C.I.A. Man

[Allen Lowe]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

    A somewhat odd coincidence.  This afternoon, I just happened to finish reading Stephen Kinzer's 2019 biography of MK-Ultra mastermind, Sidney Gottlieb, Poisoner-in-Chief.

    So, looking for some lighter reading material this evening, I resumed Bob Dylan's new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, and eventually arrived at Chapter 27, pausing before each song/chapter to listen to the YouTube recording of the song for the chapter.  (One of tonight's chapters was about Marty Robbins' 1959 cowboy ballad, El Paso, which I knew by heart when I was a kid, but hadn't listened to for decades.)

    Anyway, chapter 27 is about the Fugs 1967 proto-punk song, C.I.A. Man.   I had heard this song before somewhere but I can't remember where.  Was it part of a movie soundtrack?   Punk rock historian Cliff Varnell probably knows.

    I was a bit surprised to hear in the lyrics that the Fugs, obviously, knew in 1967 about Sidney Gottlieb's MK-Ultra LSD research projects-- more than a decade before John Marks published The Search For the Manchurian Candidate, based on the MK-Ultra financial records.

    But, as Kinzer pointed out, John Lennon and other rockers also knew about the CIA's role in pushing LSD, because Lennon once said, "We must remember to thank the CIA for giving us LSD."

    Dylan mentions that the Fugs took their name from Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead, where Mailer used "fug" for "f*ck" to circumvent obscenity allegations.  He also includes a photo in Chapter 27 of Allen Dulles' CIA photo ID card.

    The recording is raw and out-of-tune, like something Iggy Pop might have recorded in a garage, but it's funny.

 

You need to credit a lot more than John Lennon, who was relatively late to the party when it came to New York City political awareness of the CIA. Allen Ginsberg was talking about this very early in the sixties  as were the Fugs in the person of Tuli Kupferberg and the leader Ed Sanders. These guys were doing anti-nuke activities as early as 1961 and 1962. They were well head of their time.

[W. Niederhut]

14 minutes ago, Allen Lowe said:

You need to credit a lot more than John Lennon, who was relatively late to the party when it came to New York City political awareness of the CIA. Allen Ginsberg was talking about this very early in the sixties  as were the Fugs in the person of Tuli Kupferberg and the leader Ed Sanders. These guys were doing anti-nuke activities as early as 1961 and 1962. They were well head of their time.

Interesting.  Kinzer writes about Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Grateful Dead song writer Robert Hunter taking LSD at Stanford, as I recall.  I once listened to an interview of Jerry Garcia where Garcia talked about trying LSD at Kesey's electric kool-aid acid parties in the Bay Area during the formative days of the Dead.  He said LSD gave him a sense of "infinite creative possibilities."

Kinzer also described Sidney Gottlieb's frequent, avid use of LSD, and the way that the drug became quite popular in academic and celebrity circles.  Cary Grant, reportedly, experienced it as a life-altering antidepressant.

Edited November 7, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Ron Bulman]

I've wondered before if this book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: Amazon.com: Books, wasn't inspired by this song, or vice versa.

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Ron Bulman

[David Andrews]

Dave McGowan passed away some time ago.  His pre-publication article series on Laurel Canyon rock stars and MKULTRA is still kicking here:

http://www.whale.to/b/inside_the_lc1.html

An interesting, if dubiously factual, companion to Tom O'Neill's Chaos, thought provoking amid the BS.

[Ron Bulman]

49 minutes ago, David Andrews said:

Dave McGowan passed away some time ago.  His pre-publication article series on Laurel Canyon rock stars and MKULTRA is still kicking here:

http://www.whale.to/b/inside_the_lc1.html

An interesting, if dubiously factual, companion to Tom O'Neill's Chaos, thought provoking amid the BS.

Wow Dave.  This gets deep in a hurry.  Zappa's dad worked at Edgewood as a chemist.  For Gottlieb? 

 

[Cliff Varnell]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

 

    Anyway, chapter 27 is about the Fugs 1967 proto-punk song, C.I.A. Man.   I had heard this song before somewhere but I can't remember where.  Was it part of a movie soundtrack?   Punk rock historian Cliff Varnell probably knows.

 

Appeared on their album Virgin Fugs

Who can take the sugar from its sack 
Pour in LSD and put it back? 
xxxxing-a man! 
CIA Man!
 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Cliff Varnell

[Robbie Robertson]

John potash and Stephen kinzer on my show briefly mentioned this but you can find Gottlieb was used in some of the Assassination attempts on Castro and lumumba 

 

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4183168/DCI-LTR-TO-U-S-SENATE-RE-SECOND-SECRETARY-OF.pdf

 

also found this which is interesting if you look at the mkultra stuff 

 

https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/22409199-oswald-and-lsd

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Robbie Robertson

[George Govus]

My introduction to the history of CIA interest in LSD came in the form of Acid Dreams, a social history of psychedelia by Lee and Shlain in 1998.

Ron, the Grateful Dead released "Truckin'" in 1970, a bit later on than the period which inspired Wolfe to write The Kool-Aid Acid Test. Knowledgeable folks said Wolfe's book would have been better if Wolfe had himself "drunk the kool-aid."  For a song that clearly was influenced by the Dead's tenure as the Acid Test house band, you want to listen to "The Other One," the meaty center of the song suite called "That's It For The Other One."

 

 

[Robbie Robertson]

5 minutes ago, George Govus said:

My introduction to the history of CIA interest in LSD came in the form of Acid Dreams, a social history of psychedelia by Lee and Shlain in 1998.

Ron, the Grateful Dead released "Truckin'" in 1970, a bit later on than the period which inspired Wolfe to write The Kool-Aid Acid Test. Knowledgeable folks said Wolfe's book would have been better if Wolfe had himself "drunk the kool-aid."  For a song that clearly was influenced by the Dead's tenure as the Acid Test house band, you want to listen to "The Other One," the meaty center of the song suite called "That's It For The Other One."

 

 

Check out David Blavk and his books on lsd and the weather underground he’s been on my show twice and his books cover a lot and had me interested in Timothy Leary I did a few episodes on but nobody wants to touch the MKULTRA stuff. David talbot and me went into it a bit but names ive seen across various documents related to mkultra are

Ewen Cameron 

Sydney Gottlieb 

Joylon West

The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens with- out their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and per- sonnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge.
These institutes, these individuals, have a right to know who they
are and how and when they were used. As of today, the Agency itself
refuses to declassify the names of those institutions and individuals, quite appropriately, I might say, with regard to the individuals under the Privacy Act. It seems to me to be a fundamental responsibility to notify those individuals or institutions, rather. I think many of them were caught up in an unwitting manner to do research for the Agency. Many researchers, distinguished researchers, some of our most outstanding members of our scientific community, involved in this network, now really do not know whether they were involved or not, and it seems to me that the whole health and climate in terms of our university and our scientific and health facilities are entitled to
that response.

 

and that’s here 

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/95mkultra.pdf

 

 

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

Slow down here Chris.  The spiking his drink and throwing him out the window occurred several days apart.  He went to a retreat in the woods at a cabin by a lake with a half dozen or more coworkers, organized by Gottlieb.  He spiked the drinks of all the test subjects.  Only Olsen reacted negatively later.  He alone couldn't be trusted with the knowledge he possessed given his reaction.

Hi Ron,

Thanks. I hold my hands up if I have the wrong end of the stick here, it was a long while back I watched this stuff. I just remember the son talking about it in a documentary and his fight for justice. I need to go back to it. 

[Lori Spencer]

7 hours ago, David Andrews said:

Dave McGowan passed away some time ago.  His pre-publication article series on Laurel Canyon rock stars and MKULTRA is still kicking here:

http://www.whale.to/b/inside_the_lc1.html

An interesting, if dubiously factual, companion to Tom O'Neill's Chaos, thought provoking amid the BS.

“Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon” blew my mind when I first read it many moons ago. McGowan connected all those microdots into a story that was quite a trip in itself! 🤯

I attended the University of Oklahoma in Norman where Dr. Jolly West famously overdosed and killed the poor elephant. Was a running joke on campus… although most of us students didn’t know the dark side of West’s MK ULTRA experiments. They sure as hell didn’t teach that to OU students, where Dr. West was still very much revered… 

[Pete Mellor]

5 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Anyway, chapter 27 is about the Fugs 1967 proto-punk song, C.I.A. Man. 

In June '67 Mick Jagger was sentenced to three months in prison for possession of amphetamine pills after a police raid at Keith Richards' Redlands house in Sussex.  The police were tipped off after a mystery caller to the press informed of the drug party.

LBJ's Operation CHAOS fell on the U.K. as it did in the States.  Robert Lashbrook, a representative of the Human Ecology Fund-the notorious CIA front at Cornell that quietly disbursed funds for mind control experimentation, with or without the consent of the human subjects-was then assigned to the London station.  Agents under Lashbrook's supervision slipped LSD to English rock groups before performing without their prior knowledge to "study the drug's effects on their musical abilities."  Some of the most popular rock acts in Britain were scoring LSD directly from Lashbrook's CIA colleagues.  With the Stones at the West Sussex bust in '67 was the drug supplier, one David Schneidermann.  Jagger recalled, was a sinister 'Yank' hailing from California, but he had so many passports no one was certain of his origin.  Schneidermann had a suitcase that contained every herb and chemical, along with choice LSD from San Francisco.  Marianne Faithfull told historian A.E. Hotcher "Schneidermann came to our rooms and distributed Sunshine (LSD) to all of us, by afternoon we all began to emerge, floating on LSD trips."  The whole raid was a set-up, Faithfull insists to the present day.  Keith Richards and others who witnessed the bust likewise came to the conclusion that Schneidermann had arranged it, who, despite having a suitcase full of drugs, was not searched.  Also, Schneidermann mysteriously disappeared that very evening, never to be seen again.  The busting of Jagger and Richards was an act of political harassment, a coordinated attempt to discredit the Stones.

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, Pete Mellor said:

In June '67 Mick Jagger was sentenced to three months in prison for possession of amphetamine pills after a police raid at Keith Richards' Redlands house in Sussex.  The police were tipped off after a mystery caller to the press informed of the drug party.

LBJ's Operation CHAOS fell on the U.K. as it did in the States.  Robert Lashbrook, a representative of the Human Ecology Fund-the notorious CIA front at Cornell that quietly disbursed funds for mind control experimentation, with or without the consent of the human subjects-was then assigned to the London station.  Agents under Lashbrook's supervision slipped LSD to English rock groups before performing without their prior knowledge to "study the drug's effects on their musical abilities."  Some of the most popular rock acts in Britain were scoring LSD directly from Lashbrook's CIA colleagues.  With the Stones at the West Sussex bust in '67 was the drug supplier, one David Schneidermann.  Jagger recalled, was a sinister 'Yank' hailing from California, but he had so many passports no one was certain of his origin.  Schneidermann had a suitcase that contained every herb and chemical, along with choice LSD from San Francisco.  Marianne Faithfull told historian A.E. Hotcher "Schneidermann came to our rooms and distributed Sunshine (LSD) to all of us, by afternoon we all began to emerge, floating on LSD trips."  The whole raid was a set-up, Faithfull insists to the present day.  Keith Richards and others who witnessed the bust likewise came to the conclusion that Schneidermann had arranged it, who, despite having a suitcase full of drugs, was not searched.  Also, Schneidermann mysteriously disappeared that very evening, never to be seen again.  The busting of Jagger and Richards was an act of political harassment, a coordinated attempt to discredit the Stones.

Shocking stuff, really.  Jagger and the Stones should have sued the U.S. government, although only a handful of people knew the MK-Ultra details at the time, including Richard Helms.

The CIA MK-Ultra guys were awfully cavalier about their use of unwitting civilian guinea pigs-- including mental health patients, hippies, and even non-rockabilly rock stars, etc.

Notice that they never gave acid to performers like Elvis and Pat Boone.

[Paul Brancato]

16 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

And It was O’Neil who discovered how Bugliosi was compromised.

@W. Niederhut I can’t remember where I saw the podcast/video but, it was alleged that there was a CIA station in Lauren Canyon. And that not just a host of high profile musicians were in and out of the facility but, also actors. Lookout Mountain Air Base is fingered as the location. 
 

I can’t vouch for McGowan, after a qui k google search it seems he has written a book about it. 

Perhaps I am connecting too many dots here but, it seems possible that CIA mind control program did have a use for musicians, not just in terms of LSD testing, which when tested US military personnel made them very ineffective. The musicians which were seen as revolutionaries and heroes at the time, we potentially being used (some of them). It wouldn’t surprise me if Lennon and others knew it. 
 

What I do think is highly probable is that the CIA used these cults as testing subjects for mind control experiments and to determine efficacy. If you wanted to know if a a method would work on 1 million people, you might test it thoroughly on 20 or 30. 
 

Lyrics are a form of storytelling, what was the impact on the listeners of the lyrics of the time? 

 

The book is called Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. 
I saw the Fugs in NYC mid 1960’s - didn’t exactly know what was up but liked them. 
 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Paul Brancato

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

The book is called Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. 
I saw the Fugs in NYC mid 1960’s - didn’t exactly know what was up but liked them. 
 

Thanks, Paul.