The CIA’s LSD testing program was part of its larger MKULTRA Program, which remains very much a mystery, primarily because its chief operating officer, Dr Sid Gottlieb, destroyed the majority of MKULTRA documents in 1973 during the Watergate scramble to plug leaks and obliterate history. Helping Gottlieb destroy these documents was the then Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms.
But due to one family’s own diligent search for truth, in a strange case of Justice Delayed, the truth about MKULTRA may finally come out. For on 9 July 1998, a Manhattan federal appeals panel ruled that Dr Gottlieb’s destruction of documents constituted ‘an adverse influence’, upon which a jury might reasonably conclude that he dosed Stanley Glickman with LSD in 1952. As a result of that ruling, Glickman’s estate has proceeded with a $30 million suit against Dr Gottlieb.
Back in 1952, Glickman, an American citizen, was an artist in Paris. In his suit against Dr Gottlieb, Glickman claims that Gottlieb or some other agent of the United States government placed LSD in his drink at the Cafe Select in Paris in October 1952. According to Glickman, an acquaintance had asked him meet some American friends at the cafe, and later, after arguing for several hours, one of the Americans offered Glickman a drink as a conciliatory gesture. According to court documents, Glickman soon began to experience ‘a lengthening of distances and a distortion of (his) perception.’ For approximately two weeks he ‘wandered in the pain of madness, delusion and terror’ until he was eventually admitted to the American Hospital in Paris.
According to these same court documents, Glickman’s mental condition was never quite the same. He never painted again, and he ‘never led a normal social life’.
Meanwhile, around 1975, an honest CIA officer discovered financial documents which named Dr Gottlieb as having been involved in the MKULTRA Program, and in 1977 Senator Edward Kennedy held Congressional hearings into the matter. While watching the proceedings on television, Stan Glickman found reason to believe that Dr Gottlieb was the American who had dosed him with LSD in Paris 25 years before. Glickman recalled that the man who dosed him with LSD, like Dr Gottlieb, had a clubfoot.
By 1981, after conducting his own investigation, Glickman had decided to sue the CIA, Richard Helms, and Dr Gottlieb. When Glickman died in 1992 his sister, Gloria Kronisch, as executrix of his estate, proceed with the suit – despite a series of legal setbacks. Then on 9 July 1998, according to the 13 July New York Law Journal, Judge Jose A Cadranes, ‘writing for a unanimous court’, ruled that an ‘adverse influence’ could be drawn from Dr Gottlieb’s destruction of documents, and that the circumstantial evidence of Gottlieb’s club foot ‘was sufficient to warrant a trial on the estate’s claim.’
Kronisch’s attorney, Sidney Bender, calls this ‘a sweet victory’ and now intends, through court proceedings, to bring Richard Helms and the CIA itself back as defendants in the case. Regardless of how that motion turns out, the case against Dr Gottlieb should go to a jury soon.
According to the DEA official (who has requested anonymity) who conducted the US Government’s 1978 Victims Task Force investigation into LSD testing on unwitting American citizens, the combination of the clubfoot and the ‘adverse influence’ are enough to convince him that a jury would find for Glickman. If so, much new information might be revealed about MKULTRA and the CIA’s testing of LSD on unwitting American citizens. It might also reveal facts about the CIA’s use of LSD as a weapon of war in various foreign and domestic political ‘compromise and discredit’ operations it has launched over the years.
While the spectre of MKULTRA has faded, this important case of Justice Delayed ought to be followed very closely, for it will remind all Americans of the contempt in which its espionage establishment holds the average citizen. It should never be forgotten that it was the CIA that sprinkled LSD throughout society in the 1950s, or that the CIA has played a central role in creating and sustaining America’s drug dependent society.