Keystone Spies

CIA gang couldn't even spray straight

Washington Post

Mag

WASHINGTON The episode might have been called The CIA Gang That Couldn't Spray Straight.

It began, as the story unfolded on Capitol Hill yesterday, with the assignment of a trio of CIA agents to fly to San Francisco, round up recruits from local bars, then spray the merrymakers with a newly developed LSD bug-bomb in an agency safehouse.

It ended with one of the agents, closeted in the bathroom of the CIA facility, dousing himself with the drug which turned out not to work.

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The 1959 experiment was not one likely to go down in the annals of intelligence triumphs, one of the former agents acknowledged to a giggling Senate panel, which opened two o days of hearings into the CIA's mind control experiments known as project MK-ULTRA.

The problem, explained David Rhodes, one of the former MKULTRA operatives, was that it was summer and the safe house had no air conditioning. The agents were afraid the LSD would drift out an open window if they sprayed it at the party.

"The weather defeated us," said Rhodes.

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Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Human Resources subcommittee on health, prodded the reluctant former agent.

"Well, did you ever get sent back to San Francisco?" Kennedy asked.

"Once more," admitted Rhodes. "We were sent back to attend the first national lesbian conference."

It was, said the agent, all part of the effort by the CIA through the 1950s and 1960s to understand and influence patterns of human behavior. Rhodes, now retired, said he now lives in Reston, Va., and described himself as "a consultant on everything from management affairs to parapsychology.

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The description of the agency's efforts during MK-ULTRA that emerged at yesterday's hearing was more of a group of bumbling ama

teurs than anything out of James Bond.

Philip Goldman, another former MK-ULTRA agent, said he was assigned by the CIA to develop devices for political harassment overseas. One, he told the committee, would propel a small glass vial filled with tear gas up to 100 yards.

The device was ordered, said Goldman, after an agent tried tossing one of the vials out of his hotel window into a foreign political rally. The vial bounced off a wall and broke open, filling the hotel room with gas, he said.

In addition to the faulty LSD bug bomb, Goldman said he also made billy clubs that shot tear gas, druglaced swizzle sticks that melted away in drinks and a hypodermic needle that shot drugs into corked wine bottles.

Most of the devices, he said, were turned over for field testing to George H. White, a colorful federal narcotics agent who went by the name of Morgan Hall and operated a. San Francisco safe house for both -the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the CIA.

Goldman said he presumed White, who has since died, tested out the devices in San Francisco bars.

The CIA was also criticized by Dr. Charles Geschickter, the former Georgetown University professor whose private medical research fund served as a front for $2.2 million in CIA-funded covert research over a 13-year span.

Gerchickter said documents released recently by the CIA on its research funding were not accurate. In some cases, Gerschickter said, the agency had overstated its role in research projects and had even paid bills for non-existent services. Geschickter said he did not know where the money actually went.

In the end, said Geschickter, the CIA ended up funding research on asthma, high blood pressure, cancer and arthritis. The projects were de veloped by the researchers, not the agency, he said..

"They had the money," said Geschickter of the MK-ULTRA officials, "but they didn't have any ideas."