This is the story of a 30 year search by U.S. intelligence agencies to perfect mind control. Some of those engaged in that search have agreed to talk about it for the first time, one said. I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing. We knew we were crossing the line. The search would be endless. From brothels, an agent says.
We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom, to the mystical rites of a magical mushroom ceremony performed by an Indian shaman to a Spanish bull, Ray. The bull has had electrodes implanted in the brain and is controlled by a scientist. There would be victims. One intelligence agency tried to peel this man's mind back to reveal its deepest secrets lived. Through it. I've lived through it. This man worked on some of these programs. He would write of his work. It was fun, fun, fun.
This is the story of the search for mind control. ABC News. Club we are not professing. To tell you. The complete story of these activities. We are professing to tell you the complete story that we know. But. These records that we've uncovered don't tell the story, they tell pieces of it. This is a story that has been told in bits and pieces. This is an attempt to pull most of it together. We know we don't have the full
story. We do, however, have some striking new revelations and insights. The story begins here, just off the nation's front yard, the mall, the buildings. Behind me were the headquarters for the World War 2. Office of Strategic Service. It was here that the first halting steps toward mind control began. The shaper and molder of OSS was General Wild Bill Donovan, he said of his group's work. We may have made mistakes, but we were not afraid to try things
that were never done before. In this Anything goes atmosphere, Donovan appointed this man, Stanley Lovell, a Boston industrialist, to break new ground in many scientific and technical fields. Donovan called Lovell his doctor, Moriarty, after the fiendish professor in Sherlock Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed for this Saturday Evening Post photo.
He later wrote of his OSS job that it was, quote, to stimulate the Peck's bad boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him throw all of your normal law abiding concepts out of the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. It was in this atmosphere that the search for mind control began. This bizarre man would be an active participant in that search over the next two
decades. His name is George White, an OSS captain who had formerly been with the Bureau of Narcotics. In his diary, seen here publicly for the first time, White left a legacy of the darker side of American intelligence work. He received his early OSS training at the British run school at Oshawa, Canada, to the same school where Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was trained.
White referred to the school in his Diaries as the Oshawa School of Mayhem and Murder, fellow Mike Burke, former OSS colleague of Whites and now president of Madison Square Garden Center. Very compelling fellow, mysterious fellow, almost mystical fellow. He was fascinating because you didn't even know something about him and not enough about him to
really get a fix on him. He also knew a great deal about the swifter elements of society, the gamier side of life and and he was very impressive in his technical knowledge of of the underworld, so to speak. He said one of one of our men get speed up. He says. You have to act real fast and teach these guys a lesson, Charles Suragusa, a former narcotics officer and friend of White's. He's all come around, he says.
I'm breaking kneecaps. With that, one guy laughed and George White always had a little a little Billy with him. And this one guy sort of snaked George White, turned on and wiped him across the neck with it. Then he picked up a pool stake and start beating everybody up. He made his point and he. Made his point. George White was not a man of understatement or subtleties. His boss at OSS, Stanley Lovell, referred to him as deadly and dedicated in this note from White's Diaries.
It says call Lovell regarding TDTD was a rather transparent cover for Truth Drug. George White worked with the Truth Drug Committee here at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in the nation's capital. They experimented with mescaline, scopalamine and marijuana on unwitting victims. The committee soon learned there was no easy panacea, no truth drug at this stage. But White and later colleagues would not stop trying. The goal remained the same as this 1952 CIA memo says the aim is.
Controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self preservation. But it was a discovery here in Basel, Switzerland, at Sandoz Laboratories by Doctor Albert Hoffman that led the intelligence agencies of America to believe that they had found the panacea. The discovery was lysergic acid diethylamide LSD. The film that you see is considered by many experts to be the closest illustration of the
effects of a hallucinogenic. It was one of the first times that anybody had run into a powerful drug that was different than anything else that they knew anything about. John Gettinger, recently retired chief psychologist for the CIA. This is the first time Gettinger has been interviewed publicly. We could disable the whole city by putting a very small amount on a water supply after all of these years of us.
Those of us who involved and then looking for this secret drug, this was the only thing that began to look for the first time, like it might be something like that. The CIA's interest in LSD was intense. The worry was that the Russians would get hold of it. Were the Soviets into LSD? I. Don't have to say, I'm sure they were that.
If you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of it. But at one point, intelligence information received from Switzerland said that Sandoz Laboratories was about to put 100 million doses of LSD on the open market, and it caused enough concern within the agency that the United States was prepared to buy the entire supply. However, a slight mistake had been made. The mistake is made public for
the first time. I just found out on a new CIA document that there were no such large quantities of LSD on the market. John Marks has filed numerous Freedom of Information suits against the CIA and has unearthed much new material. He is the author of The Search for The Manchurian Candidate, a history of intelligence agency work with mind control. He is a consultant for this
report. What happened is that there was a military attache in Switzerland, an American officer, who got milligrams and kilograms mixed up. In other words, he made a mistake of thinking 11 thousandths of a gram was the same as 1000 grams, which is a mistake of a million times. So when the CIA got the intelligence that there were 100 million doses on the market, in fact, there were 100 doses. The man who would oversee.