An Account of the MK-ULTRA Doctors on 11/22/63

[Robert Howard]

This is a passage from Secrets and Lies - A History of CIA Mind Control & Germ Warfare - Gordon Thomas; detailing the activities of Dr. Ewan Cameron, William Buckley, the CIA Station Chief, who was murdered years later, Dr. Gottlieb and Dr. Harold Wolff before and after November 22, 1963. I will say I have read over a hundred accounts of various "persons" accounts of November 22, 1963, and this is certainly among the most compelling and important.

I do not believe everything in this segment is true, but I am sure a lot of people have never seen this, which is why I am posting it,

page 263

.....After Dr. Gottlieb had decided to send Dr. Wolff and his two associates to Montreal to reassess the value of Dr. Cameron's work, he sent a "MOST-SECRET" message to the telex machine in Buckley's office in Saigon, saying that three

more "medical specialists" would be arriving to conduct further "research." Buckley was to ensure there were sufficient numbers of "subjects" for testing. Afterwards, Buckley was to return with the specialists to Langley. When the message arrived, Buckley was out of Saigon on a field trip on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Named after North Vietnam's legendary leader, the trail was the supply route long which men and supplies from the North reinforced the Vietcong guerrillas. Buckley had placed his own "assets" along the trail, men the Vietcong called the my-nguy, American puppets. If caught,they were tortured and executed. Buckley had lost scores of my-nguy over the past year. The purpose of this trip was to find replacements for them. He would make the usual offer — in return for working for him he would arrange for them to go to America with their families when the war ended.

Buckley returned to Saigon to find Gottleib’s message. He set about making preparations. There may have been a time when he would have questioned what he was being asked to do.

“But long ago I had learned that if I did not do it, it would probably make no difference to the outcome of the war in the end. America had supremacy in its fighter-bombers, napalm and rockets. But the guerillas knew how to take advantage of the terrain. However hard the Stars and Stripes newspaper tried to promote America’s eventual victory, the truth was that every night our transports left with our dead in our body bags for home. MK-ULTRA had become a big, bad, black game which men like Gottlieb and Cameron and others like them played because they wanted to believe. Not actually believed, but wanted to,” Buckley later recalled.

Nevertheless, on that tropical energy-sapping day in November, he went to Bien Hoa Prison and arranged for some fifty of Vietcong prisoners to be placed in the same holding pen Dr. Gottlieb’s surgeons had previously used for their human guinea pigs. The next day two staff doctors, a pathologist and a psychiatrist from Pacific State Hospital in California arrived.

Each had brought with him a portable ECG machine. That afternoon the first dozen prisoners were strapped down on tables. Each man was given six electroshocks. In the next two hours all fifty were similarly shocked. After six hours they were brought back and given a further twenty separate shocks. Twelve hours later the process was repeated. In between, the psychiatrist questioned the prisoners. He was trying to establish if the shocks would produce an admission from each prisoner that he had come to realize that Communism was “bad.”

All the captives said was they feared further treatments. The doctors raised the settings on the ECG machines. Within two days the first prisoner was dead. Ten more succumbed. Autopsies carried out by the pathologist showed the men died from heart failure. That night Buckley flew with the team back to Los Angeles. Hardly anyone spoke on the long flight. “It was more than a sense of having failed. It was the feeling that they should not have started in the first place,” Buckley decided.

Upon landing, he found a message from Dr. Gottlieb ordering him to take the next flight to Mexico City. Waiting at the airport was the hypnotist who taught him in New York.

He handed Buckley a sealed envelope. It contained Dr. Gottlieb’s instructions for Operation Mindbender. This centered on turning a Mexican CIA informer, who was now suspected of working for the KGB, into an assassin. It would involve the hypnotist putting the man into a trance and Buckley then taking him to the restaurant where the local KGB station chief was known to dine. The agent was to shoot the Russian. In the expected confusion, Buckley was then to shoot the Mexican. To hypnotize the agent, a suite had been booked in the city’s Sheraton Hotel. For two days Buckley and the hypnotist waited for the Mexican to turn up. He never did. It was only later that Buckley learned the KGB resident, suspecting something was afoot, had arranged to have the man flown to Cuba. His fate there remained unknown. Operation Mindbender took almost $4,000 more out of the MK-ULTRA budget. During his stay in Mexico, Buckley met with the CIA’s station chief in the city. The man told him that the only excitement in his work had been the discovery that a former radar operator in the U.S. Marine Corps, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, had shown up in the city in their company of a KGB officer. They had made several trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies as well as mixing with various groups of Cuban exiles in the city. The station chief said he had filed a report on the matter but there had been no follow-up from Langley. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Arriving in Langley, Buckley was told by Dr. Gottlieb that he was to travel with the assignment team to Montreal. The team took the morning flight from Washington to Montreal arriving there in the early afternoon of November 22, 1963. The newspapers on the flight were filled with accounts of President Kennedy’s progress in Texas and how he appeared to be healing the factionalism between State Governor John Connolly and Senator Ralph Yarborough, which at one time had threatened to destroy the Texas Democratic Party. By the time the team reached the Institute, the cab radio announced that the Kennedy entourage had landed at Love Field, Dallas, and the presidential motorcade was heading into the city. Dr. Cameron greeted his visitors and led them on a tour of the wards. At each bed, Dr. Wolff flicked through a case file before questioning those patients who were conscious. Others lay there, eyes opened,

staring fixedly, too regressed to communicate. The physicians did not bother to disguise their disquiet. Dr. Wolff repeatedly asked Dr. Cameron: “Are these typical of your successes?”

He was told they were good examples of “positive treatment” either from “depatterning” or “psychic driving.” Buckley heard Dr. Wolff murmur to his colleagues he had a feeling “We are living in two worlds. Cameron’s and the real one.”

They had reached South-Two when a nurse ran from a day room shouting, He’s been shot! Someone shot the President!” Dr. Cameron stared at her: Lassie control yourself. What nonsense are you saying?” Buckley followed by Dr. Wolff, ran to the day room. On the television screen, an announcer had interrupted the afternoon soap opera with news from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. For long minutes they all stood before the television listening to the updates coming over the screen from Dallas. What made it even more surreal for Buckley was the giggling that came from one of the patients slumped in a wheelchair. Dr. Cameron ordered a nurse to take the man outside. Finally came the news that Kennedy was dead. Buckley’s first response was to ask himself, how could this have happened? Where was the warning? Then he remembered the MOST SECRET report he had received before leaving Saigon. It was a CIA appraisal of the threat level to the President, based upon the growing opposition to the Vietnam War.

Could this be the start of a second civil war in America?

Beside him, Dr. Wolff was whispering to his colleagues.

Buckley caught some of the words, “enough...let him get out...back to Washington....seen enough.” Dr. Cameron was speaking: “There is much more to see. You can’t leave like this! I have important projects to show you. New ones to discuss.”

Buckley remembered later that the protests in Dr. Cameron’s voice had been “unreal. Here we had our President assassinated and he was talking about his projects. Wolff was right. The man was out of touch.”

Thirty minutes later, with his visitors heading to the airport, Dr. Cameron sat alone behind his desk. Before he left, Dr. Wolff had said he would not be recommending that the Society for Investigation of Human Ecology support any new grant applications for the Institute. On the way to the airport, Dr. Wolff told Buckley: “This madness has to stop. What I have seen today makes it clear that Cameron is a liability. His links with us have to be severed.”

When Buckley returned to Langley, he found the Agency gripped in a collective paranoia. The belief in an elaborate plot to murder the President had taken root early on when as Associated Press wire message announced that a Secret Service agent had been shot and killed in the vicinity of the assassination. The message had been quickly corrected. But it took many hours before the CIA was ready to let go of the idea that the Russians had struck. That belief was reinforced when Buckley mentioned what the station chief in Mexico had told him about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had been seized for carrying out the killing. “In moments,” he was to remember, the whole of the Operations area was in uproar. Men were sent to Mexico, to Florida, to infiltrate the Cuban community. To anywhere where Oswald had been, may have been, could have been — and sometimes where he manifestly had not been.”

Buckley found himself back at his analyst’s desk trying to figure out the genesis of a plot. On a TV set, he watched the unfolding drama: Lyndon Johnson taking the presidential oath of office on board Air Force One; the bloodstained and grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy beside him, the body of her husband in the aircraft hold. Buckley watched the plane land at Andrews Air Force Base a little over two hours later, then the separation of the old and new; Johnson taking the helicopter ride to the White House, the Kennedy entourage following the coffin to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an autopsy that continued through the night. Just before dawn the casket, covered with the American flag, was carried into the White House and placed on a catafalque in the East Room. Buckley could barely suppress his tears as Mrs. Kennedy knelt at the side of the coffin and hid her face in the flag’s shield of stars.

For Buckley, like the rest of America and the whole western world, the next three days passed in a blur. He ate at his desk, catnapped on a couch, didn’t bother to wash or shave as he tried to make sense of what happened.On the fourth day he was ordered to get some proper rest. Instead he sat before the TV in his apartment and watched the funeral. Like the assassination, it was televised around the world. The next day, he was back at Langley, “trying to pick up the pieces again.”Richard Helms took him aside and said the assassination had been the work “of a lone nut. We are now certain of that.”

The day after the President’s funeral, Buckley was back in Montreal with a sealed envelope from Dr. Gottlieb. Buckley handed over the envelope to Dr. Cameron explaining he was to read it in his presence. Dr. Cameron did as he was instructed.

“Have you fully understood the contents, Dr. Cameron?” Buckley asked. The psychiatrist nodded. It was the only indication he had heard the question. Buckley reached across

the desk and retrieved the letter and its envelope. He replaced the letter in the envelope and resealed it with a piece of Scotch tape. “It was written on Cameron’s face. “Finished.”

Buckley was on the next flight back to Washington.

Dr. Cameron’s secretary, Dorothy Trainor, would recall that, almost overnight, he became aged and withdrawn. On November 26 he dictated to her a memo to all research staff that they were to wind up their projects. he told Dr. Roper, “They are out to get me.” He didn't amplify on who "they" were.

Edited January 8, 2012 by Robert Howard

[David Andrews]

Thank you, Robert. How can you say you're leaving us?

[Robert Howard]

Thank you, Robert. How can you say you're leaving us?

David, I appreciate your interest in my participation here at the Forum. I have too much invested in ascertaining the real truth of the JFK assassination, to just up and leave. I get a little bit frustrated at times, because of the condescending,

patronizing analysis of my posts by some of the experts who don't contribute much to the revealing of facts, but have plenty of caustic, snide remarks if what they read does not fit in with their opinions about what happened.

Some of the areas that are of intense interest, Oswald and ONI, details about the real Jack Ruby and his role

in the JFK assassination, and German connections to the JFK assassination, as well as MK-ULTRA, are areas I have

done extensive research on......I can make my case, which I fully intend to continue doing...

Edited January 10, 2012 by Robert Howard

[John Dolva]

Robert, you should take the 'attacks' as a compliment. Anyway, who gives a .... about that. I doubt there are many who read and do not recognise the quality of your contributions. I think perhaps when one cannot fault a post often it's good to leave it as a final say.

[Evan Marshall]

Robert, I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said, "You know you're on the right path when the Dunces have conspired against you."

keep up the good work and keep it here.

[Robert Howard]

Robert, I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said, "You know you're on the right path when the Dunces have conspired against you."

keep up the good work and keep it here.

David, John, Evan; You probably don't realize how much your words mean to me. I have a point to make that may or may not surprise you, and that is my JFK collection...documents, books, videos articles, numbers, we'll lets say 1,000 is a starting point.

I don't say that to boast, but to point out that the chronology of assassination related information ascends chronologically to include practically everything that is important to me.....

Maybe that is why I am still optimistic about the issue of resolution.

I will give you an example....

The Oswald/Ruby issue......

I believe there was something regarding Jack Ruby about two-weeks before the assassination, that provides a clue to who was directing the convergence of Ruby and Oswald at least on Ruby's end. Jack Ruby did something that day he hadn't ever done in the almost 17 years that he had lived in Dallas.

It was the fact that Jack Ruby rented a PO Box.....

Oswald had rented his Dallas PO Box on November 1, 1963

I learned this initially by reading that claim by Michael Eddowes.....I was skeptical at first thinking

that Ruby had been a PCI for the FBI in 1959.....

But back then Ruby had used a safety deposit box as part of his PCI informant setup

[in Dallas in the period August 21, 1959 and September 4, 1959], during the period when he was

acting as a Potential Criminal Informant (PCI) for the FBI’s SA Charles T. Flynn.

It does appear Eddowes was correct in saying that this was Ruby’s first use of

a Post Office Box since moving to Dallas in 1947.

I'm still working on it, but this isn't exactly Trivial Pursuit, at least not to me.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Robert Howard

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Robert, I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said, "You know you're on the right path when the Dunces have conspired against you."

keep up the good work and keep it here.

Dito. You are one of the three most interesting posters on the Forum IMO.

[William Kelly]

Robert, I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said, "You know you're on the right path when the Dunces have conspired against you."

keep up the good work and keep it here.

David, John, Evan; You probably don't realize how much your words mean to me. I have a point to make that may or may not surprise you, and that is my JFK collection...documents, books, videos articles, numbers, we'll lets say 1,000 is a starting point.

I don't say that to boast, but to point out that the chronology of assassination related information ascends chronologically to include practically everything that is important to me.....

Maybe that is why I am still optimistic about the issue of resolution.

I will give you an example....

The Oswald/Ruby issue......

I believe there was something regarding Jack Ruby about two-weeks before the assassination, that provides a clue to who was directing the convergence of Ruby and Oswald at least on Ruby's end. Jack Ruby did something that day he hadn't ever done in the almost 17 years that he had lived in Dallas.

It was the fact that Jack Ruby rented a PO Box.....

Oswald had rented his Dallas PO Box on November 1, 1963

I learned this initially by reading that claim by Michael Eddowes.....I was skeptical at first thinking

that Ruby had been a PCI for the FBI in 1959.....

But back then Ruby had used a safety deposit box as part of his PCI informant setup

[in Dallas in the period August 21, 1959 and September 4, 1959], during the period when he was

acting as a Potential Criminal Informant (PCI) for the FBI’s SA Charles T. Flynn.

It does appear Eddowes was correct in saying that this was Ruby’s first use of

a Post Office Box since moving to Dallas in 1947.

I'm still working on it, but this isn't exactly Trivial Pursuit, at least not to me.

Yes, Robert, thanks for the insight into the MKULTRA docs on 11/22/63 and how it affected their work.

I had missed it when you first posted it.

Also Evan, have you read William Kennedy Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces,"?

It takes place in the French Quarter of New Orleans and depicts a young man who is almost arrested at one of Oswald's FPCC leafleting spots by a cop named Mancuso for being a communiss, and takes on quite a funny bent. Toole couldn't get the manuscript published and committed suicide, but his mother took it to a literature professor at a New Orleans university and he had it published and it won a Pulitzer Prize. I think Toole began his story because of Oswald's activities in New Orleans in the summer of '63,

And Robert, Keep up the good work, and keep me (us) posted on what you find,

BK

JFKcountercoup

[Robert Howard]

Robert, I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said, "You know you're on the right path when the Dunces have conspired against you."

keep up the good work and keep it here.

David, John, Evan; You probably don't realize how much your words mean to me. I have a point to make that may or may not surprise you, and that is my JFK collection...documents, books, videos articles, numbers, we'll lets say 1,000 is a starting point.

I don't say that to boast, but to point out that the chronology of assassination related information ascends chronologically to include practically everything that is important to me.....

Maybe that is why I am still optimistic about the issue of resolution.

I will give you an example....

The Oswald/Ruby issue......

I believe there was something regarding Jack Ruby about two-weeks before the assassination, that provides a clue to who was directing the convergence of Ruby and Oswald at least on Ruby's end. Jack Ruby did something that day he hadn't ever done in the almost 17 years that he had lived in Dallas.

It was the fact that Jack Ruby rented a PO Box.....

Oswald had rented his Dallas PO Box on November 1, 1963

I learned this initially by reading that claim by Michael Eddowes.....I was skeptical at first thinking

that Ruby had been a PCI for the FBI in 1959.....

But back then Ruby had used a safety deposit box as part of his PCI informant setup

[in Dallas in the period August 21, 1959 and September 4, 1959], during the period when he was

acting as a Potential Criminal Informant (PCI) for the FBI’s SA Charles T. Flynn.

It does appear Eddowes was correct in saying that this was Ruby’s first use of

a Post Office Box since moving to Dallas in 1947.

I'm still working on it, but this isn't exactly Trivial Pursuit, at least not to me.

Yes, Robert, thanks for the insight into the MKULTRA docs on 11/22/63 and how it affected their work.

I had missed it when you first posted it.

Also Evan, have you read William Kennedy Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces,"?

It takes place in the French Quarter of New Orleans and depicts a young man who is almost arrested at one of Oswald's FPCC leafleting spots by a cop named Mancuso for being a communiss, and takes on quite a funny bent. Toole couldn't get the manuscript published and committed suicide, but his mother took it to a literature professor at a New Orleans university and he had it published and it won a Pulitzer Prize. I think Toole began his story because of Oswald's activities in New Orleans in the summer of '63,

And Robert, Keep up the good work, and keep me (us) posted on what you find,

BK

JFKcountercoup

Still doing some digging, on the aforementioned topics, but in the meantime I thought the following were rather interesting.......

ALLEGATION - “In 1963, When Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, [William "Billy" Mellon] Hitchcock rented a fifty-room mansion in Millbrook, New York where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California

The Story of Acid Profiteers - Mary Jo Warth Village Voice

My God What Have We Done

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/kreca1.html

END

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA) - November 12, 1998

Deceased Name: MARGARET MELLON HITCHCOCK 'THROWBACK' TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF WEALTH AND POWER IN THE CITY

The death of Margaret Mellon Hitchcock - wealthy daughter of Gulf Oil's patriarch, world traveler, wife of an international polo star and war hero and mother of five children after being widowed twice by age 43 - marks the latest ending to an age of incredible but fading industrial wealth and power.

Though she did her part to keep the age alive.

For years, Mrs. Hitchcock kept her summer house in Beaumaris, Canada - where she and other Mellon family members have gathered for generations - preserved as it was when she was a girl. Boats bought by Mrs. Hitchcock's father, William Larimer Mellon, a co-founder and longtime president of Gulf Oil, looked the same as they did in the 1920's.

Furnishings were the same. Manners were the same, too.

''She ran the house the way her father ran it,'' said a grandson, Peter H. Stephaich of Shadyside. ''We had sit-down meals every day. Most people, when they're on vacation, go into the kitchen and make a sandwich. Not at her house.''

''She was a throwback to another era,'' he said.

Mrs. Hitchcock, a resident of Palm Beach, Fla., died Monday night of natural causes in her apartment in New York City. She was 97.

The grandniece of U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon and great-granddaughter of Mellon Bank founder Judge Thomas Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1901. As her father built Gulf Oil into one of the largest companies in the world - it once was twice as big as U.S. Steel - she grew up in her family's now-demolished 40-room mansion at the end of Darlington Road at the edge of Schenley Park.

Mrs. Hitchcock spent summers and other time off from her finishing school in Dobb's Ferry, New York, fishing with her father. Along with other family members - including her late brother Larry, who founded the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in central Haiti - they went for smallmouth bass in Canada and bonefish in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean. Other times they took her father's 220-foot yacht ''Vagabondia'' to South America, Tahiti and the South Seas in search of other trophies, some of which were brought back to the Carnegie Museum for study.

In 1924, Mrs. Hitchcock married Alexander Laughlin, grandson of the founder of Central Tube of Ambridge, and had a son the next year. Laughlin died in 1926. Later that year she married Thomas Hitchcock Jr., a World War I flyer, polo star and stockbroker, and moved to New York.

By the time they married, Thomas Hitchcock had been shot down behind German lines and escaped 100 miles on foot to Switzerland; had led the American polo squad to International Cup wins over the British; and routinely flown his Fairchild 24 seaplane to work on Wall Street, landing it in the East River. They had four children and lived on Long Island.

Lt. Col. Thomas Hitchcock went to England in 1942 to fight in World War II and died two years later when his P-51 Mustang fighter crashed in a training exercise in Salisbury. Mrs. Hitchcock was left to raise her five children on her own.

As her children grew, Mrs. Hitchcock divided her time between New York, Florida and Canada and became a patron of arts and charities.

''She knew the arts, ballet, music. . . . She was from an old school of ladies who didn't go to college but lived to raise families and entertain people,'' said Bill Simpson, a longtime friend.

Mrs. Hitchcock supported Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration - endowed by her parents a year after her father's death in 1949 - and the Carnegie Museum. She also supported the Raymond F. Kravits Center for the Performing Arts, the Hospice Guild of Palm Beach, the Intercoastal Health Foundation in West Palm Beach and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Hitchcock rarely came to Pittsburgh in later life but the city was ''near and dear'' to her, said Stephaich.

''With her family history and the wealth it created, she believed in the values that Pittsburgh stood for. She was very attached to the city, so much so that she asked to be buried here,'' he said.

Mrs. Hitchcock is survived by her sons, Alexander Mellon Laughlin, Thomas Hitchcock III and William Mellon Hitchcock; daughters Louise Stephaich and Peggy Hitchcock; and 11 grandchildren.

A private service and interment will be held today at Homewood Cemetery.

The family suggests memorial contributions to Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration, 4902 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh 15213.

END

William Pickard's long, strange trip

Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a missile silo in Kansas

Seth Rosenfeld,

San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, June 10, 2001

(06-10) 04:00 PST Wamego, Kan. -- - On a cold afternoon last November, federal drug agents staked out a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in the gently rolling fields and watched as a tall, thin San Francisco man in black clothing and long silver hair tried to get in.

Oblivious to the trap, William L. Pickard Jr., a University of California at Los Angeles researcher who studies psychoactive drugs of the future, took several aluminum canisters from a silo shed, put them in his rented Buick and merged into traffic.

Minutes later, red lights and sirens pulsing, Kansas Highway Patrol officers stopped Pickard and a friend following him in a van. Clyde Apperson, a Mountain View business consultant, was arrested. But Pickard bolted from his Buick, which rolled into a ditch as the marathon-running vegetarian vanished into the heartland dusk.

Inside the vehicles, agents found sophisticated laboratory equipment and what they allege is enough raw material to make 16 million doses of LSD. Pickard, they say, was poised to use the missile base, built during the Cold War to defend the American way of life, to make the drug that helped launch the 1960s counterculture and inspired Timothy Leary's exhortations to "turn on,tune in and drop out."

This is the story about the life and times of Pickard, a brilliant chemist who was deputy director of UCLA's Drug Policy Research Program, and how he came to be accused of conspiring to run one of the nation's largest LSD labs.

The tale unfolds amid a budding psychedelic renaissance rooted in the Bay Area. Hallucinogens have turned up at raves where they are used to party, at psychiatrists' offices where they have been part of therapy and at universities where scientists are conducting the first authorized human tests on them in decades.

The case highlights law enforcement suspicions that since the hippie era, Northern California has been a haven for elusive, close-knit groups who supply most of the nation's "acid" in the belief that it fosters enlightenment.

The Chronicle has learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration has investigated whether a surreal assortment of other people played a part in the alleged conspiracy - including women from a San Francisco strip joint, a Harvard psychiatrist, and a Manhattan financier who is a trustee of the American Ballet Theatre.

The DEA also has probed claims that Pickard funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in LSD profits to fund his own position at UCLA and to support ostensibly legitimate drug researchers at Harvard and the Heffter Research Institute, a Santa Fe, N.M., group leading the push for more studies of psychedelics. Heffter's lawyer denied the claim.

Pickard, 55, and Apperson, 46, have denied charges of possessing LSD and conspiracy, and face a June 21 hearing in Topeka.

Pickard's lawyers, William Rork of Topeka, and William Osterhoudt of San Francisco, contend their client was framed by an Oklahoma con man who owned the missile silo and became an informant to avoid his own charges of making

LSD. In a phone call from Leavenworth federal prison, where he is being held without bail, Pickard said he opposes drug abuse and is straighter than most narcs.

"I'm not a drug user at all," he said softly. "Nor do I synthesize controlled substances or distribute them. I don't even drink. A big drug experience to me would be a cup of coffee."

It was 1974 and Pickard went to San Francisco's federal building to pay his respects.

Tim Scully was on trial for making huge batches of LSD in a Sonoma County farmhouse. Scully believed the drug could raise people's consciousness and had bluntly told the court he had wanted to "turn on the world."

"There was a break, and I walked out into the hall, and he introduced himself as a fellow chemist," recalled Scully, once an "apprentice" to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the most infamous psychedelic sorcerer of the '60s.

Pickard smiled and handed Scully a U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Group pin with a flask and test tube design. "He was trying to express some brotherhood of underground chemists," said Scully, noting that many acid chemists felt "we were doing a public service."

Later, Pickard paid $5,000 for a print by Dutch artist M.C. Escher, "Heaven and Hell," that Scully sold to pay legal fees. It showed angels and devils and seemed to reflect the LSD experience.

Nowhere was that experience more concentrated than the Haight in the sixties, which became a world center of a counterculture electrified by LSD.

The most potent hallucinogen known, LSD can produce kaleidoscopic hallucinations, profoundly alter perceptions and cause experiences ranging from transcendent to terrifying.

Used initially to study personality disorders, LSD had seeped into the mainstream before the government banned it in 1966. Then clandestine chemists like Scully filled the void.

Pickard, a bright young man who had had trouble with authority and a special interest in chemistry, was among the throngs drawn to the Bay Area in 1967.

"No one had quite seen anything like it," Pickard said, "so many people stepping out of line . . . discussing theology and philosophy, seeking explanations, exploring their place in life."

Pickard was raised in a Baptist family in the Atlanta suburbs. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a fungal disease expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In high school, he was an honors student, played basketball and was named "most intellectual." But in 1965, he was arrested for driving a stolen car.

Pickard still won a scholarship to Princeton University. But he cut class to hang out in Greenwich Village jazz clubs and withdrew after one term, he said.

By 1971, he had landed work as a research manager at UC Berkeley's Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, a job he held until 1974, when his academic resume begins a 20-year gap.

Public records show he studied chemistry at San Jose State and Stanford universities. And at San Francisco State University, he took a course on social drugs taught by Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, whose pioneering research on the hallucinogenic amphetamine MDMA has earned him renown as the "Godfather of Ecstacy."

"He was a very interested student," recalled Shulgin.

In 1976, San Mateo County Sheriff's deputies arrested Pickard for possessing hallucinogenic peyote cactus. In 1977, they raided his Portola Valley home, seizing a small Ecstacy lab. He served six months.

On his release, he faded into the background, favoring inconspicuous cars and clothes.

"He looked like a guy on his way to a golf course," said Mark Dowie, a former Mother Jones editor who met him in the 1980s. "He was, in a way, part of the love generation. He really believed LSD and its derivatives could produce a better culture."

And he could be dramatically romantic, a friend recalled, and once hired Stanford University Band members to serenade a woman friend.

By the early 1980s, Scully was out of prison and home near Mendocino. Pickard dropped by. "He wanted to compare and contrast methods of making acid," said Scully.

Pickard said his interest was purely academic, but the elder chemist declined. He had quit the psychedelic scene.

Pickard left after an hour, said Scully, now a computer engineer.

"All I could do is be friendly and offer him a cup of tea."

In December 1988, a neighbor noticed an odd chemical odor emanating from the architectural shop at a Mountain View industrial park and phoned police.

Agents found a lab and seized more than 200,000 doses of LSD, including blotter paper featuring Grateful Dead album covers.

When officers shined a black light around the lab, the surfaces glowed eerily with LSD dust. While taking the lab apart, one agent became so heavily dosed he collapsed in convulsions.

Pickard was charged with making LSD, pleaded guilty and served about five years. Later, officials revealed that Pickard "had been an informant" for state and federal drug agents.

Pickard said he helped police investigate people supplying equipment to make methamphetamine, which like heroin and cocaine is addictive. He seemed to see psychedelic drugs as beneficial, but eyed addictive drugs as a blight: "I agree with (hippie leader) Wavy Gravy. There's blood on heroin and cocaine."

At a hearing related to his LSD bust, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel warned the then-44-year-old Pickard:

"I hope that the . . . years in the federal penitentiary will be spent wisely. You don't have much time left to straighten out your life."

Released from Terminal Island prison near Los Angeles in August 1992, Pickard went straight to the San Francisco Zen Center.

In prison, he had become a vegetarian and learned to meditate. He would later be ordained as a Buddhist priest.

Pickard lived at the center two years. Each morning, he would ring the temple bell, calling people to 5 a.m. meditation.

And after sweeping the sidewalks outside the center, Pickard went off to classes at UC Berkeley.

To journalist Dowie, Pickard seemed "set on his science and doing something with his life." Occasionally, Pickard attended potluck dinners that brought together some of the leading thinkers on altered states of consciousness.

The psychonauts, as many of them called themselves, met monthly at the Marin County home of John Weir Perry, a Harvard-trained psychotherapist who died in 1998. Perry had studied with Carl Jung. Shulgin, who had taught Pickard 20 years earlier, was among the resident elders. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, computer engineers, scientists, writers and artists also dropped in, the Shulgins said.

The talk lasted into the wee hours and covered consciousness, drugs and policy. Ann Shulgin noted drug use was forbidden.

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at Harvard who had dined with the psychonauts, said Pickard was seen as a "superbrilliant chemist."

In 1994, Pickard enrolled at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government,

where he became personally and professionally close with research fellow Deborah Harlow. They wed, had a daughter, but later separated.

Harlow was a Bay Area therapist who helped pioneer the use of MDMA - before it became illegal in 1985 - as a tool to help clients become more emotionally open. She also worked on a federally funded study of MDMA users.

Over the next few years, Pickard co-wrote a series of brief papers, including a 1994 study on 12 raves that found LSD more common at New York raves and MDMA more common at California raves.

He focused on drug abuse in the former Soviet Union, theorizing that the booming black market and many unemployed chemists could flood the drug market.

As part of the school program, some of Pickard's Russian research was reviewed by Robert S. Gelbard, a Harvard graduate and then-Assistant Secretary of State for International Matters and Law Enforcement Affairs. Gelbard's involvement helped Pickard meet top Russian drug officials, Pickard said. Gelbard did not return calls seeking comment.

The research resulted in a paper, "What can the State Department do about drug problems in Russia?" But according to DEA records, Pickard himself was about to resume work as an underground acid chemist.

On a spring day in 1995, Pickard showed up at the New Mexico home of Al Savinelli, a subject in the first authorized test of psychedelics on humans since the 1970s.

Savinelli had been given successive doses of a powerful hallucinogen called DMT at the University of New Mexico. The experiment drew attention from drug researchers including Pickard, who that day met one of his more prominent colleagues at Savinelli's house.

John Halpern, a psychiatric resident at Harvard University Medical School, had a strong interest in psychoactive drugs. He had recently published a study finding "the illicit use of hallucinogenic drugs is a re-emerging public health problem, especially among well-educated adults and teenagers."

But that day in Taos, Halpern himself was using ayahuasca, a potentially dangerous hallucinogenic tea made from rain forest plants. He was having a bad trip.

He was lost in thoughts of despair and death, he later told the DEA, and Pickard calmed him.

Pickard confided that he had taken "more LSD than anyone on the planet," said Halpern. And as the two Harvard researchers discussed mutual interests over the following months, Pickard became a father figure.

According to a statement Halpern gave the DEA, Halpern told Pickard he was financially strapped and might have to stop his research to take a better- paying job.

Pickard replied that he had more than $1 million in cash from an inheritance - and other money from "the old days," which Halpern figured meant his 1988 LSD operation.

But when Halpern returned to Taos in 1996, Savinelli suggested another source of the money: He said he'd helped Pickard set up an LSD lab.

Halpern claimed he didn't know whether Pickard was doing anything illegal. But he told the DEA that, within a year, Pickard said he was generating lots of cash and wanted to invest it.

Halpern set up a meeting between Pickard and an old friend and financial adviser, Stefan Wathne, 31, who lives in Manhattan and is a trustee of the American Ballet Theatre.

In return for the introduction, Pickard offered Halpern a 10 percent commission on any deals with Wathne. Both Pickard and Wathne later told Halpern that none materialized.

But in January 1998, Pickard handed Halpern a cigar box containing $100,000,

Halpern said, which was followed by another $199,000 in cash.

The DEA has investigated whether Wathne laundered LSD profits for Pickard, records show, and whether Savinelli helped set up LSD labs.

Halpern and Wathne both refused to comment. Pickard denied giving either man drug money. Savinelli denied wrongdoing.

Pickard had said he was not making LSD, Halpern told the DEA, and that he was working for the FBI, the DEA and American spy agencies.

That, he said, might explain his "sometimes bizarre and secretive behavior."

Pickard had other means of moving money, an informant told the DEA.

He may have shipped $1.2 million to Los Angeles with help from three exotic dancers who worked at San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theatre, the informant said.

But the women denied the claims, telling the DEA that they knew Pickard only as a frequent customer of the theater who sometimes dined with them.

And in 1998, the informant said, Pickard used Federal Express to send $97, 700 in LSD profits to Heffter Research Institute, which supports medical studies of psychedelics.

The institute is financing federally approved human experiments with psilocybin at the University of Arizona, and funds studies at Harvard and universities in Switzerland and Russia.

Founded partly out of frustration with what it sees as inadequate government support for such research, Heffter has raised funds from Laurence S. Rockefeller and includes respected scientists at the University of California and other schools. Halpern is a consultant; Shulgin is an adviser.

Jerry Patchen, Heffter's lawyer, said in a letter to The Chronicle that the institute had received no money from Pickard, has complied with all laws and was not the subject of any investigation.

David Nichols, Heffter's president and a professor of pharmacology at Purdue University, said he's seen growing interest in the scientific study of psychedelics.

"I'd like to think its the beginning of a renaissance," he said.

By 1999, Pickard's academic career was peaking.

Kleiman had left his Harvard post to head UCLA's Drug Policy Analysis Program, and named Pickard assistant director.

Funding for Pickard's post mysteriously materialized.

"I got a letter one day from some guy I didn't know," said Kleiman, followed by two checks totaling about $140,000.

Pickard used LSD profits to fund his own post, but disguised its origin by sending it through financial adviser Wathne, the informant said. Pickard denies this.

While at UCLA, Pickard did research in Russia, learning about a plan to make a synthetic opiate and told former DEA head Robert Bonner. "I referred him to a DEA official," Bonner said. Pickard's main focus at UCLA was the Future and Emerging Drugs Study (FEDS), a proposal for an international group of experts to monitor new drugs that could have "novel effects upon personality, memory and learning, addictive behavior, and human performance."

Despite Pickard's academic achievement, Kleiman said, Pickard was rarely around the office and produced few finished papers.

"That was making me nervous," he said.

It was at the Palace of Fine Arts, at a 1997 conference on entheobotany, the study of hallucinogenic plants, that Pickard encountered an eccentric Oklahoma man with an interest in psychedelics and a history of legal trouble.

Gordon Todd Skinner, 36, had lots of cash, Porsches and a missile silo near Topeka, in Wamego.

He bought the Atlas E silo in 1996, lavishly remodeling it and turning the silo grounds into a menagerie of Clydesdale horses, llamas and rare rabbits.

In 1989, he was arrested in New Jersey on charges of selling a large quantity of marijuana. To avoid a stiff sentence he offered to sell three people 30 pounds of pot, then turned them in. The case was dismissed in 1995 after a court said the suspects were illegally wiretapped and "the credibility and character of Skinner was . . . questionable."

Last month, he was arrested for involuntary manslaughter in connection with a 1999 incident in which a man overdosed on depressants at the silo. Skinner has denied the charge.

Skinner also found himself facing potential charges of bank fraud and manufacturing LSD.

Last October, he met with DEA agents and in return for immunity admitted he had laundered LSD profits, delivered thousands of doses and secured lab sites. He claimed Pickard was a longtime LSD chemist, had laundered money through Wathne and sent profits to Heffter. He offered to help ensnare Pickard. Skinner and his lawyer could not be reached for comment.

In recorded calls, Skinner asked Pickard to help move a piano and some boxes from the silo, Pickard said.

In early November, he met Skinner at the silo grounds and discovered that the boxes held an illegal drug lab, Pickard said in court. He said he wanted to call the DEA immediately, but Skinner refused and drove off.

On Nov. 6, Pickard loaded the boxes with plans to destroy the lab, he said.

But when he tried to enter the silo, DEA agents hidden inside held the door shut, as if it was locked.

Then Skinner called on a cell phone, telling Pickard to go to the shed and take some aluminum canisters - allegedly containing the raw material for LSD.

When the officers stopped his Buick, Pickard said, he panicked and fled into the fields.

The next day, a farmer found him in his barn and phoned police.

Again Pickard ran - but the squad car chased him through the mud until he stopped.

"You've got me," he said.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/06/10/MN170988.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1ltEPjp44

E-mail Seth Rosenfeld at srosenfeld@sfchronicle.com.

Edited February 9, 2012 by Robert Howard

[Thomas Graves]

Thank you, Robert. How can you say you're leaving us?

David, I appreciate your interest in my participation here at the Forum. I have too much invested in ascertaining the real truth of the JFK assassination, to just up and leave. I get a little bit frustrated at times, because of the condescending,

patronizing analysis of my posts by some of the experts who don't contribute much to the revealing of facts, but have plenty of caustic, snide remarks if what they read does not fit in with their opinions about what happened.

Some of the areas that are of intense interest, Oswald and ONI, details about the real Jack Ruby and his role

in the JFK assassination, and German connections to the JFK assassination, as well as MK-ULTRA, are areas I have

done extensive research on......I can make my case, which I fully intend to continue doing...

Robert,

Thanks for your preceeding post.

If you haven't done so already, I highly suggest that you read "The Strength of the Wolf" by Douglas Valentine. The book has a lot on the (CIA-FBN) MKULTRA project. Nothing on Cameron, but lots on Sid Gottleib, Charles Siragusa, George White, et al. There's a fascinating chapter called "The FBN and the Assassination of JFK".

--Tommy

[Mark Wengler]

Thank you, Robert. How can you say you're leaving us?

David, I appreciate your interest in my participation here at the Forum. I have too much invested in ascertaining the real truth of the JFK assassination, to just up and leave. I get a little bit frustrated at times, because of the condescending,

patronizing analysis of my posts by some of the experts who don't contribute much to the revealing of facts, but have plenty of caustic, snide remarks if what they read does not fit in with their opinions about what happened.

Some of the areas that are of intense interest, Oswald and ONI, details about the real Jack Ruby and his role

in the JFK assassination, and German connections to the JFK assassination, as well as MK-ULTRA, are areas I have

done extensive research on......I can make my case, which I fully intend to continue doing...

Hope you do stay. Enjoy the posting that you do. Yes you are right about the condescending, that is going on. I think two people can disagree on a topic like this. But i think they can do it in a more civilized manor.

Without getting nasty about it.

[Robert Howard]

Thank you, Robert. How can you say you're leaving us?

David, I appreciate your interest in my participation here at the Forum. I have too much invested in ascertaining the real truth of the JFK assassination, to just up and leave. I get a little bit frustrated at times, because of the condescending,

patronizing analysis of my posts by some of the experts who don't contribute much to the revealing of facts, but have plenty of caustic, snide remarks if what they read does not fit in with their opinions about what happened.

Some of the areas that are of intense interest, Oswald and ONI, details about the real Jack Ruby and his role

in the JFK assassination, and German connections to the JFK assassination, as well as MK-ULTRA, are areas I have

done extensive research on......I can make my case, which I fully intend to continue doing...

Hope you do stay. Enjoy the posting that you do. Yes you are right about the condescending, that is going on. I think two people can disagree on a topic like this. But i think they can do it in a more civilized manor.

Without getting nasty about it.

Thanks for the comments, Mark......

As for below.....

Robert,

If you haven't done so already, I highly suggest that you read "The Strength of the Wolf" by Douglas Valentine. The book has a lot on the (CIA-FBN) MKULTRA project. Nothing on Cameron, but lots on Sid Gottleib, Charles Siragusa, George White, et al. There's a fascinating chapter called "The FBN and the Assassination of JFK"

I actually have had the pleasure of having a few email conversations with Doug, and am intimately familiar with the chapter on the FBN.......

The fact that the Warren Commissioners either intentionally kept FBN out of the written record, re Jack Ruby's background and nefarious MK-ULTRA related issues, or just didn't know, is a question I can't answer.....

But, thanks to Douglas Valentine and the Congressional Hearings re MKULTRA, we have a fairly good understanding

of how all that worked.

When I think about that area, the best insight I can offer is not anything from the Strength of The Wolf, but

some independent work I did on Timothy Leary's life and times in the decades afterwards.

There is a lot of material out there on the subject, but what caught my eye were his own writings,

while some might respond to a comment that Leary's writings in the 1970's were really weird, which

was my reaction, a kneejerk reaction might offer "Well what do you expect from someone who ingested

massive quantities of the dreaded lysergic," but to me there was something even darker to it.

One thing is quite certain and that is, while the mind-control MK-ULTRA area could be said to have peaked

right around the time of the JFK assassination, if you've ever read Peter Levenda's works, [he is the real deal, IMO]

not just The Trilogy, but Unholy Alliance, which is about as dark of a netherworld, as one would ever care

to glimpse into, I personally get the impression that if one had the ability to personally know the "history of intelligence operations in the 20th century", not just CIA, but KGB, Mossad, Ustashi, etc., a person might be radically exposed to the reality that "the truth is stranger than fiction." Which in this case is, IMO the relationship between mind-control and the occult.

I will give you something to chew on, as serious as I can be.

If you can read Levenda's account of the assassination of Walter Rathenau in June 1922 [contained in pages 93-97 of Unholy Alliance] if Levenda is correct, and I am sure that he is, there was a terrorist cell within the Ehrhardt Freikorps, called the Organization Consul. The Freikorps were ideologically attuned to the message of, what became the Protocols of Zion; Rathenau, to make a long story short, represented the epitome of the boogeyman the crafters of The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a forged document, had encouraged anyone who had a proclivity to blame "Capitalists, Communists, International Jewry, and Freemasons [and Hitler], as Rathenau, who had been the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, and was also Jewish; the Freikorps actually believed he was a "member" of the alleged Elders, so he was assassinated. If you had the luxury of being able to read the vast amount of literature I have read, not just about the Kennedy Assassination, ANDother 'significant' events of the 20th century, the fact that auto icon Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by Hitler in 1938, and was the only American to make that claim; when you consider that after JFK's assassination, the limo SS-100-X and Ford Motor Co., became intertwined with each other in a manner that......

see

http://www.in-broad-daylight.com/

...well, lets just say it makes you try to take a few steps back, when your assimilating all this data.

Edited February 10, 2012 by Robert Howard