What the CIA Was Looking For

“The CIA spent a decade trying to weaponize LSD and produced nothing useful except a casualty. The program's only lasting contribution was Ken Kesey.”

The CIA's interest in LSD was instrumental: could it extract information from unwilling subjects? Could it break down psychological resistance? Could it program behavior the subject wouldn't remember or resist?

The answer, after a decade of research including Operation Midnight Climax, in which unwitting subjects were dosed in San Francisco safe houses while agents watched through one-way mirrors, was no to all of the above.

What the program produced: in at least one documented case, a death. Frank Olson, the Army researcher secretly dosed by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953, fell from a New York hotel window.

The CIA program's ironic legacy is Ken Kesey. Kesey participated as a paid volunteer in a CIA-sponsored LSD study at the VA hospital in Menlo Park. He obtained LSD through the research network, formed the Merry Pranksters, organized the Acid Tests, and helped drive the counterculture's adoption of LSD, thereby providing the political conditions that made prohibition politically viable.

The CIA was looking for a weapon. What it found, through the pathway it inadvertently opened, was a movement that helped destroy the clinical research program it was simultaneously trying to weaponize.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
• Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979)