80,000 in pensions to colony residents each month, according to German press reports.
Among the things German officials are known to be looking into is the possibility that 20 to 30 children who have disappeared from West Germany may have been taken to the colony.
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November 20, 2012, USA TODAY, Pentagon overseas propaganda plan stirs controversy, by Tom Vanden Brook,
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August 3, 1977, The Sun, Lowell, Mass. / N.Y. Times, page 60, CIA Used Institutions in Mind-control Effort, Wednesday,
(This article was the work of an investigative reporting team consisting of John M. Crewdson, Nicholas M. Horrock, Royce Rensberger, Jo Thomas and Joseph B. Treaster. It was written by Nicholas M. Horrock.)
November 16, 1979, San Francisco Chronicle, 918 Died — No One Yet Convicted, by Ron Javers,
A year after 918 Americans died at Jonestown in the largest mass murder-suicide in history, no one has been convicted of any crime.
Nor have a host of government investigators been able to determine whether the killings of San Mateo Representative Leo Ryan, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson and three others at the Port Kaituma airstrip on Guyana were planned.
Here in the Bay Area, where Jim Jones manipulated, praised, punished and awed his more that 1000 followers before taking many of them to the South American jungle and their deaths, the Peoples Temple story is still being played out.
Survivors remain in hiding, some of them still expressing allegiance for their dead "father."
Despite the enormity of the events in Guyana, only two people have been charged with crimes, possibly millions of dollars remain unaccounted for, bodies remain unclaimed and government agencies show little interest in investigating what happened or why it happened.
"It's ridiculous," said Robert Bockelman, a San Francisco attorney representing five former cultists who escaped Jonestown before the killings.
"All of my clients who were in the camp were sure the morning before Ryan visited that he wouldn't be allowed out alive. That's why they wanted to escape so desperately. They were certain something big was going to happen."
The late congressman's aide, Jackie Speier, herself severely wounded at the airstrip, has joined with another former Ryan aide, Joseph Holsinger, and Ryan's successor in Congress, Bill Royer, in calling for further investigation of the events at Jonestown.
"Based upon the facts as I know them, it is inconceivable to me that no one else who was affiliated with the Peoples Temple has been charged with criminal behavior," Royer wrote in requesting that congressional committees conduct hearings into the stalled investigation.
Just two men, Larry Layton, 33, and Charles Beikman, 45, both former members of the Peoples Temple, are being held by Guyanese authorities in connection with the murders.
Layton is charged with the murder of Ryan and the attempted murders of two defecting cult members. Beikman is accused of slashing the throats of another woman cultist and her three children at the temple's Georgetown house just hours after hearing by short-wave radio that the murder-suicide ritual had begun in Jonestown.
"The Justice Department and the State Department have indicated that their investigations are closed," Royer told The Chronicle yesterday. "But no one has been arrested in the United States. I leave it to your judgment just how thorough those investigations must have been."
A spokesman for the State Department defended his agency's investigation of the Jonestown slayings. Spokesman David Nall yesterday said the State Department stood by its earlier statements saying the department had conducted a complete probe of the killings.
Royer said he was seeking full reports from both the State and Justice Departments on how they conducted their inquiries.
Still unanswered, for example, is the question of exactly how much money Jim Jones had accumulated in various bank accounts and other financial instruments in several countries.
Whatever the assets eventually amount to, they won't go unclaimed as so many of the bodies have. There are nearly 700 legal claims, amounting to nearly $1.8 billion, filed against the temple.
In addition to the State Department's probe, a host of other government investigations have produced little or nothing.
The House of Representatives has completed a costly, months-long inquiry and issued a lengthy, unsurprising report.
A Guyanese government probe of the killings, announced with much panopoly last January, has not yet begun.
In San Francisco, a federal grand jury investigation is still under way, although sources predict only a slim chance that any indictments of the more than 80 individuals who survived the massacre or of other ex-temple members in California will be handed down.
The FBI is seeking to establish whether there was any conspiracy to kill Leo Ryan. The murder of a congressman is a federal crime.
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December 7, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, Mark Lane, FBI meet secretly; Guyana probe enters San Jose, by Knut Royce, Staff Writer,
Controversial attorney Mark Lane and Terri Buford, longtime Peoples Temple treasurer, held a secret meeting in a San Jose hotel Wednesday with federal officials investigating the murder-suicide in Guyana.
The meeting was held under tight security. One official said San Jose was chosen as the site because it was hoped the session would attract little attention.
The discussions reportedly centered on the possibility of immunity from prosecution for Buford in the event she cooperated with investigators.
Lane and Buford met with U.S. Justice Department lawyers, a deputy district attorney from San Francisco and FBI agents. The two were taken this morning by federal agents from the San Jose Airport to the Hyatt House, where the secret meeting was held.
The outcome of the meeting could not be determined Wednesday night.
Lane has been a Peoples Temple lawyer since September.
Donald Freed, a Lane associate who met with the attorney and Buford in Los Angeles on Tuesday, said Lane was "going to the wall on the concept that the only persons who wore a white hat in this carnage is Terri Buford."
Freed also said that Lane would argue for "guidelines for immunity," and that he "wants to see the money (estimated at $10 million) go to the survivors." In addition, he said, Lane wants "to protect the life of Terri Buford."
A federal source said the Justice Department had made no deals with Lane or Buford in agreeing to the meeting, which he said was held in San Jose for security reasons.
Buford, 24, is believed to have left the Jonestown, Guyana commune in September to take over the leadership of the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. She reportedly defected soon afterward and contacted Lane.
Lane has kept her away from reporters, but has claimed, in interviews, that she had intimate knowledge of the temple's finances and other information that would shed light on the events that led to the tragedy. He has said she has information on Peoples Temple accounts in Switzerland and Panama that hold $7 million, and of $3 million stashed away at the Jonestown commune.
While keeping Buford incommunicado, Lane has been preparing a series of stories on the Peoples Temple, based in part on her information, that is scheduled to be released next week.
A source at the Hyatt House said the FBI had called Tuesday to reserve a room. Wednesday morning, the source said, a woman asked the hotel's receptionist where Terri Buford's room was, and was ushered to the Monterey Suite, which was reserved under the name of Larry Lawler. A Lawrence Lawler is an FBI agent in the San Francisco office.
The federal investigation is said to focus on whether the murder of Rep. Leo J. Ryan was an assassination conspiracy, which would provide federal jurisdiction in the slaying of the congressman.
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November 30, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle, page 5, A Growing List of Temple 'Hitmen',
The list of Peoples Temple "enforcers" considered potentially dangerous by San Francisco police has now reached 60, it was learned yesterday.
None has turned up so far on the incomplete lists of the known dead among the 912 who died in Jonestown after Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit mass suicide.
Police fear that some survivors from Jones' force of security guards may attempt to return to the United States to carry out the cult leader's orders to seek out his enemies and kill them.
Among those being sought is Jim McElvane, described by ex-members of Peoples Temple as the organization's chief of security.
McElvane, who had been based in San Francisco, was seen at Temehri International Airport, watching the late Congressman Leo J. Ryan and those who accompanied him to Georgetown pass through customs and immigration after their plane landed in Guyana.
He was later seen in Jonestown.
Police have been informed that McElvane flew from San Francisco to Georgetown a couple of days before the congressman arrived on his fact-finding mission.
Police were also told that survivors of the shootings at Port Kaituma airstrip, where Ryan and four others were killed, identified Stanley Gieg as the driver of a tractor that brought seven men — including at least three gunmen — into the vicinity of Ryan's plane.
The names of seven others with Gieg at the time had previously been reported: Tom Kice, Bob Kice and Joe Wilson, identified as firing weapons in the attack, and Eddie Crenshaw, Ronnie James, Ron Talley and Albert Touchette, seen riding on the trailer behind the tractor Gieg was driving.
It was not known how many — if any — of the 60 are currently at large in Guyana or in the hands of Guyana authorities.
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December 18, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle, page 2, Survivor Heard Cheers After Temple Death Rite,
Matthews Ridge, Guyana
Thirty to 45 minutes after the "revolutionary suicide" seemed to have ended and silence had fallen on Jonestown, a survivor hiding in the bush heard what he says sounded like a chorus of cheers from within the commune.
"What I heard, I would say was three cheers," the survivor, Stanley Clayton told a coroner's jury here late Friday. "It sounded like a lot of people. It was just a lot of voices."
The jury is conducting the first formal inquiry into the deaths of more than 900 people in Jonestown.
As he attempted to re-enter the commune on November 18 to recover his passport, Clayton said, he heard five gunshots being fired and dropped back into the jungle. Later, he said, as he pulled the passport from an office file, he heard a sixth shot, snapped off the light, then waited several minutes before slipping out along the main dirt road.
Clayton, a 35-year-old former security guard and kitchen hand, said he saw no one else alive in Jonestown. But he said that as he walked to a police outpost six miles away, at Port Kaituma, he met villagers who told him they had seen others apparently fleeing Jonestown.
Clayton said he had not run into the bush until all but 100 to 200 persons had died. When many men and women seemed reluctant to join in the death ceremony, he said, the Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching and cajoling through a microphone, came down from the stage with a phalanx of security guards and began "pulling people up from their seats saying they must go."
Clayton recalled: "He kept telling them, 'I love you. I love you. It is nothing but a deep sleep. It won't hurt you. It's just like closing your eyes and drifting into a deep sleep.'"
The prosecuting attorney, the magistrate and the five locally selected jurors did not question Clayton about unidentified survivors, the gunshots or the duress that he reported.
At the opening of the inquest four days ago, Guyana's chief criminal pathologist told the court he had found only two victims of gunshot wounds among the Jonestown bodies: Jones and Annie Elisabeth Moore, the cult leader's personal nurse. Each, he said, had been shot once.
Outside the courtroom, Clayton, who has reportedly received several thousand dollars from The National Inquirer for exclusive rights to his story, refused to elaborate on his testimony.
He gave a vivid account of mothers and nurses lifting cups of cyanide-laced, fruit-flavored drinks to the lips of babies and of some women injecting the poison into their children.
"There were mothers and people crying," he said, "and Jim came across on the speakers telling them to 'Shut up. Don't be scaring the babies like that. Make them feel happy.' He was saying they have to die proud with dignity.
At first, Clayton said, it seemed that many in the commune thought they were participating in one of the "white night" drills that Jones conducted, that they were not actually taking poison.
"After mostly the babies were gone, I would say, people began realizing this was really taking place," he testified.
It was at this point, he said, that many men and women seemed reluctant to continue the death ceremony and that Jim Jones stepped into the crowd and began guiding them toward the poison vat. Jones's wife, Marceline, also walked among the followers, Clayton said, hugging them and saying, "I'll see you in your next life."
After watching most of the cultists die, Clayton said, he began trying to find a way out. He said he bumped into several members of the security force. One turned a bow and arrow in his direction, but others gently directed him back toward the pavilion, he said.
Finally he embraced one guard and said he was going to say goodbye to some people in a nearby tent. "I looked back and saw nobody was following me," he said, "and I took off."New York Times
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February 28, 1980, Monterey Peninsula Herald, Berkeley Killings Revive Fear Of Peoples Temple Revenge,
BERKELEY (AP) — The murders of a couple who turned against the Rev. Jim Jones have resurrected fears of a death squad unloosed to revenge the demise of the Peoples Temple 15 months earlier.
Even as the hundreds of dead were counted at Jonestown, the Guyanese jungle settlement, Al and Jeannie Mills feared they would be killed for leaving the charismatic Jones and for providing comfort to other "defectors" as tales of beatings, sexual perversion and suicide drills leaked out.
On Tuesday night, Al Mills, 51, was found shot in the head, lying face down in his bedroom of the family's cottage here. The body of his 40-year-old wife Jeannie, also shot in the head with a small-caliber weapon, was discovered on her back in an adjacent bathroom.
The couple's 15-year-old daughter, Daphene, was in critical condition last night in Alta Bates Hospital. She reportedly was shot twice in the head and her chances of recovery were slim, sources said.
The Alameda County Coroner's office added few details of the couple's death in its preliminary report Wednesday, adding only that there were no signs of a struggle.
Son at Home
Berkeley police were even more close-mouthed late Wednesday after they had questioned the couple's 17-year-old son, Eddie. The youth told police he was in the home after 9 p.m. when his grandmother, who had come to visit, found the victims. But he insisted, police said, that he was watching television and hadn't heard the shootings.
Residents near the Mills cottage, whose doors were often unlocked in the evening, also said they hadn't heard a disturbance, but one neighbor thought a van left the area around the time of the killings. Police couldn't explain why the young Mills or neighbors didn't hear the gunfire.
Police also said they could not say why the Millses were shot.
They also downplayed conjecture that the crime was the work — possibly the first — of a Peoples Temple hit-squad, but their word did little to assuage the fears of former members who have insisted that the evils of the church were not buried with the 914 persons who died in Guyana in November, 1978.
A member of the San Francisco Police Department's intelligence detail, which had investigated the possibility of a hit-squad, would not say whether findings supported a death plan. Last November, a police spokesman said that the detail had concluded that an assassination team didn't exist.
Triggered by Visit
The ritual of murder-suicide was triggered by a visit by Rep. Leo Ryan, D-San Mateo, and newsmen who came to the jungle compound to investigate reports of mistreatment and brain-washing that were described by the Millses and other defectors.
Ryan, three newsmen and Temple member Patricia Parks, who was trying to flee Jonestown, were shot to death on the Port Kaituma airstrip.
Mills and his wife joined the Jones flock in 1969 when the church was gathering strength in Redwood Valley, a peaceful spot tucked away 125 miles north of San Francisco. It was there the Indianapolis-born preacher would later enjoy the favor of politicians and social leaders who praised Peoples Temple as a caring movement that understood the needs of the many blacks in the congregation.
At that time, the Millses were Elmer and Deanna Mertle, names they shed after fleeing the church. The hard decision to leave came after watching their 16-year-old daughter, Linda, in 1974, writhe under 75 blows of a paddle — punishment ordered by Jones after Linda apparently embraced a friend that Jones deemed a "traitor" to the church.
That cruelty and The Human Freedom Center, a haven the Mills created to give others a shot at life outside the temple, are described in Mrs. Mills' book, "Six Years With God," which was published last year.
Feared Retaliation
Angela Miller, editor of A and W, the New York firm that published the work, said the couple "was positive there was going to be some kind of retaliation" against them, a fear heightened last November as the first anniversary of the Jonestown holocaust approached.
On the last tape recording he made from his "throne" in the steamy agricultural outpost, Jones blamed the visit of Ryan in part on Mrs. Mills. "The people in San Francisco (surviving church members) will not be idle over this. They'll not take our deaths in vain, you know."
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December 18, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle/ Reuters, page 2, 700 Temple Dead Were 'Murdered',
Chicago
Guyana's top government pathologist believes that more than 700 of the 911 Peoples Temple cult members who died at Jonestown last month were murdered, the Chicago Tribune reported yesterday.
"I do not believe there were ever more than 200 who died voluntarily," the government's chief medical examiner, Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, was quoted as saying.
Mootoo was the first medical examiner to arrive at the Jonestown jungle commune after the reported mass suicide of Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones and his followers on November 18.
The doctor said he performed 70 autopsies and 33 of them showed cult members died from poison injected into upper parts of the arm where it could not have been self administered. Reuters
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November 30, 1978, San Francisco Chronicle / AP, Reagan Says Jones Favored Democrats,
Bonn, West Germany
Former California governor Ronald Reagan said yesterday that Peoples Temple cult leader Rev. Jim Jones appeared to attract more members of the Democratic party then Republicans.
"I'll try not to be happy in saying this," Reagan said. "He (Jones) supported a number of political figures but seemed to be more involved with the Democratic party having been helped by him or seeking his help."
Reagan, who lost the 1976 race for the Republican presidential nomination to Gerald Ford, is currently on a tour of European capitals and was interviewed in his hotel suite here overlooking the Rhine river.
Reagan described the mass suicide of more than 900 Peoples Temple members in Guyana as "a horrible thing almost without precedent."
He said Jones was a man who began "apparently very legitimately" and then alienated supporters when "he began to see himself as the object of worship rather than the God he preached about."
Reagan said Jones, whose headquarters was in San Francisco, did not represent a "national wave. He wasn't like some charismatic leader who could dominate an entire country."
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November 27, 1978, San Jose Mercury News, page 17A, Jones lived well, kept to himself during mysterious Brazil stay,
Special to the Mercury
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil — During a mysterious 11-month visit to Brazil in the early 1960s, Jim Jones lived well, donated food and clothing to the poor and generally kept to himself, according to neighbors.
One neighbor said a U.S. Consulate car was used to do shopping for the Jones family, but the consulate described that as "highly unlikely."
Police officials said Jones, his wife Marceline, and their four children arrived aboard a commercial airliner on April 11, 1962, at Sao Paulo, Brazil's financial capital. Immigration officials, who carefully control passports in Brazil, identified the children as the Jones' natural son, Steven, 3, and three adopted children: Susan, 9, Lew Eric, 5, and Warren, 1.
The Jones family went on to Belo Horizonte, capital of the mining and agricultural state of Minas Gerais, where they checked into the expensive Financial Hotel, the officials said.
Later, they said, Jones and his family moved into a large house at 203 Maraba Avenue, in the city's well-to-do Santo Antonio section.
A retired Brazilian engineer, Sebastiaco Carlos Rocha, who lived next door, said the Jones family "enjoyed a very expensive lifestyle."
Rocha gave this account of Jones' stay in the city, about 250 miles east of Rio de Janeiro:
"He lived like a rich man. Most days, he would leave the house with a suitcase at about 6 a.m. and return at around 6 or 7 p.m. He never said where he went.
"During the few conversations that we had, Mr. Jones told me he was a retired U.S. Navy captain and was in Brazil to 'recuperate from the Korean War.' He said he planned to go to Argentina or Cuba after visiting Brazil.
"He was not a very communicative person and he seemed to have very few friends in Belo Horizonte. Except for his mysterious trips with the suitcase, he spent most of his time with his family at home.
"When he did talk, he would ramble from one subject to the next and did not seem to make much sense. At these times he seemed somewhat mentally unbalanced.
"Mr. Jones seemed to enjoy talking about war in general. He also displayed great preoccupation with the world's social problems and said he hated hearing anything bad about blacks and or people in general."
Rocha's teen-age daughter, Maria, said Jones' wife gave a different reason for their visit to Brazil.
"She said they were here because she suffered from a lung ailment and doctors had told them that the climate here would be good for her," Maria said.
Rocha said "some people here believed he was an agent for the American CIA. I never saw him drink or smoke. He said he received a monthly payment from the U.S. government for his military service but he did not say how much."
Rocha said Jones attended a church operated by American Pentacostal missionaries in a suburb of the city.
"He engaged in some heated arguments with the missionaries there but I don't know what the debates were about."
Other neighbors, who asked not to be identified, said Jones would turn aside questions about his plans in Brazil, but they said his daughter Susan told them her father intended to establish a branch of his Peoples Temple in Brazil.
Several neighbors said a car bearing the emblem of the U.S. Consulate would deliver groceries and other items to the Jones home from time to time.
A spokesman for the consulate said it was "highly unlikely" a consulate car would have been used for such purpose.
Police officials said Jones and his family were given temporary visas, good only for 11 months. When the visas expired in February 1963, officials said, the Jones family left the country for an undisclosed destination. Brazilian authorities said records gave no other indication Jones had visited Brazil at any other time.
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December 28, 1978, San Francisco Examiner, page 1, Narcotics as a control How Jones used drugs, by Peter King,
Potential troublemakers or defectors from the Peoples Temple flock in Jonestown were kept under tight control in a special "extended-care unit" where they were heavily drugged, according to former residents of the jungle commune.
There were enough dangerous drugs at the remote compound — thousands of doses of anti-depressants and downers — to treat each of the 900 cultists who lived there hundreds of times.
Although the temple had an official anti-drug policy — some members were ex-addicts who had kicked the habit under Jim Jones' influence — there were enough drugs at the mission to supply a city the size of Georgetown, Guyana (population 66,000), according to an American pathologist who inspected the scene.
Police and government authorities in Guyana are sorting out documents pertaining to drugs found at Jonestown as their investigation spreads into areas beyond the killings. The drug question has been a low priority up to now.
Dale Parks, a temple defector who was a nursing supervisor at Jonestown, said he was shocked at the quantity of drugs found at the medical clinic there: "There's no way that many people were receiving treatment. I know they were using things to keep people under control, but not like this."
Parks, a trained therapist for respiratory ailments, said the "extended-care unit" consisted of eight beds separate from the mission clinic.
"If a person wanted to leave Jonestown or if there was a breach of rules, one was taken to the extended-care unit," he explained. "It was a rehabilitation place, where one would be re-integrated back into the community. The people were given drugs to keep them under control."
After a few days or weeks, Parks said, the patients lost their desire to leave the commune and no further behavioral problems were anticipated.
Asked about the use of drugs for brainwashing, Parks said, "It is a reasonable assumption that such went on in the extended-care unit."
Another temple member, who asked that his name not be used, said: "People who wanted to leave were fed drugs like Thorazine so they would come to their senses. We were told the CIA would haunt us for the rest of our lives, that we could never live in peace."
Parks said the extended-care unit was started recently, in about August or September, to replace physical punishment as a means of keeping unhappy temple members in line.
After Debbie Blakey's defection from the temple and her allegations of physical abuse, Parks said, Jones became concerned that investigators would try to verify her stories. That was when the extended-care unit was formed, Parks said.
He said people emerging from the facility were closed-mouthed about the treatment and repentant about their past behavior. "I'm sure they were threatened," he said.
During a joint two-week investigation by The Examiner and the Associated Press, a partial drug inventory was obtained. It revealed that the drugs in the Jonestown warehouse included thousands of doses of Quaaludes, Demerol, Seconal, Valium and morphine, plus 11,000 doses of two drugs used to control the behavior of manic depressives and others with extreme psychotic problems.
Medical officials say the drugs promote suicidal tendencies, can cause hallucinations, blurred vision, confusion and speech disturbances, involuntary movements and produce emotional highs and lows.
In addition to being used on cultists Jones believed could cause him trouble, the drugs were administered liberally — and forcibly in many cases — during the suicide-murder ritual that left 914 people dead.
Dr. Lynn Crook, a pathologist from Medical University of South Carolina, was sent to Guyana by the U.S. government to help inspect the bodies. He suggested that narcotics might have been used to pave the road for mass suicide. He said many of the cultists might have been under the influence of drugs when they drank the deadly cyanide-grape punch.
In addition, such narcotics as Thorazine, a strong tranquilizer, and chloral hydrate, generally known as "knockout drops," were added to the cyanide, probably to ease the suffering caused by the poison.
The drugs, according to survivors of the events and former temple members, were smuggled into Guyana, avoiding the South American country's strict importation regulations on pharmaceuticals.
Grace Stoen, a former temple member and one of its foremost critics, says Jones' followers were frequently asked to go to a physician, complain of an ailment, and turn over their prescription to the temple. Jones was most interested in acquiring sleeping pills, she recalled.
Stoen said a temple member who worked as a psychiatric technician at Mendocino State Hospital stole patients' medication.
Jonestown survivors said cultists making the trip from San Francisco to Guyana were encouraged to bring as many drugs as possible with them. Guyanese customs officials, although they knew of the drugs, let the temple members' luggage into the country routinely without a thorough inspection, sources said.
"Jones never bothered (Guyanese) customs and customs never bothered Jones," Dr. Crook said local Guyanese told him.
Parks said crates containing "something Jones wanted brought in" would be packed on top with personal belongings. Customs officials seldom bothered to check crates or trunks that temple members told them were packed with personal items, Parks said.
And a memo obtained by the Associated Press details ruses that temple members would use to distract customs officials. They included romancing them, having an elderly man fall out of his wheelchair and packing Tampons at the top of crates of medical supplies to discourage customs searches.
Sources also named a temple member in San Francisco who is a registered nurse as the person in charge of procuring the drugs. They couldn't explain how the woman did it.
A spokesman for the California Board of Pharmacy said the nurse could have obtained the drugs legally if she was acting on behalf of a physician. He suggested that a more direct method to obtain large quantities would be to buy from the manufacturer, who then exports the drugs.
Many of the drugs at Jonestown were manufactured by U.S. firms, although not necessarily in the United States. A check with some of those firms brought denials of any involvement. Many said they have policies against that kind of foreign sale.
Drug industry officials in Guyana said only minute amounts came through official channels there. Drugs bought for use in Guyana must be registered and cleared through a government agency, and none of the drugs found in Jonestown were, the officials said.
Dr. Joyce Lowinson, a psychiatrist and member of President Carter's Council on Drug Abuse Prevention, said the list of drugs indicated that "there were a lot of psychotic patients, or they (Peoples Temple) were using them to control people."
Many of the Jonestown drugs are habit-forming. Several require that antidotes to reverse an adverse reaction be in stock, but none of the antidotes were noted on the drug list.
Some of the drugs were especially dangerous, too. Therapeutic doses of Demerol, for instance, have precipitated unpredictable, severe and occasionally fatal reactions.
The following are examples from a partial inventory that has been independently authenticated by law enforcement sources.
- Thorazine (chlorpromazine), 10,000 injectable doses and 1,000 tablets in a size normally given only "for severe neuropsychiatric conditions." The drug acts "at all levels of the central nervous system." It is effective for the "management of the manifestations of psychotic disorders" and for control of the manic depressive.
- Quaaludes, 1,000 doses of the sedative-hypnotic drug frequently used in suicide attempts.
- Vistaril, 1,000 doses. Used for total management of anxiety, tension and psychomotor agitation; can render the disturbed patient more amenable to psychotherapy in long-term treatment of neurotics and psychotics.
- Noludar, 1,000 pills. A sleeping aid that produces both physiological and psychological dependence. Moderate overdoses can produce delirium and confusion; large overdoses, stupor leading to coma.
- Valium injectable, 3,000 doses. Useful in treating neurotic states manifested by tension, anxiety, apprehension, fatigue, depressive symptoms or agitation.
- Valium tablets, 2,000. An overdose of Valium in either form tends to make suicidal patients more likely to make a death attempt.
- Morphine sulphate, injectable, 200 vials. This strong pain killer can be habit-forming and have complex psychological effects.
- Demerol, 20,000 doses. A narcotic analgesic, it should be used with great caution and has multiple reactions similar to those of morphine.
- Talwin, 1,150 doses. Similar to Demerol in morphine-like actions. The drug has a history of creating psychological and physical dependence.
- Seconal, 1,000 pills. An extremely dangerous sedative and hypnotic that can be habit-forming. Must be used under medical supervision.
Examiner staff writers Nancy Dooley and James A. Finefrock also contributed to this story.
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November 20, 1992, San Francisco Chronicle / Reuters, Brainwashing Compensation By Canada,
Ottawa
The Canadian government announced compensation yesterday for victims of brainwashing experiments conducted in the 1950s with CIA funds.
The "depatterning" experiments were carried out on about 80 people who were drugged and subjected to electrical shocks and other experiments.
The experiments conducted at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron between 1950 and 1965 were jointly financed by the Canadian government and the CIA.
The settlement arose out of a lawsuit filed by a woman sent to the institute suffering from depression in 1963. Linda Macdonald, 55, said she was drugged, kept asleep for 86 days and given more than 100 electroshocks and subjected to "psychic driving" to wipe her brain clear.
Released after five months, she did not remember her husband, children or the first 26 years of her life. She could no longer read or write, cook a meal or make a bed.
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1969, Prentice-Hall, Inc., The Second Genesis - The Coming Control of Life by Albert Rosenfeld
Prentice-Hall, Inc., - hardcover, second printing,
A few excerpts from the book The Second Genesis - The Coming Control of Life by Albert Rosenfeld (former science and medicine writer for Life Magazine)
Prentice-Hall, Inc., hardcover, second printing
from pages 92 - 94
The Nazi philosophy is admittedly extreme, and is almost universally condemned as being sickeningly, psychotically inhumane. Yet even the Nazis could only rationalize their experiments by imputing an essential racial inferiority to their subjects. Once the subhumanity of a category of people is accepted, the next step is not too hard to take. Most of us accept the premise that it is all right to inflict horrible diseases upon thousands of healthy animals—even breeding them for that specific purpose—in the hope that the experimental findings will save some human lives. That inferior beings may be sacrificed to save superior ones, then, is a logical extension of such a rationale. In the past it was not a rarity for doctors to apply this idea to people. If an orphan, or the child of a peasant or a prisoner, had to be given smallpox to provide material for the vaccination of a prince, what royal physician would hesitate?
Any such practices are certainly deplored in the contemporary world, as they are bound to be in any milieu that preaches democracy and egalitarianism. But have we altogether graduated from such notions? In looking for experimental populations, is it not a little easier, more acceptable, for scientists of a technologically advanced nation to try out a new therapy somewhere in a "backward" nation (with that nation's approval, of course)? Or to seek a group of volunteers in some institution—a prison, an orphanage, a home for the aged? Charity hospitals have been a favorite site for the proving-out of experimental techniques, often painful and dangerous, and often having little or nothing to do with the disease of the subject being experimented upon. Some of the instances cited by Dr. Pappworth in his book are incredible enough to invite comparison with what the Nazis did. Often sick persons have deliberately been made sicker in order to study the illnesses. And Pappworth is openly skeptical of the means of obtaining consent. He feels reasonably certain, too, that the most egregious cases go unreported; his case rests almost entirely on reports by the doctors themselves in the technical literature.
Dr. Katz observes that "we have been satisfied with fulfilling legal standards rather than asking ourselves whether they conform to our own ethical standards. For example, we have experimented* on mentally retarded children after scrupulously obtaining consent from the administrators of the institutions without deliberating sufficiently whether or not it was ethical for us to proceed, especially when the experiments were unrelated to diseases for which these children were hospitalized. Indeed, we may have become so preoccupied with what is legal that we have neglected to define our position from our own vantage point."
A bizarre proposal for circumventing many of these dilemmas and for speedily acquiring a great quantity of knowledge about basic human physiology, has been put forth by Dr. Jack Kevorkian of the Pontiac General Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan. Kevorkian would like the legislature of some state that still permits capital punishment to offer the condemned man the choice of being executed in the usual prescribed manner—or of being placed under anesthesia, never again to awaken, while a skilled medical team used his body and brain for experimentation and study. By using condemned criminals in this manner—men whom society has in any case ordered put to death, and who would thus be offered an opportunity to expiate their crime by making a major contribution to human knowledge—Kevorkian believes that more could be learned in a single year in a single state than is now gleaned in decades of worldwide efforts. Aware of how much his proposal, when looked at superficially, smacks of the ghastly Nazi experiments, Kevorkian has written a book—printed at his own expense—spelling out the differences. He has talked to condemned prisoners, prison wardens, criminologists, medical researchers, and state legislators about his plan, believes he has found a lot of sympathy for it, and still hopes he can convince someone to carry it through.
*Dr. Katz's "we" here does not apply to any experiments in which he himself participated. It is rather an editorial "we" applying to experimental medicine in general.
from pages 185 - 186
A man of our time who feels overburdened by his confusions—sexual and otherwise—and his responsibilities—including his marital ones—might see distinct advantage in the more carefree kind of world that the new biology could make feasible. On a bad day he might even envy his imaginary counterpart in one of the possible societies of the not-too-far-off future—a man grown in vitro, say, and raised by a state nursery. Such a man, it is true, might never know who his genetic parents were, nor would he have any brothers or sisters he could call his own. On the other hand, if he considered all men his brothers, what need would he have for a few specifically designated siblings who happened to be born in the same household? Think how carefree he might be: no parents to feel guilty about neglecting, no parental responsibilities of his own, no marriage partner to whom he owes fidelity—free to play, work, create, pursue his pleasures. In our current circumstances, the absence of a loved one saddens us, and death brings terrible grief. Think how easily the tears could be wiped away if there were no single "loved one" to miss that much—or if that loved one were readily replaceable by any of several others.*
And yet—if you (the hypothetical in vitro man) did not miss anyone very much, neither would anyone miss you very much. Your absence would cause little sadness, your death little grief. You too would be readily replaceable. A man needs to be needed. Who, in the new era, would need you? Would your mortality not weigh upon you even more heavily, though your life span were doubled or tripled?
"Which of us has known his brother?" wrote Thomas Wolfe. "Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"
The aloneness many of us feel on this earth is assuaged, more or less effectively, by the relationships we have with other human beings—our deep, abiding relationships with our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters, our wives, husbands, sweethearts, lovers, closest friends. These relationships are not always as deep or as abiding as we would like them to be, and communication is often distressingly difficult. Yet there are deep, full, loving relationships. And perhaps they are not as rare as the studies and charts would suggest. And there is always the hope that each man and woman who has not found such relationships will eventually find them. But in the in vitro world, or in the tissue-culture world, even the hope of deep, abiding relationships might be hard to sustain. Could society devise adequate substitutes? If each of us is "forever a stranger and alone" here and now, how much more strange, how much more alone, would one feel in a world where we belong to no one, and no one belongs to us. Could the trans-humans of post-civilization survive without love as we have known it in the institutions of marriage and family?
* Taking a cool look at these possibilities, Gagnon and Simon are not at all sure the results would not be preferable to the current state of affairs.
Suppose people were as replaceable as, say, things, clothing, houses, buildings, offices, occupations? Our joys would be less intense, but so would our frustrations and sorrows. In the absence of a strong sense of possessiveness, emotional attachments would not be so all-consuming, hence—in their view—there would probably be much less trouble in the world.
from pages 191 - 224
Studying behavior in a small monkey colony, for example, Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado of the Yale University Medical School, a pioneer researcher in this area of brain research, found that by remote radio stimulation of certain areas of the brain (where tiny electrodes had been surgically implanted), he could set in motion an entire sequence of activities. Dr. Delgado in a lecture at New York's Museum of Natural History described one facet of his work with an experimental monkey named Ludi:
After different areas of the brain had been studied under restraint, the radio stimulator was strapped to Ludi, and excitations of the rostral part of the red nucleus were started, with the monkey free in the colony. Stimulation produced the following complex sequence of responses: (1) immediate interruption of spontaneous activities, (2) changes in facial expression, (3) head turning to the right, (4) standing on two feet, (5) circling to the right, (6) walking on two feet with perfect preservation of equilibrium by balancing the arms, touching the walls of the cage, or grasping the swings, (7) climbing a pole on the back wall of the cage, (8) descending to the floor, (9) low tone vocalization, (10) threatening attitude toward subordinate monkeys, (11) changing of attitude and peacefully approaching some other members of the colony, and (12) resumption of the activity interrupted by the stimulation.
The detailed knowledge that Delgado would have needed to make a monkey go through all this, starting from scratch, would be phenomenal, and certainly far beyond anyone's present grasp. But by taking advantage of patterns already there, as if preprogrammed in a computer, the mere stimulation of the right area of the brain can set the entire sequence in motion.
When you press a light switch, it is not the flick of the switch that turns on the light. It merely acts as a trigger to set in motion the chain of events—the flow of electrons through wires, the glowing of the tungsten filament, and so on—that results in illumination. But by knowing what to do, you do in fact control the light. In the same manner, when a space-flight controller at Cape Kennedy or in Houston finishes a countdown, it is not the sound of his voice or the pressing of a button that launches the astronauts into orbit. Yet, by triggering—or deciding not to trigger—this preprogrammed series of events, he does control the outcome. Similarly Dr. Delgado learned, without direct detailed interference in the submicroscopic events in the monkey's brain, to control the behavior sequence by controlling the trigger.
The whole sequence was repeated again and again, as many times as the red nucleus was stimulated. Responses 1 to 8 developed during the five seconds of stimulation and were followed, as aftereffects, by responses 9 to 12 which lasted from five to ten seconds. The excitations were repeated every minute for one hour, and results were highly consistent on different days. The responses resembled spontaneous activities, were well organized, and always maintained the described sequence. Climbing followed but never preceded turning the body; vocalization followed but never preceded walking on two feet; the general pattern was similar in different stimulations, but the details of motor performance varied and were adjusted for existing circumstances. For example, if the stimulation surprised the animal with one arm around the vertical pole in the cage, the first part of the evoked response was to withdraw the arm in order to make the turn possible. While walking on two feet, the monkey was well oriented and was able to avoid obstacles in its path and to react according to the social situation. In some experiments, three monkeys were simultaneously radio-stimulated in the red nucleus, and all three performed the full behavioral sequence without interfering with one another.
The stimulus always worked unless it was overridden by a more powerful set of demands. A monkey eating after it had starved for twenty-four hours, for example, or a monkey threatened with physical danger, tended to pay attention to its hunger or its self-defense rather than be overwhelmed by the stimulation of the red nucleus. But in general, under normal circumstances, when not under any great pressures or threats to its life, the monkey performed as dictated to. "Examples of other patterns of sequential behavior, says Delgado, "have been evoked by excitation of several diencephalic and mesencephalic structures, showing that sequential activities are anatomically represented in several parts of the central nervous system." An understanding of the brain's geographical terminology is not necessary to the understanding of the implications of Delgado's findings.
Take a look, for instance, at another of Delgado's experiments, this one in a different monkey colony, where patterns of sexual behavior were triggered by the same kind of direct and simple stimulus.
Radio stimulation of the nucleus medialis dorsalis of the thalamus in a female monkey produced a sequential pattern of behavior characterized by a movement of the head, walking on all fours, jumping to the back wall of the cage for two or three seconds, jumping down to the floor, and walking back to the starting point. At this moment, she was approached by the boss of the colony, and she stood on all fours, raised her tail and was grasped and mounted by the boss in a manner indistinguishable from spontaneous mounting. The entire behavioral sequence was repeated once every minute following each stimulation, and a total of 81 mountings was recorded in a 90-minute period, while no other mountings were recorded on the same day. As is natural in social interaction, the evoked responses affected not only the animal with the cerebral electrodes, but also other members of the colony.
The probability that this much sexual activity would have taken place over this period of time in the normal course of events, without the electrical command from outside, is negligibly low. Yet, in each of these behavioral sequences—sexual or otherwise—once the series of events was set in motion, it then proceeded exactly as if the whole thing had been the monkey's idea in the first place. It seems likely that, when this kind of stimulated sequential behavior takes place, the monkey believes it is her own idea. This likelihood has been borne out in experiments with human beings. The subject has no feeling that his brain cells are being electrically stimulated—and would not know it was being done if the experimenter chose not to tell him. He only experiences the resulting sensations as if they had come normally and spontaneously.
ESB (not to be confused with ESP—for extrasensory perception; or BSP—for biosocioprolepsis) stands for electrical stimulation of the brain. ESB, the technique used by Delgado in his monkey experiments, stems originally from brilliant work done with cats back in the early 1930's by the Swiss Nobel laureate, Dr. Waiter R. Hess. "The principle of ESB," wrote Robert Coughlan in Life, "is simple: stick an electrical conductor into whichever part of the brain one happens to be curious about, turn on the current and see what happens."
The usual laboratory method, as described by Coughlan, is this: "The head of the anesthetized subject is immobilized. A tiny high-speed drill is used to bore through the skull and sink a minute well shaft through intervening tissue to the point chosen for investigation. With a micromanipulator the operator then inserts an assembly consisting of a miniature electrode attached to two insulated wire filaments. The other, or scalp-side, ends of these wires are then connected with a small terminal socket and the latter is cemented to the skull. Current fed into the socket goes down the pair of filaments to the electrode and supplies the stimulus—as if the nerve cells there had all fired electrical discharges in unison.
"So incredibly exact have this technique and apparatus become," says Coughlan, "that a microelectrode only a millionth of an inch in diameter can be placed inside an individual nerve cell...without interfering with any of the cell's normal processes.
"Incidentally," he adds, "this procedure does not hurt the subject in the least Most parts of the brain, oddly enough, are not able to feel pain, and the electric current is kept at low levels." (It is this lack of pain in brain surgery that enables the wide-awake patient—a victim, perhaps, of epilepsy or Parkinson's disease, to describe his reactions to the surgeon as various manipulations are in progress. Often the surgeon could not perform his task without the patient's verbal assistance to guide him.)
Experimental animals soon get used to their skull sockets, and, according to Delgado,"extensive experimentation by many authors [i.e., authors of scientific papers] has demonstrated that intracerebral electrodes are safe and can be tolerated for years, providing an effective tool for sending and recording electrical impulses to and from the brain of unanesthetized animals." Delgado himself has experimented with cats, dogs, mice, monkeys, and bulls. Others—among them Dr. Carl W. Sem-Jacobsen in Norway, Dr. Robert G. Heath at Tulane, and Drs. Vernon Mark and William Sweet at Harvard—have gone on to implant electrodes in the brains of human beings. Obviously this has not been done casually, and the practice has been restricted to people who were patients rather than experimental subjects—patients whose ailments (epilepsy, intractable pain, anxiety neurosis, involuntary movement) could be helped by these techniques. "Accumulated experience," says Delgado, "has shown that electrodes are well tolerated by the human brain for at least one year and a half, and that electrical stimulations may induce a variety of responses, including changes in mental function. . . . The prospect of leaving wires inside the thinking brain could seem barbaric, uncomfortable, and dangerous, but actually the patients who have undergone this experience have had no ill effects, and they have not been concerned about the idea of being wired or by the existence of leads in their heads. In some cases, they enjoyed a normal life as outpatients, returning to the clinic for periodic stimulations. Some of the women proved the adaptability of the feminine spirit to all situations by designing pretty hats to conceal their electrical headgear.
Control of the brain would also provide control of those primitive areas which in turn control the basic functions of the body. "Buried at the base of the brain," Dr. Joel Elkes of Johns Hopkins points out, "in the midline, the center of the head, there are old, old regions, concerned clearly with survival. These areas control respiration, pulse rate, and blood pressure; govern salt balance and temperature control; guide certain built-in instinctual responses such as hunger, thirst, fight, flight, play, sleep, wakefulness, sex. These are the steering centers of the cerebral machinery."
ESB experiments have indeed already shown that an animal can be induced to starve itself (though it has gone hungry for some time) or gorge itself (though it has just eaten), or to perform sexually far beyond its normal capacity. The kinds of controls that can be exerted on animals and men by ESB range all the way from simple muscular movements to fairly complex social behavior. It has been known at least since the nineteenth century that electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex could produce motor responses in animals. But until recently it was assumed that this could be achieved only with anesthetized animals, and that the movements would be clumsy and imprecise. But the newer techniques and miniaturized apparatus that made ESB possible have made it evident, as Delgado says, "that motor performance under electronic command could be as complex and precise as spontaneous behavior."
Delgado describes an induced leg movement—the flexing of a hind leg—in a laboratory cat as an example:
The evoked movement usually began slowly, developed smoothly, reached its peak in about two seconds, and lasted until the end of the stimulation. This motor performance could be repeated as many times as desired, and it was accompanied by a postural adjustment of the whole body which included a lowering of the head, raising of the pelvis, and a slight weight shift to the left in order to maintain equilibrium on only three legs.
Did all of these ESB commands disturb the cat emotionally? On the contrary:
The cat was as alert and friendly as usual, rubbing its head against the experimenter, seeking to be petted, and purring. However, if we tried to prevent the evoked effect by holding the left hind legs with our hands, the cat stopped purring, struggled to get free, and shook its leg. Apparently the evoked motility was not unpleasant, but attempts to prevent it were disturbing for the animal.
These reactions are not dissimilar from those of humans under ESB. This being the case, Delgado's further comment on the cat experiment is particularly to be noted:
The artificial driving of motor activities was accepted in such a natural way by the animal that often there was spontaneous initiative to cooperate with the electrical command.* For example, during a moment of precarious balance when all paws were close together, stimulation produced first a postural adjustment and the cat spread its forelegs to achieve equilibrium by shifting its body weight to the right, and only after this delay did the left hind leg begin to flex. . . . A variety of motor effects have been evoked in different species, including cat, dog, bull, and monkey. The animals could be induced to move the legs, raise or lower the body, open or close the mouth, walk or lie still, turn around, and perform a variety of responses with predictable reliability, as if they were electronic toys under human control. [italics mine].
Moreover, animals seem to enjoy being stimulated electrically—another disquieting phenomenon if translatable to people.
* Dr. Gregory Razran of Queens College, New York, who has made a continuing study of Russian psychology one of his specialties, says that in the U.S.S.R., experimental psychologists of the Pavlovian persuasion have made a careful distinction between conditioned reflexes (e.g., salivation) that are triggered from the outside (e.g., the ringing of a bell), and those triggered by stimulation of an internal organ (e.g., the bladder). Reflexes triggered by internal stimulation, says Razran, are always much more unconscious. It is likely that ESB would fall in this category. Though the triggerer is on the outside, the stimulation occurs inside and appears to be indistinguishable from the natural occurrence of an idea.
Going beyond these simple motor activities and the more complex sequences of activities described earlier, Delgado and others found they could also affect moods, attitudes, and even the basic character of individual animals (which in turn affected the behavior of other animals) by stimulating the appropriate points or regions of the brain. A cat can be induced to start a fight with another cat—or a dog—much larger than itself; or to cringe from a mouse, depending on the brain area getting the signals. A peaceful animal can be made to snarl and turn belligerent, while a normally aggressive animal can be rendered docile. Rhesus monkeys, says Delgado, "are destructive and dangerous creatures which do not hesitate to bite anything within reach, including leads, instrumentation, and occasionally the experimenter's hands. Would it be possible to tame these ferocious animals by means of electrical stimulation? To investigate the question, a monkey was strapped to a chair where it made faces and threatened the investigator until the rostral part of the caudate nucleus was electrically stimulated. At this moment, the monkey lost its aggressive expression and did not try to grab or bite the experimenter, who could safely put a finger in its mouth! As soon as stimulation was discontinued, the monkey was as aggressive as before.
"Later," Delgado goes on, "similar experiments were repeated with the monkeys free inside the colony, and it was evident that their autocratic social structure could be manipulated by radio stimulation." The boss monkey, under ESB, lost his aggressiveness, and the other monkeys crowded him without fear. This went on for about an hour. "About 12 minutes after the stimulation hour ended, the boss had reasserted his authority." In similar experiments at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center, Dr. Bryan W. Robinson noted that, as first one and then another male became dominant, "the female switched her allegiance to the dominant male, and then turned about and attacked the other guy." In an even more interesting version of the experiment, Delgado observed that the other monkeys in the colony "learned to press a lever in the cage which triggered stimulation of the boss monkey in the caudate nucleus, inhibiting his aggressive behavior." Thus one monkey was deliberately controlling the behavior of another by means of ESB—a truly impressive demonstration of how little needs to be understood to exercise quite a lot of control.
Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of what ESB could do in the way of turning off aggression—and how confident a scientist could be of ESB's power—was a bravura performance by Delgado himself with a real fighting bull (into whose brain he had implanted electrodes) in a Spanish bull ring. Playing the role of matador, the cape-waving Delgado got the animal all worked up to the proper pitch of snorting, pawing ferocity. Then, standing there calmly as the bull charged, he stopped the bull within a few feet of him. He had literally turned off the bull's charge by means of a small radio transmitter he carried in his hand. ESB had rendered the bull as friendly as Ferdinand.
Often the stimulated area that makes an animal very angry is located quite nearby the area that makes it euphoric. An electrode implanted at one spot in the amygdala might, when ESB is applied, bring on a paroxysm of ungovernable rage; if it is moved only a fraction of an inch away, ESB will result in the most friendly, even loving, behavior. Could this produce a world where no one would ever be angry? Would this be a good thing?
This is not an idle question. The uses of ESB in the control of human aggression has already been convincingly demonstrated at a clinic in Boston which makes a specialty of studying violent behavior. It was organized in 1967 by a team of medical scientists attached to Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital. The group includes two outstanding brain surgeons, Dr. Mark and Dr. Sweet, and its full-time head is a psychiatrist, Dr. Frank R. Ervin.
The typical clinic patient has "poor impulse control" with a quick-flaring temper and a history of repeated violent episodes. Many of these patients are incredibly destructive of property, and they may beat their wives, husbands or children with astonishing ferocity. One young wife who came in recently for help said that she had assaulted her husband—fortunately a very large, very tolerant man—537 times in the last six years, with everything from fists to dishes to furniture. Violent people also frequently vent their impulses through sexual assault or multiple automobile accidents.
Though the violent patient usually has a "reason" for his uncontrollable rages, the reason can be incredibly flimsy: he may do major violence in response to a minor or imagined slight. A man may knock his wife across the room because she burned the toast. A teen-age girl may smash her room into a total shambles because her brother asked her to turn down the record player. Yet, between bouts of violence, this same person may be mild-mannered, charming and altogether likable. Once the rage is gone and the damage done, there may be a flood of guilt and contrition, sometimes followed by a near-suicidal depression.
In the 50-or-so cases the clinic has so far had the opportunity to study in some depth, there has been a startling frequency of correlation between deviant behavior and brain damage. The damaged or abnormal areas can often be pinpointed through ESB—and the rage evoked at will by stimulation, and, depending on the site and extent of the abnormality, turned off by ESB as well. In rare cases, because of the ravages accompanying certain types of epilepsy or the presence of a tumor in the primitive brain, the damage is so extensive that the patient is violent nearly all the time. The damage apparently scrambles the electrical circuitry so that the cells in the affected regions are discharging electricity almost constantly, evoking impulses of rage and violence. There is no way to turn them off, except through drug therapy or brain surgery.
So far there has been great reluctance to perform brain surgery, except in extreme cases—repeated attempts at murder, for instance. Sometimes even relatively simple surgery—if any brain surgery can be called simple—can help for a time. At the Indiana University Medical Center, Dr. Robert Heimberger has found that by touching the afflicted area of the brain with a delicate "cryosurgical" probe (an instrument with a frozen tip) he can destroy the diseased tissue. This operation, performed on institutionalized patients who are violently destructive, keeps them calm for weeks or months at a time.
In many of the cases handled by Dr. Sweet and Dr. Mark, the brain damage is not obvious. But examinations in depth usually turn up some abnormality in the tissue—damage that is perhaps congenital, perhaps the result of blows on the head, or of some viral infection that reached the brain. There has lately been much interest in genetic causes of these abnormalities, too, especially since a recent case in France, where a violent criminal was found to possess an abnormal "XYY" chromosome. The Boston group has already incorporated a cell geneticist into the team to study these latest possibilities.
All this obviously has important implications for criminology and penology. When I earlier cited the imaginary example of a rapist being cured of his tendencies, transformed by brain surgery from a sadistic brute into a gentleman of sweet disposition, it probably seemed far-fetched. But we can now see that the possibility may be more immediate than anyone imagined. Early in 1968, a British court handed over a young incorrigible—a "compulsive gambler"—to doctors for treatment by a leucotomy operation. After the story appeared in the London Times, the British Medical Journal expressed its qualms about what this sort of procedure might lead to in terms of sentencing criminals to treatment instead of to jail. Yet the precedent is already established: In cases of "insanity," the criminal is often turned over for psychiatric treatment rather than sentenced to prison (though he may spend an equally long time in confinement) on the grounds that it was his mental illness rather than the man himself that was at fault. Will the presence of brain damage or a bad chromosome soon be sufficient to absolve a criminal of guilt on the same grounds?
Of all ESB experiments carried out with animals, perhaps none was more astonishing than the series back in 1953 and 1954 in which Dr. Tames Olds (then at McGill University in Montreal) accidentally discovered the brain's pleasure centers. He had just learned how to implant electrodes in rat brains preparatory to studying rat behavior. But he was curious to know if the ESB technique itself might so disturb and distract the rats as to spoil his experiment. "I went up to the lab one Sunday afternoon," he recalls, "and took the first rat I had ever prepared with my own hands. Every time the rat walked into one corner of the testing table, I turned on the electricity to see if he would avoid approaching that spot thereafter. Instead, my rat liked it!"
Pursuing this windfall instead of his original idea, Olds refined his techniques, found that he could, by ESB, produce at will a state of bliss in the rat. Other researchers eagerly followed Olds's lead and confirmed that there were a number of pleasure centers in a variety of animals. Coughlan writes:
Many sites seem to be identified with specific pleasures, such as those of food, drink, and sex. But sometimes ESB sets up a complex, generalized response. This may indicate a higher satisfaction independent of specific pleasures—or possibly,
Dr. Olds suspects, that particular pleasure sites are packed close together and several are stimulated by one large dose of ESB.
The nature of this feeling of pleasure is scarcely definable: some have guessed that it combines the mystical raptures of the saints with the fleshly raptures of the sinners, in a diffused, ineffable delight. In any case, animals find the sensation completely irresistible. A white rat, if allowed to regulate its own ESB dosage by pressing a lever in its cage, will continue to press it—at the fantastic rate of up to 8,000 times an hour—until hunger, thirst, or exhaustion force an interruption. But the interruption is brief: a sip, a bite or two, a few minutes' nap, and the rat returns to its orgy of pleasures. In an experiment by Dr. Joseph V. Brady at Waiter Reed Army Medical Center, rats went on this way 24 hours a day for three weeks straight. One would expect that such sybaritic rats would eventually wear themselves to a frazzle, burn themselves out before they were 30 days old, but to the contrary the ones at Waiter Reed showed no physical or mental damage then or later. And Dr. Olds' rats, after a series of ESB marathons cumulatively totaling hundreds of days, have seemed in better health and fettle than their littermates who were raised in identical conditions but without ESB.
Pleasure centers have been located also in cats, dogs, monkeys, apes, and bottle-nosed dolphins...and these creatures have responded to ESB in the same degree.
Later experiments by Dr. Heath, by Dr. Sem-Jacobsen, and again by Delgado indicate that the human brain, too, possesses pleasure centers. Patients under ESB, sometimes without knowing that ESB had been applied at a given moment, suddenly said they were experiencing highly pleasurable sensations. ESB was able, at times, to turn depression to gaiety, and lethargy to alertness. Shy people became suddenly bright and talkative, and normally reserved women grew languorously flirtatious. Some of Dr. Heath's mental and epileptic patients have worn electrodes for long periods of time—electrodes they could themselves stimulate at will. This technique is called ICSS—for intracranial self-stimulation. ICSS devices have varied uses. A certain type of epileptic, for instance, feeling the first beginning sign of a convulsive seizure, can stop it instantly by pushing the button. A man afflicted with narcolepsy (chronic sleepiness) can stimulate himself into a state of wakefulness. In one patient with severe narcolepsy, the method worked so well that "by virtue of his ability to control symptoms with the stimulator," says Dr. Heath, "he was employed part-time, while wearing the unit, as an entertainer in a night club." This patient, like some others, had more than one button on his stimulator and had access to more than one area of his brain. He found that when he pushed one of the buttons "the feeling was 'good'; it was as if he were building up to a sexual orgasm." He pushed it frequently. So did another patient. On checking, Dr. Heath found that "regardless of his emotional state and the subject under discussion in the room," stimulation in this area "was accompanied by the patient's introduction of a sexual subject, usually with a broad grin. When questioned about this, he would say, 'I don't know why that came to mind—I just happened to think of it.' "
One can easily imagine people in the future wearing self-stimulating electrodes (it might even become the "in" thing to do) which might render the wearer sexually potent at any time; that might put him to sleep or keep him awake, according to his need; that might curb his appetite if he wanted to lose weight; that might relieve him of pain; that might give him courage when he was fearful, or render him tranquil when he was enraged.
The notion of a man controlling his own brain is one thing. But the prospect that a man's brain might be controlled by another man is something else again—not to mention the control of masses of people by a few powerful individuals. Delgado, for one, does not take this latter possibility too seriously. He admits that—through such practices as requiring blood tests before marriage, compulsory smallpox vaccination, and fluoridation and chlorination of our drinking water—governments "have established a precedent of official manipulation of our personal biology." He sees, too, that "governments could try to control general behavior or to increase the happiness of citizens by electronically influencing their brains." But, "fortunately," he concludes, "this prospect is remote, if not impossible, not only for obvious ethical reasons, but also because of its impracticability. Theoretically it would be possible to regulate aggressiveness, productivity, or sleep by means of electrodes implanted in the brain, but this technique requires specialized knowledge, refined skills, and a detailed and complex exploration in each individual, because of the existence of anatomical and physiological variability. The feasibility of mass control of behavior by brain stimulation is very unlikely, and the application of intracerebral electrodes in man will probably remain highly individualized and restricted to medical practice."
But not all scientists share Delgado's optimism about the remoteness of these prospects, especially since ESB is only in its infancy. The fact that it might be difficult or troublesome (and it could soon become less difficult and less troublesome) to apply ESB on a large scale would not necessarily deter someone who was sufficiently motivated to do it, and had the power to carry out his will. As for the "obvious ethical reasons," that would depend upon the individual ethics of the persons in power—and would of course carry no weight at all with ruthless types who invent their ethics as they go. It has been suggested that a dictator might even implant electrodes in the brains of infants a few months after birth—and they would never know that their thoughts, moods, feelings, and all-around behavior were not the results of their own volition. Where then is free will, and individual responsibility An electrical engineer named Curtiss R. Schafer, who made a similar suggestion, added that "the once-human being thus controlled would be the cheapest of machines to create and operate. The cost of building even a simple robot like the Westinghouse mechanical man is probably 10 times that of bearing and raising a child to the age of 16."
"What does this imply" asks Robert Coughlan. "One hypothetical possibility . . .:the 100-socket, 600-electrode human being controlled by a transistor-timed stimulator worn perhaps, in the form of a lapel pin by men and of a jeweled brooch by women. Each individual's program would be pre-set and tailored to assigned functions and duties, but it could be changed instantly by overriding radio signals sent out by local (75-socket) controllers, who would be controlled by district (50-socket) controllers, who would be controlled by regional (25-socket) controllers, who would be controlled by a Master Controller (no sockets) who, in his wisdom, would control the behavior of everybody."
So much for the electrical half of the brain's electrochemistry. But the chemical half may turn out to be considerably more than half in terms of its fundamental functional importance. Not that electrochemistry is neatly divisible into halves. But it is feasible to think of the electricity and the chemistry as separate though interrelated modes of cerebral operation; and certainly to think of electricity (e.g., the application of ESB) and chemistry (e.g., the administration of drugs) as two distinct approaches to the control of the brain. Potent as the electrical approach appears to be, chemistry looks even more promising, hence even more threatening.
Though neural impulses can be electrically stimulated, their actual transmission along the nerve fibers and across the synapses is achieved—as was demonstrated by Sir John C. Eccles and his colleagues at the Australian National University—by the transport of key chemical substances," the principal transmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) being acetylcholine. And while thoughts and memories may go round and round in their electrical circuits, they appear to be stored chemically in the molecules of the brain—with implications for memory and learning to be discussed shortly. It has already been amply demonstrated that electricity introduced from the outside can turn on the chemistry in a given area of the brain and stimulate a variety of behavior patterns. In such cases it is the impingement of the electrical current that sets in motion the chemical reactions. Under normal circumstances, though, it works the other way around. The brain's cells are like miniature storage batteries, with an electrical potential that lies latent, stored chemically as positive or negative ions (atoms or molecules with extra electrons or missing electrons), until an appropriate stimulus sparks the electricity into action. This firing of the cells sets in motion the electrical currents that keep the brain and CNS functioning—much as the storage battery in your car, once it is turned on, initiates the current that runs the motor. These weak electrical currents are what the electroencephalograph picks up; it is when they are no longer detectable that most physicians are now willing to consider a patient truly dead.
*One group of deadly "nerve gases" is known as clolinesterase inhibitors. By interfering with the activity of a single enzyme, cholinesterase, they effectively block a vital chemical cycle, thus turning off the nerve cells' chemical transmitting apparatus. When the nerve impulses stop, so does the heartbeat.
If the use of a broadside technique like ESB can give its possessor such powers over the brain, think what might be done if we knew how to manipulate the brain's chemistry in all its exquisitely refined detail. "rust as the DNA code determines the color of the eye, the shape of the nose, and the precise operations of such complex organs as the liver," writes Lawrence Leasing in Fortune, "so it also determines the cast of the mind. The new hypothesis is that DNA not only specifies the physical structure of the brain, but it also controls, directly or indirectly, all brain processes and mental activity through a molecular code that may be searched out and finally mastered."
Dr. Joel Elkes adds: "If certain behaviors are genetically coded, then these behaviors can be chemically released." Though ultimate mastery of these chemical codes is a real hope, we are now only at the bare beginnings of the necessary knowledge. In the words of Dr. Robert S. deRopp, "The scientist who attempts to study the chemistry of thought and feeling resembles a burglar attempting to open a vault of one of the world's major banks with a toothpick."
But an expert safecracker might, by thorough familiarity with the vault, figure out a way to do the job with a toothpick. There are events in science which the late Nobel chemist Dr. Irving Langmuir liked to call divergent phenomena—events which, though tiny in themselves, when applied at the right place at the right time, can start a chain reaction of happenings out of all proportion to the triggering action. A favorite example of Langmuir's was the series of occurrences in a Wilson cloud chamber, where a single quantum event, such as the disintegration of a radium atom, instantaneously produces thousands upon thousands of water droplets. This understanding of divergent phenomena is what gave Langmuir, one of the original "artificial rainmakers," the courage to try to modify massive weather patterns by tampering in very small ways.
A few stray neutrons in a critical mass of refined uranium can set off a nuclear blast. A sudden cry can cause an avalanche, and the slippage of rocks along a fault can result in a major earthquake. So it should come as no surprise that a little bit of interference with the chemistry of a few key cells in some tiny areas of the brain can be a divergent phenomenon, triggering major biological events. Consider, for instance, the rainbow visions, the ascents and descents into private psychic hells and heavens, the telescoping of time, the bizarre and long-lasting inner experiences that are evoked by one twenty-thousandth of an ounce of LSD—an amount too small to be seen of a tasteless, colorless, odorless substance. This is perhaps even more amazing than opening a bank vault with a toothpick.
At the base of the cerebrum there is a segment of the primitive brain called the hypothalamus which has a major role in a number of basic physiological functions. It has a role in sex, and in the sleep-wake cycle. It serves as the body's thermostat, its temperature regulator, as well as its appestat, or appetite regulator. If a man's appestat is off, he may eat too much and get too fat—or have no yen for food at all and waste away. ESB experiments have shown that when an animal's appestat is deliberately thrown out of kilter, the chemical signals it gets from its body as to its state of hunger or satiety become unreliable. So do the instructions it sends out in response.
By singling out the crucial cells in the hypothalamus, nearly all its functions can be altered quite radically. At the centennial celebration of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Neal E. Miller of Yale told of a series of experiments in which a thermode had been used, not to tamper with the basic chemistry of cells, but merely to heat or cool a tiny specific region of the anterior hypothalamus. The results were recorded with microelectrodes. Most of the nerve cells were found to be relatively unaffected by moderate temperatures changes. Miller said:
However there are some neurons here that increase their rate of firing when they are slightly heated, and others that increase their rate when they are slightly cooled. These cells seem to serve as, or be connected to, specialized "sense organs" for measuring small changes in the temperature of the surrounding blood.
Heating this region of an animal's brain causes panting and increased blood supply to the skin which serves to lower the body temperature. Cooling it causes the opposite effect of shivering and decreased blood supply to the skin. It also stimulates the secretion of the thyroid, which in turn speeds up the body's burning of fuel. In the experiments in which only this tiny region of the brain is cooled, these effects produce a fever, but when the whole body is cooled under normal conditions, they serve to restore the animal's temperature to normal.... Cooling this region of the brain will make a satiated animal hungry, so that it will eat, whereas heating this region elicits drinking. Thus, this temperature-regulating mechanism is tied in with hunger and thirst which motivate behavior that helps the animal to anticipate its need for the fuel it will burn to keep warm, or the water it will evaporate to cool off.
In short, a whole series of homeostatic mechanisms ranging from changes in metabolism to the motivation of the behavior of seeking food or water is touched off by the cells in the brain that respond to temperature.
Again a divergent phenomenon—a toothpick's worth of tampering produces a bank vault's worth of payoff. There is obviously great potential here for long-range medical and psychiatric benefits in the possibility of controlling body temperature, appetite, sleep, and sexual desire.
Still short of manipulating the cells' chemistry, there are yet other simple methods of achieving the same results as those obtained by heating and cooling. "Certain receptors in the brain," explains Dr. Miller, "respond to osmotic pressure so that a minute injection into the proper place in the brain of a solution that is slightly more salty than body fluid will motivate animals that have just been satiated on water to drink, and also to perform responses that they have learned to get water.... Conversely, a minute injection of water will cause a dehydrated animal to stop drinking or working for water."
Scientists have also now succeeded in going the extra steps to direct chemical interference. Studies by Dr. S. P. Grossman at Yale have shown, again in Dr. Miller's words, that "after a rat has been thoroughly satiated on both food and water, injecting a minute amount of acetylcholine or carbachol . . . will cause it to drink, while epinephrine or norepinephrine injected into the same site will cause the same satiated rat to eat." This experiment and other similar studies serve as clinching evidence for Miller "that the neuromechanisms involved in the motivations of hunger and thirst are chemically coded." Miller goes on to describe, too, how "yet other cells of the brain respond to specific hormones so that activities such as nest-building in rats can be elicited by injecting a minute quantity of the proper hormone into the correct site in the brain."
The effects of hormones used this way can be impressive indeed, as Dr. Elkes made clear in a Deerfield Foundation lecture in 1965. "A small dose of hormone, a steroid entering the central nervous system during an acute developmental phase," he said, "will so re-set its responsiveness that the whole program of behavior is one of male rather than female activity. Let me cite another experiment, coming from our own laboratory [at Johns Hopkins]. This was done by Dr. Richard Michael, and concerns adult cats. Dr. Michael implanted a minute quantity of hormone directly into a small area of the posterior hypothalamus. . . . He also implanted, in other animals, dummy material of the same dimension. . . .The cats implanted with small quantities of the hormone (silbesterol dibutyrate), although originally devoid of sexual activity, became sexually very receptive; dummy implanted cats did not show any such effects. With removal of the implants, the susceptibility disappeared." The Johns Hopkins researchers also found that the hormone does not travel very far, that it stays in the immediate vicinity of the implant, and that a few selected cells take up the hormone. "This," says Elkes, "is a remarkable instance of specificity of interaction in the CNS."
"Let us think this to the end," he then implores. "A small amount of hormone incorporated properly into the membrane of relatively few cells so re-sets the total machinery that it now responds to a male presence with a very specific sexual response—a program that runs down in about eight minutes or so in a cat. Put in another hormone, and this will not happen. Move the hormone a few millimeters away from the susceptible site and again this will not happen. Cells are thus apparently sensitized in a highly specific way."
So a surprising lot is getting to be known. "We now have methods available," says Elkes, "which enable us to map this chemistry of the brain in great detail, not only in terms of gross, macroscopic structure—shall we say, the geography of the brain itself—but also in terms of the layer by layer geology of the brain; and to determine the concentration of those materials in very thin areas of the brain and show how one area differs from another, only a few millionths of an inch apart. It can be done by elegant microtechniques which enable one to gauge the local concentration of materials; it can also be done by special staining methods which show up these materials in beautiful fluorescent arrays."
It is quite clear, then, that the brain can be controlled chemically in at least a limited fashion. And, since all the behavior patterns capable of being set in motion by ESB are based on chemical patterns that are stored and ready-to-go, and are chemically carried out, it follows that anything ESB can do, chemistry can do better—once we learn how. At its best, ESB still requires the implantation of electrodes inside the brain and the cementing of sockets onto the skull, an exacting task whose end result is a relatively gross prodding of an area or site of the brain. Chemical control—interacting directly with the substances in the brain cells without physical molestation, without destruction of tissue, without the necessity for electrodes or sockets—is obviously the preferred method, and would provide much more precise control, not only triggering behavior, but modifying behavior as well, and modifying it virtually at will.
The required sophistication is still a long way off. In the experiments described by Dr. Miller and Dr. Elkes, the chemicals were applied directly to the cells of the brains—but only, as in ESB, by means of microsurgical techniques. "Some of this work," says Miller, "has been done by biophysicists who thrust micropipettes with several barrels into a single nerve cell, using a conductive solution in one pipette to record the electrical activity of the cell, while minute quantities are injected electrophoretically via the other barrels. Studies with the electron microscope have verified other details. Yet other studies have used a push-pull cannula to wash out and measure for a group of nerve cells the greater production of the transmitter, acetylcholine, when they are active than when they are not."
These are remarkable achievements indeed, and only a clown would call the manner of achieving them unsophisticated. But widespread application of the results can come about only after scientists have learned to deliver the desired chemicals to the desired sites more easily. They are prevented from doing so by a set of circumstances which exist nowhere else in the body—the so-called "blood/brain barrier."
Though the brain constitutes only one-fiftieth of the body's total weight, it requires a full one-fifth of the body's oxygen-rich blood supply. If circulation is cut off for more than a very few minutes, the result is permanent brain damage and, in a few more minutes, death. Since the brain's cells are constantly bathed in blood, it would seem that the simplest way to get drugs to the brain, just as to other sites in the body, would be to put them into the bloodstream, either orally or by injection. But the brain's cells are uniquely surrounded by a little-understood electrochemical fence, the blood/brain barrier, which admits only certain selected substances and keeps out everything else. Until this barrier is overcome, the cells will simply not take from the bloodstream many of the chemicals which, when injected directly into the cells, have such profound effects.
Even so, the blood/brain barrier does permit the passage of a varied inventory of substances, and it is no news that some of these substances can influence the mind's thoughts and perceptions, and hence the person's behavior, in striking ways. The Chinese described marijuana and its effects as early as the twenty-eighth century B.C. Over the centuries of recorded history there has hardly been a time or a place without some knowledge and practice of opiates or stimulants of one kind or another. Even the poorest people, even in the most primitive societies, have known where in the plant kingdom to seek solace or a moment of borrowed ecstasy. From the poppy fields of the Near and Far East have come opium and its derivative narcotics, morphine and heroin. From the female hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, which will grow anywhere in the temperate zones of the world including backyards and window boxes, come hashish and marijuana by all their multifarious names. Nutmegs and morning-glory seeds, cacti and coca leaves, have consistently provided kicks and calms for the inhabitants of the regions where they grow.
The news is that in recent years scientists have been raiding the herbals of folk medicine, testing the efficacy of many ancient drugs, finding new uses for them, extracting the active elements from the grosser content, synthesizing the vital chemicals, and creating new, wholly synthetic drugs in the laboratory. They have been getting down to the basic biochemistry of these substances as well as the brain's own key chemicals, and studying their complex interactions. They have built up an impressive arsenal of psychochemicals or "mind drugs"* and given birth to the lustily growing new science of psychopharmacology.
While these developments proceed, plenty of mind-affecting drugs are already on the market, and many that aren't, are on the black market. Dr. Donald Louria, Chairman of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction, estimates that some nine to thirteen billion sedatives, tranquilizers, and stimulants were manufactured in the United States in 1965. "This," he calculates, "means 35 to 60 pills or capsules for every man, woman, and child!" These are legitimate prescription drugs, though many find their way into illegitimate channels where they are dangerously misused and overused. There are, too, the frankly illegitimate drugs, most notoriously the narcotics and especially heroin, that claim their annual toll of misery, bondage, and death through addiction and overdosage.
Finally, there are the hallucinogens, also known as psychedelics—principally marijuana, which is relatively mild in its effects, and LSD, which is explosively potent. These are, at the moment, the most controversial of drugs because they have gained wide popularity among young people.
*Most people seem to know that the effects of these drugs are different in different people, but Dr. Elkes believes it cannot be emphasized too strongly that even "the same drug, in the same dose, in the same person may produce very different effects, according to the events which precede or follow a particular medication."
When doctors talk about drug abuse, they are usually referring to drugs that are self-administered, taken through the user's own volition. But, as in the case of ESB, there is considerable concern among scientists about the potential abuse of future psychochemicals in terms of the powers they might give the clever and ruthless over their fellows. Part of this concern is due to a familiarity with certain aspects of psychochemistry being investigated by the world's military establishments—whose fascination with the mind drugs is hardly less than that of the psychopharmacologists themselves, though for different reasons. Major General Marshall Stubbs, at the time chief of the Army's Chemical Corps, told a congressional committee: "The characteristics we are looking for are. . . exactly opposite to what the pharmaceutical firms want in drugs—that is, the undesirable side effects."
Most of what interests the military is highly classified. However, Robert Coughlan in Life was able to offer an imposing catalogue of "incapacitating agents" being actively pursued.
The things these agents can do now are many and exceedingly strange. Besides the hallucinogens there are, for instance, euphoriants [italics mine]. They incapacitate by making their victim so witlessly optimistic about everything that he is no good for anything. As one Army medical attendant at a Chemical Corps tryout on human volunteers explained, "Even the worst food, like Army food, tastes absolutely delicious to them. They'll tell you it is the best they have ever eaten!" The opposite number of the euphoriants is the depressants. These drugs induce morbid gloom and prevent the victim from doing anything because he feels that nothing is worth doing. Also there are cataplexogenics. Their victim remains fully conscious, thinks normally and tries to respond to stimuli in his usual way, but he finds that his muscles don't obey. They might be rigid, flaccid, or limp, but in any case they are useless and he is immobilized.
Then there are the disinhibitors. These block or weaken the controls that normally keep behavior on a fairly even keel; the victim overreacts, with excesses of talking, imagination, emotions, and actions. (Alcohol is a familiar disinhibitor but a relatively mild one). In addition there are the chronoleptogenics. They distort the sense of time and since the victim cannot discriminate between hours and seconds, he loses track of relationships in which time is involved, becoming ineffectual and lost. And there are the confusants. They cause the victim to lose track of all relationships; the world is totally out of joint and everything in it (himself included) is uncertain, contradictory, overwhelmingly strange, and perplexing.
These descriptions have been generalized, of course. In practice the effects are variable and subject to many limitations. None of the compounds is 100 percent effective in all circumstances, and some are only moderately effective even under the best circumstances. The important point about all of them, however, is that they do exist, they do affect the brain and they do manipulate specific aspects of behavior. The rest is a problem of product development, so to speak—of tinkering, refining, and improving, adding a new twist here and there to make them better and better—or, perhaps one ought to say, worse and worse.*
Among yet other possibilities, Coughlan makes ominous mention of "chemicals that increase suggestibility and hence could be extremely useful in 'brainwashing' prisoners of war or even (if diffused in water supplies, or perhaps in common table salt, as is done with iodine) in making whole populations receptive to propaganda. The Chemical Corps, through its liaison program with industry, receives hundreds of odd compounds monthly for testing and there is no telling what will turn up."
All of these new means of tampering with the human brain and behavior via electricity and chemistry invoke the same kind of fears and the same kind of moral dilemmas as those aroused by the biomedical developments explored in Parts I and II. They involve our definition of the good life, the role of the individual, the assignment of power and authority—and their limitations and restrictions.
*In the movie Goldfinger, it was some such incapacitating agent, all ready and perfected for cinema purposes, which the conspirators arranged to have sprayed on Fort Knox to put the guards out of effective action.
We all have qualms about those in power inflicting their will on the unconsenting masses. But what of those who choose to exercise the new controls on themselves, and who insist on their individual right to do so? Suppose a man wants to have electrodes implanted in the sexual centers of his brain and carry a self-stimulating pushbutton device to turn on his desire and capacity whenever he pleases—should this be denied him? It is certainly not unusual for a patient suffering from feelings of sexual inadequacy or impotence to go to a urologist or psychotherapist for help; and the doctors do try hard to find remedies. If a physician decided that the implantation of electrodes was the easiest remedy—and quite safe—for a given patient, it might appear to be merely an extension of normal medical advice to send the man to a neurosurgeon and have it done. But many doctors would have great ethical qualms about proceeding.
In the controversy over the use and abuse of psychedelic drugs many intellectuals and artists have insisted that marijuana and LSD have many positive values to recommend them: insights into the self, expanded awareness, enhanced creative potential. Many argue for the legalization of these drugs on the ground that they are not addictive narcotics, and that their troublemaking potential is certainly no greater than other universally accepted commodities such as caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine.
One of the least investigated areas of the drug problem in our society is the "white-collar drug scene," a label coined by Bruce Jackson in Atlantic. Jackson gives a quietly hair-raising account of a pill party he was invited to in a major American city. The host, on pep pills, had not slept in three or four nights. Instead of the usual cocktail-party bar, there were candy dishes full of many-colored pills and capsules, most of them amphetamines and barbiturates available by prescription. Also on hand was a well-worn copy of the Physicians' Desk Reference, a handbook on pharmaceuticals for doctors. The pills were passed around, and the guests selected from them as they would from a tray of assorted cookies. It was not a wild party. There was music, but no drunkenness or sex play. None of the partygoers were teen-agers, college undergraduates, or hippies. They were all well-dressed, well-behaved, well-educated, and presumably mature adults in the middle-income bracket, some of them married couples who just happened to become "pillheads." They went regularly to such parties where the conversation centered mainly on the varieties of drugs, how to enhance their effects, how to insure a continuing source of supply to feed their habits.
Most of these people seemed to have no clearcut idea as to why they had become habituated to the pills, except that they consider life without the pills either too complex to cope with or too boring to tolerate. The amphetamines and barbiturates they use are all substances which get through the blood/brain barrier to influence the chemistry of the cells in those primitive areas of the brain that Miller and Elkes were talking about. The white-collar pillheads also use hallucinogens occasionally, smoking marijuana and taking LSD, substances that get through to some of the brain's higher centers as well, distorting and heightening perceptions, thoughts and feelings, sometimes intensely and for prolonged periods of time.
"Lately," writes Jackson, "attention has been focused on drug abuse and experimentation among college students. Yet all the college students and all the junkies account for only a small portion of American drug abuse. The adults, the respectable grown-ups, the nice people who cannot or will not make it without depending on a variety of drugs, present a far more serious problem. For them the drug experience threatens to disrupt or even destroy life patterns and human relationships that required many years to establish.
"And the problem is not a minor one," he warns. "Worse, it seems to be accelerating." One of his pillhead friends told him one night, "You better research the hell out of it because I'm convinced that the next ruling generation is going to be all pillheads. I'm convinced of it. If they haven't dysfunctioned completely to the point where they can't stand for office. It's getting to be unbelievable. I've never seen such a transformation in just four or five years. . . ."
As time goes on, and as the biochemists and psychopharmacologists pursue their research, the pillheads will have at hand an increasingly sophisticated array of psychochemicals to draw from. The noted psychologist, Dr. B. F. Skinner of Harvard, predicts that "in the not too distant future the motivational and emotional conditions of normal daily life will probably be maintained in any desired state through the use of drugs." Is this a good or bad thing? Aldous Huxley, in his younger days—long before the prospect seemed to have any basis in reality—bitingly satirized the whole notion in Brave New World. But he lived to wax lyrical in its favor in Doors of Perception, the result of his experiences with mescaline.
Do individuals have the inalienable right, as many argue, to take any drugs they please whenever they please—especially if the drugs are nonaddictive—without interference from the law, or, for that matter, from their physicians? Should free individuals not be the sole guardians and custodians of their own inner experiences If a man chooses to sit in a room and quietly enjoy his drug-induced visions, or whatever stimulation or lethargy the drug of his choice brings him, is it anyone else's business?
In the present state of psychopharmacology, yes, it is other people's business. Taking these drugs in an unsupervised milieu, in large dosages, and on a continued basis, is more than a little risky. The taker may do himself irreparable damage physically, psychically, and socially. He may be unable to function or handle his responsibilities, and not care one way or the other whether he does or not, thus leaving society to worry about him and his dependents. The risk is not all his own, because the inner experience he chooses to undergo can have devastating consequences for others, including his wife and children. Moreover, under the influence of drugs he may very well be a genuine menace to innocent bystanders. Drugs may distort his perceptions so that he is unable, say, to drive a car properly; yet his judgment may also be distorted so that he believes he is handling the car even more expertly than usual. He may feel a soaring sense of power, a delusion that can make him reckless and bring injury or death to himself and others. Or the drug may bring out latent paranoid tendencies, and, fearing an imaginary attack, he may attack first. So drug-taking cannot be a person's purely private affair.
Nevertheless, questions about the internal freedoms of the individual are valid enough. We do trust people to drink whiskey, which is a mind-affecting drug—and we hold them responsible for the consequences, such as drunken driving. Why not trust them, in the same way, to smoke marijuana? Such questions will be even more valid, and more plentiful, in the years ahead. Drugs will presumably become more selective in their action, producing the desired moods and perceptions without damaging the user or curtailing his ability to function normally. (Our concepts of what constitutes "normal" functioning are also due for some changes, of course.) When these things come to pass, we may be hard put to attach any sense of moral wrongdoing to the mere taking of drugs.
Is it not, after ail, one of medical science's main purposes to provide us with medications to make us feel better? No one thinks it is wrong to eat whichever foods will most nourish our cells and coax them to their maximum metabolic efficiency. Yet foods are nothing but chemical substances derived from plants or animals that we grow or slaughter, and which we take in our bodies for the purpose of doing us good. In recent years more and more of our foods and our food supplements have become partially synthetic, which does not seem to have rendered them unacceptable. Why should it be considered unnatural, then, to take in any chemical substances that will do us good, especially if the side effects are negligible, even if they happen to be labeled as drugs instead of as food? Even foods are not devoid of side effects. They can, for instance, cause nausea and stomach aches. They can line our arteries with cholesterol. They carry small quantities of pesticides and radioactivity into our system. When we were children, we were all, at one time or another, encouraged to eat foods that we were told (probably erroneously) were good for our brains. Well, that's what the psychopharmacologists are working on.
A real danger inherent in promiscuous drug-taking, of course, is that people might become so enchanted with their drugged states that they have little desire for experience in the real world—a world which does not interest them, perhaps, because it seems both dull and hopeless, a world they were eager in any case to retreat from.
It is too bad that a world so full of intrinsic fascination and adventure can seem so hopeless and uninteresting to people who are neither ill nor poverty-stricken. Perhaps our creative people in all fields of endeavor, from politics to the arts, will want to exert themselves a bit to see that society begins to make better sense again, and that hope begins to seem worth hoping for again. What are people for? What are our human goals and values? What ought they to be? The questions repeat themselves. When we come up with answers that begin to satisfy us, perhaps we can then start building a society whose members will have little need and less desire to retreat from it via the drug route.
Even if individuals could be counted on to use drugs sanely and judiciously, this would only take care of the hazards of self-administration. How we use drugs on ourselves is one thing; how they are used on us is another. The mere existence of a versatile armamentarium of psychochemicals that can bring pain or pleasure, sleep or wakefulness, sexual desire or impotence, feelings of heat or cold, thirst or hunger or satiety; that can offer greater insights and intellectual powers as easily as they can deaden or disorient the mind; that can, in brief, control human brains and therefore human behavior in almost any desired way, holds out prospects that are not guaranteed to cheer us. Whose hands will they fall into? How can we insure that they will be used for our benefit, and not for the selfish or criminal purposes of private parties or of nations? The late Lord Brain voiced his hope "that the scientific freedom which produces this knowledge will act as an effective antidote for its misuse," but he admitted, in the same sentence, that "our experience of nuclear weapons may justify some skepticism about this."
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February 5, 1979, San Francisco Chronicle / UPI, page 10, Mind Control: The CIA's Plan to Create a Nuisance,
Washington
The CIA once proposed mind-control experiments in which hypnotized subjects would have an uncontrollable impulse to "commit a nuisance" on Groundhog Day in 1961, agency documents reveal.
The proposed experiments were contained in formerly secret CIA documents released last week under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Citizens for Honesty in Government, an organization sponsored by the Church of Scientology.
There is no evidence the experiments were carried out.
The proposal was contained in a heavily censored CIA memorandum dated Oct. 20, 1961, which said in part:
"We suggest that initial experimentation on amnesia and post-hypnotic suggestion could most efficiently and with the least risk of embarrassment be tried on (censored) . . . in experiments in which we would go no further than to have them forget the hypnosis episode and on Groundhog Day 1961 have an uncontrollable impulse to return to (censored) and commit a nuisance on the steps of the (censored)."
The memo, whose origin and destination were censored, said the CIA hoped to find out whether an unwilling subject could be quickly hypnotized and whether, once hypnotized, the victim could be made to undergo amnesia and "durable and useful post-hypnotic suggestion."
The memo seemed to indicate that criminals were suggested as the subjects of one set of experiments, and that the subjects should not be persons of high intelligence.
The document also suggested experimenting with the use of hypnosis for interrogating subjects.
"Concurrently with these more or less longer range experiments on low level (censored) subjects, it would be feasible to experiment with hypnosis as an interrogation technique by reopening certain now dormant unsettled cases in (censored) and elsewhere," it said. United Press
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September 29, 1973, San Francisco Chronicle, page 1, A Radio Shocker: Jim Dunbar Is Shot At While He's On the Air,
A deranged young gunman fired three shots at Jim Dunbar's head yesterday while the talk show host was conducting a radio interview, shortly after 10 a.m., at KGO's studio at 277 Golden Gate avenue.
Although the gunman was just a few feet away when he fired, the bullets were deflected by a bulletproof glass window between the studio and the sidewalk outside.
Dunbar, a popular radio personality and host of KGO-TV's morning interview program, "A.M.," shouted to an aide to telephone police as the gunman ran inside the station's offices.
"Hey, will you guys call the cops on that? . . ." his listeners heard Dunbar say. "Whew! I just had a man take a shot at me."
Once inside the station, the gunman shot Ben Munson, 47, an advertising account executive for KGO radio.
Then, with several executives in pursuit, the youth passed Dunbar's view twice before heading for Hyde street.
SUICIDE
The young man shot himself in the head outside Hastings College of the Law and died two hours later at San Francisco General Hospital. Munson, the advertising executive, was in critical condition early today.
Munson, a KGO employee for 14 years, lives in San Rafael with his wife and five children.
Homicide Inspector Hobert Nelson identified the gunman as Lawrence Kwong, 25, who lived at the Westside Lodge, a psychiatric rehabilitation center at 1000 Fulton street.
KGO officials said last night they had been notified by the center that Kwong apparently held a gnawing grudge against Dunbar.
In a California street apartment he occupied until six months ago, he had scrawled: "Dunbar is an evil S.O.B. and has to be done away with."
Dunbar had just completed an hour's discussion with Congressman Jerome Waldie and was getting into an interview with Steven Wasserman of the National Lawyers Guild when the shooting began.
Waldie had left the station and was in his automobile with the radio turned to KGO when he heard Dunbar's shouts over the air.
"I had had a feeling that guy was dangerous," Waldie said later. "He kept walking past the window and he looked strange — like he was high on something.
"At one point, Jim (Dunbar) waved to him and he smiled back."
Waldie said he had mentioned his impression of Kwong to Dunbar, who replied, "I don't like the looks of that man either, but don't worry — there's five inches of bulletproof glass between us."
So Dunbar and the Democratic congressman had continued with their discussion of Vice President Spiro Agnew.
SHOOTING
When Kwong later pulled out his .22-caliber pistol and began firing, right at Dunbar's head, Dunbar shouted for assistants to call police.
Kwong encountered Munson right inside the station door. Five shots were heard. One of those apparently lodged in Kwong's own left leg.
Bob Benson, the station's operations director, heard the shots — "they sounded like firecrackers," he said — and came out to see what was going on.
CHASE
Accompanied by two other KGO executives, Ron Denman and Al Racco, Benson followed Kwong out the door to Golden Gate avenue.
Kwong staggered around, changed directions a couple of times, then ran to Hyde street and around the corner.
As the three from KGO pursued him, a messenger, standing next to his bicycle, shouted, "Don't go after him; he's just reloaded."
Denman carefully went around the corner while, a block away, at Hyde and McAllister, outside Hastings College of the Law, Kwong put the gun to his own head, pulled the trigger and fell to the ground.
Denman walked over to him and kicked the gun away.
Benson said neither he nor anyone else at the radio station had any idea why Kwong wanted to shoot Dunbar.
"As far as I can tell, he was just an isolated psycho," said Benson.
HIATUS
The station went into three minutes of commercials after the shooting began. When live programming returned, listeners heard the voice of Gregg Jordan, KGO's sports director.
"I'm a little shaky," Dunbar had said. "I don't feel like going back in there right now."
At about noon, Dunbar spoke to reporters.
"I had the feeling there was something peculiar about this guy," Dunbar said. "He kept appearing and he was shaking. It made me uneasy."
When Kwong fired at him, Dunbar said, "it sounded like somebody rapping on the glass."
The glass cracked, but didn't shatter.
Inspector Nelson, investigating Kwong's background, said the young man once had been treated at San Francisco General Hospital for some sort of mental problem.
Westside Lodge is one of the services of Westside Community Mental Health Center.
Dr. William D. Pierce, director of the mental health center, said the service is run by Pacific Medical Center.
SILENCE
Dr. Allen Enelow, chief of psychiatry at Pacific Medical Center, said he was prohibited by law from discussing a patient or a patient's medical history.
Dr. Enelow said, however, that Westside Lodge handles patients who have been in hospitals for treatment and are "presumed to be recovering."
It was learned from another source that Kwong was admitted to Westside Lodge after 85 days in St. Mary's Hospital. St. Mary's Hospital acknowledged Kwong had spent 85 days there — but wouldn't say why he was in the hospital.
BROTHER
Kwong was believed to have a brother living somewhere on the Peninsula. Homicide Lieutenant Charles Ellis said that was being checked out.
KGO announced, meanwhile, that Dunbar will be back at work on his programs today.
KGO radio said last night that Kwong's mother is in a mental hospital in Hong Kong.
The station also said Kwong believed "KGO radio was controlling his mind. He once went to Hawaii to get away from KGO radio," one of his fellow patients said.
A private detective, John Immendorf, said he was contacted six months ago by Kwong, who told him he had been kidnapped — and that a transmitter had been implanted in his stomach.
Kwong wanted Immendorf to investigate the station, because the signals from his stomach could only be picked up by KGO, he claimed.
Dunbar, 42, came to KGO radio in March 1963 from WLS, the American Broadcasting Company's station in Chicago.
He came here as the station's program director and four months later took over as host of a talk show. He began doubling on Channel 7 television in January 1966. Dunbar grew up in Detroit, is a graduate of Michigan State College, and worked on radio stations in Detroit, East Lansing, Mich., Manhattan, Kan., and New Orleans, before moving to Chicago.
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