A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (3 page)

The implementation of standards and practices to stop any current abuses and to place a moratorium on human mind control experimentation and any experimentation on unwitting or uncomprehending human subjects.

Prologue

It was a sticky summer day in 1991, the year that the Cold War officially ended and the Soviet Union was dismantled. My sister and I paid a visit to my uncle who was dying of cancer. Dad and two other uncles had all died prematurely, cursed with heart disease. It was with love and trepidation that I bent over to kiss him good-bye, knowing that I would never see him alive again. There was so much pain on his sunken in face and the disease and the treatments he had taken to fight it had ravaged his body. I told him that I loved him and my sister and I left.

Something in me stirred that warm afternoon. The secrets I had been holding my whole life couldn’t be contained any longer. Maybe it was being so close to the smell and taste of death. Maybe it was simply, “Just the Right Time.”

When we reached my sister’s home we sat on the couch, and I could hear my heart in my ears. I looked at her and made up my mind that even if I lost her love, I had to speak the truth. I told her I had something horrible to tell her, and that she probably would hate me when I was through. She said that could never happen, and asked me what in the world I was talking about.

I looked at her in disbelief. How could she know this? I nodded and she said, “Carol, was it Norman
^v
, our cousin?”

I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head back and forth, letting her know that wasn’t who it was. I started to cry and the pounding in my ears got even louder.

“Carol, I will believe you no matter what you tell me, because Norman raped me when I was in third grade.”

My heart stopped. I couldn’t believe my ears. I forgot my own pain and reached over to her and held her. She told me I was the first person she had told this to in over thirty-five years. God I wanted to die, I wanted to puke. I wanted to make this moment in time vanish and maybe the horrible truth would vanish with it. Here we were-two women separated in age by five years and a million secrets.

Somehow I found my voice. I told her how sorry I was, and she kept asking me who hurt me. I couldn’t keep the words inside any longer.

“Dad. It was our dad.”

Oh God, no. Let me take the words back. Look at the look on her face. I knew it. She doesn’t believe me. She hates me. Please don’t hate me. Please God; please don’t let her hate me. I’m so afraid.

She reached over and took my hand and we talked. I can’t remember the words, just that she listened and dawning recognition seeped over her face. I knew she believed me. Our young lives had been such hell. We had been raised in a family with an authoritative father who frequently used his belt and fists to help us “see the light.” My six brothers had been the recipients of this violence much more frequently than Dot and I. Mom was absent for months on end, either locked up in a mental institution or running away from dad, and now she was dead dead at 52. Dead 14 long years dead, dead, dead. We only had each other. The silence was ended. By sharing and believing each other’s long held secrets that day, I began the longest journey of my life. My struggle to heal had finally begun.

Chapter 1 -
THE SPOILS OF WAR

It was May of 1944 when the Navy called daddy to fight in the “Big One.” He left momma, who was just nineteen and already the mother of a one and two year old, in a little rented cottage next to Grandfather’s house and marched off to war. He was barely out of basic training when our baby brother got sick with pneumonia causing daddy to go AWOL, at least that’s the story he always told.

When the Navy caught up with him, he was thrown in the brig. They shaved his head and put him through a battery of tests. It seems one particular Naval lieutenant commander named John Gittinger who was also a psychologist was working on creating a new Personality Assessment Test (PAS). This test would later be combined with the Wechsler psychological test and used to predict future behavior.
²³

Gittinger was later employed by the CIA for twenty-six years, but worked under the cover of the Human Ecology Society in the 50’s.
²⁴
MKULTRA subproject 39 at the Ionia State Prison in Michigan was instituted to see if you could drug and hypnotize a child molester and get him to divulge his ugly little secrets. They were looking for a “Truth Drug” that could be used on spies. A combination of drugs and hypnosis were used for interrogation.
²⁵
The Human Ecology Society furnished Wechslers of these sexual psychopaths to the CIA. These scores showed that so-called normals have different personality patterns than people with uncontrollable urges.

Well that was the beginning of the end for me, before I was even born. Evidently those tests in the brig indicated someone who was holding very dark secrets. The government knew that at some later date this could be useful information. Blackmail was the oldest game in the book.

Daddy was assigned to the LST-1146
U.S.S.
Summit County
, who began loading supplies and ammunition for the soon to be ending war in the Pacific. Seven hundred tons of pontoon cargo destined for Guam was loaded and she sailed for Panama on July 5, 1945.

The European theater had already changed dramatically on the eastern front. On April 25, 1945, American and Russian soldiers embraced near the town of Torgau on the western bank of the Elbe. Italian partisans killed Mussolini, and strung him up by his heels alongside his mistress in a gasoline station in Milan. Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker. Franklin Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945, never living to see the Reich surrender on May 7, 1945, V-E Day.

Increasing attention was being given to shaping the postwar world. In 1943, the allies felt compelled to issue a warning to those participating in atrocities, saying they would be hunted down and brought to justice. The Moscow Declaration said, “Let those who have hitherto not imbued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty. For, most assuredly, the three Allied powers will pursue them to the utmost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done.” How ironic that two years later the United States was making arrangements for Nazi scientists to come to America.
²⁶

On July 6, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff specifically authorized an effort under the top secret project code-named Overcast, to “exploit...chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” The chiefs directed that up to 350 specialists, mainly from Germany and Austria, should be immediately brought to the United States. These “rare minds” included specialists in submarine design, chemical warfare, and missile research.
²⁷

In 1946 President Truman authorized Project Paperclip, whose code name was said to have originated because scientific recruits’ papers were paper clipped with regular immigration forms. Paperclip had two aims: to exploit German scientists for American research, and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union. In a confidential letter to President Truman’s chief science adviser, RCA Chief David Sarnoff argued, “the security for any nation henceforth depends... to a very large extent on its place in the scientific sun. That sun may shine brightly for those who know, and it may be a blackout for those who don’t.” Sarnoff continues, “It is not only important that we get [Germany’s] scientific information, but that we lay hands on their scientists as well. If we do not find them and remove them to a place perhaps on this side of the water where they can continue their scientific experiments under our guidance and control, our Russian friends may do so first.”
²⁸

JIOA
^vi
Director Bosquet Wev was in charge of presenting dossiers to the U.S. departments of State and Justice for approval. Some of the reports attached to the dossiers bluntly pointed out that they were “ardent Nazis.” Some of the experts were accused of participating in murderous medical experiments on human subjects at concentration camps. One was a fugitive from formal murder charges, and another was known to have established an institute for biological warfare experimentation on humans in Poland. Director Wev decided to start withholding records and not submitting the candidates to State and Justice. In a wire to the director of intelligence at the U.S. European Command he wrote, “[T]here is very little possibility that the State and Justice Departments will agree to immigrate any specialist who has been classified as an actual or potential security threat to the United States. This may result in the return [to] Germany of specialist whose skill and knowledge should be denied to other nations in the interest of national security. He then requested, “that new security reports be submitted where such action is appropriate.”
²⁹

That one action made by Wev would allow new dossiers to be made, with the offending language taken out. How many Nazi’s were let into this country is still making the headlines. As I write in March of 2000, an accused Nazi who has lived in the United States 45 years was being deported to Austria from Sterling Heights, Michigan.
³⁰
Many have chosen to relocate to other countries, rather than be deported.

General Reinhard Gehlen was head of Nazi Intelligence for the Eastern front for Hitler. Allen Dulles hired him to work for the Army’s G-2 intelligence in West Germany and put him in charge of the Gehlen organization, a counterespionage network that employed thousands of people to supply the Pentagon and the CIA with intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was riddled with former SS, SA, and Gestapo men.
³¹
His top aides were Nazi zealots who had committed some of the most notorious crimes of the war. Gehlen himself was involved in the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some four million Soviet prisoners. These men used stolen German intelligence files to barter for their lives. They new if they were caught by the Soviets, they would be hanged. The Gehlen organization was the forerunner of West Germany’s secret service, the BND recognized in 1956 and run by Gehlen until 1968.

Gehlen signed a contract with the CIA in 1949 for a reported sum of $5 million a year. When Allen Dulles was asked why he made use of someone like Reinhard Gehlen he said, “There are few archbishops in espionage. He’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.”
³²
In September 2000 after fifty years of silence, the Central Intelligence Agency in an affidavit in US District Court acknowledged an intelligence relationship with German General Reinhard Gehlen.
³³

While the OSS
^vii
was helping to run covert operations with Reinhard Gehlen, they were also involved in secret talks with the Japanese. In mid-May, 1945 Allen Dulles of the OSS reported from Switzerland that the resident Japanese minister, Shunichi Kase had expressed interest in mediating a cessation of hostilities. OSS chief Bill Donovan wrote to the president that Kase believed one of the few provisions the Japanese would insist upon, would be the retention of the Emperor as the only safeguard against Japan’s conversion to Communism. Under Secretary of State Grew shared this assessment, and believed the war would end quickly if Washington issued a statement explaining that unconditional surrender did not carry with it the dethroning of the emperor. John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, suggested that the phrase “unconditional surrender” be dropped altogether, because the phrase itself meant loss of face to the Japanese.
³⁴
Several more indications were received from the Japanese that they would like to negotiate, but the U.S. chose not to.

On July 16, 1945, scientists and military men wearing dark glasses watched the first atomic bomb being detonated. President Truman was facing a decision that would alter history. How different the world could have become without this nuclear nightmare. The mushroom shaped cloud that appeared on that warm summer day would come to symbolize a new age. The bomb shelters of the 50’s became like growing embryos from the moment of that first detonation.

On August 2 daddy’s ship arrived in Pearl Harbor; and on August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. At exactly 8:15 a.m. 81 percent of the city ceased to exist. One bomb, dubbed “Little Boy,” killed almost 68,000 people, with as many injured. Still Japan did not surrender. On August 9 a second atomic bomb was exploded over Nagasaki, 38,000 were killed. On August 14, V-J Day, people across the continent poured into the streets while the church bells rang. The war was soon to be officially over, but at what price?