called Free Vietnam, there existed neither a sense of nationhood nor an indigenous administration… The 17th parallel designated a truce line, not an international boundary, and the entirely provisional entity lying south of it was supposed to disappear after national elections in 1956.’ Effectively, rather than backing one side against another, they were trying to create a country.
The CIA had been active in Vietnam since 1950, trying to boost French efforts against the Communist insurgent organization, the Viet Minh, and now they put Colonel Edward Lansdale in as a ‘kingmaker’, much the same role as he had played in the Philippines where his actions had helped stave off the Communist political movement, the Hukbalahap, from taking power. Lansdale told CIA Director Allan Dulles that his goal was to build a ‘political base’ in Indochina which, if successful, would ‘give CIA control [of the] government and change [the] whole atmosphere’. This would be focused around Ngo Dinh Diem, a certified anti-Communist and Catholic who had lived in New York from 1951–53.
The CIA put a lot of effort into backing Ngo Dinh Diem, who became prime minister in 1954. Lansdale helped to train the Vietnamese National Army, and ran a propaganda campaign to encourage the country’s Roman Catholic population to move into Diem’s part of Vietnam, using the slogan ‘God has gone south’.
Diem called a referendum in October 1955, the campaign for which was characterized by dirty tricks. Even though his advisers were convinced that Diem would win comfortably and oust the sitting head of state, former Emperor Bao Dai, there was still massive electoral fraud, with Diem winning 133 per cent of the vote in Saigon. (The US State Department congratulated him on running the referendum ‘in such an orderly and efficient manner’!) Diem went on to proclaim himself president of the Republic of Vietnam — and, at least initially, it did seem as if this was another job well done by the CIA.
Things weren’t doing so well in the heart of Communism itself. There wasn’t a CIA officer stationed at the Moscow embassy for the first six years of the Agency’s life, and when the State Department finally reluctantly agreed for one to be put in place in 1953, the first head of station, Edward Ellis Smith, was seduced by his MGB maid. (He wasn’t well regarded by his peers, ‘his work was not only worthless, but much had been fabricated’, the CIA’s chief of operations in the Soviet bloc division would later comment.) According to the KGB, a dozen embassy personnel admitted succumbing to the temptations of State Security’s ‘swallows’ before being sent home in disgrace over the next few years. The KGB didn’t need to worry that much about the Americans’ activities anyway: during the building of the new US embassy in 1953, key rooms were bugged during the night when no American guards were keeping watch on the building site.
The CIA did score one notable success within the Soviet bloc during this time, after a GRU officer, Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, slipped a note into an American diplomat’s car in Vienna in January 1953, stating: ‘I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.’ With the experienced George Kisevalter as his case officer firstly in Austria and then later in Berlin, Popov proved to be a highly effective asset for the fledgling Agency, providing the CIA with details of the organization of the Soviet military command, the structure of the GRU, and the names and operations of Soviet intelligence agents in Europe. He was also able to alert the CIA to spies entering the US, and it was after the FBI frightened one of these off that Popov came under suspicion, since he was one of the few on the Soviet side who knew the illegal agent’s travel plans. Popov was recalled to Moscow in November 1958 — although the CIA tried to persuade him not to go — where he was able to pass a coded message back to the Agency to say that although he was safe, he had been transferred out of the GRU and was unable to leave the USSR.
It became clear from the standard of material that Popov was passing once he was back in Moscow that he had been turned by the KGB. Although for a time it was believed that Popov was betrayed by KGB agent George Blake, it has also been claimed that a Russian mole within the CIA passed on the information, and that poor tradecraft by the CIA in Moscow meant that a letter designed for Popov reached the KGB. In September 1959, Popov was able to pass a message surreptitiously to his Moscow CIA handler, Russell Langelle, confirming he was now a double agent, and saying that he hoped to be posted to Berlin once more, from where he could escape to the West. His note concluded: ‘Could you not ask your kind President Eisenhower to see if he might cause restitution to be made for my family and my life?’
Unfortunately for him, the KGB decided to wrap up the operation before Popov could be transferred, arresting and expelling Langelle. Popov was tried and executed the following year.
One aspect of the CIA’s activities that began during the fifties about which much has been written, a lot of it sensationalist, was Project MKULTRA, the agency’s top secret behavioural research programme. Everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the death of singer John Lennon has been blamed on test subjects either being controlled by the CIA, or struggling to deal with the after-effects. Many of the ideas behind the
MKULTRA was set up in response to the belief that the Communist nations were making great steps in the fields of brainwashing and mind control, as evidenced by the ‘voluntary’ testimony being given by captured American soldiers during the Korean War. The thinking was that Western agents and soldiers should therefore be prepared to deal with the effects of such techniques.
The Technical Services staff at the CIA were authorized to begin MKULTRA in April 1953; it became the responsibility of the Chemistry Division, headed by Dr Sidney Gottlieb. As an internal CIA report from 1963 explained, MKULTRA was ‘concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behaviour’. It had wide-reaching aims — everything from finding ways to make alcohol more or less effective, as required, to creating instantly acting knock-out drops, to locating substances that would help people’s ability to resist brainwashing.
The project tried many different methods to achieve its goals. Initially, hypnotism was tried. In February 1954, Gottlieb was able to implant a post-hypnotic suggestion into a woman who was normally loath to handle a weapon. Under the command, she was told to try to wake another woman up by any means possible, and ‘failing in this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it’. According to the declassified report, she ‘carried out all these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded pneumatic pistol) gun… and then proceeding to fall into a deep sleep… [On waking] she expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.’
The substance with which MKULTRA is most associated is lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. To begin with, the subjects of the experiments gave their consent, but Gottlieb needed to know how people who were not aware that they were being drugged would react. This would lead to many people’s rights being violated, and in some extreme cases, to death — the most notable case being army scientist Dr Frank Olson, who was given LSD in November 1953 without his knowledge or consent and jumped from a hotel room to his death a few days later. Eventually, as they had with hypnosis, the MKULTRA scientists dismissed LSD as being too unpredictable in its results — although not before many Americans were tested, including the author Ken Kesey, who would become of the great proselytizers of the drugs culture.
Less well known are some of the side-products of the MKULTRA research — including the CIA’s investigations into magic. It was all very well coming up with secret drugs that would have the desired effect, but pointless if there was no way of administering them to the chosen target. John Mulholland, one of the most highly respected American magicians of the time, was brought on board, and applied the secrets of sleight of hand to the problem. His 1954 paper entitled ‘Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception’ formed the basis of a training manual for agents, and the agency picked his brains further to investigate possible methods of covert signalling.
MKULTRA’s days were numbered when the CIA’s own internal monitor, the Inspector General, reported in 1963 that the controls over its operations were inadequate, and that the moral and ethical implications were too great. Much as many of those who would like to believe that the CIA’s quest to create the perfect unwitting assassin — usually referred to as a Manchurian Candidate, after the Richard Condon 1959 novel, which featured a serviceman programmed by the Communists to commit murder — continued (and perhaps continues to this day), MKULTRA was disbanded by the end of the sixties. However, the revelation of its existence would have a critical effect on the CIA in the seventies; perhaps the best epitaph on it came from Senator Edward Kennedy in 1977: ‘The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense.’
