First came Operation Paperclip. The agency brought over Nazi space engineers, rocket scientists, chemists — anyone who could give them an edge in the Cold War.
And there were doctors. Nazi doctors — mostly Nazis, anyway — who performed experiments on human beings. The Nazi doctors and chemists and others experimenting on prisoners from the camps. POWs. Several of the Nazis who had tortured people to death, reduced others to permanent vegetative states, exposed them to poisons and illnesses, were given one of the great moral mulligans of all time. Some of these men were about to be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials.
Project Artichoke would protect those guilty of war crimes and, in trade for their knowledge from inhumane studies, the US government brought them to America to share their information with the CIA. The other, perhaps main, reason they did this was to keep the doctors and scientists and biochemists away from the Soviet Union.
My first mentor was a Nazi. Hans Krieger. My family had fled Poland in the thirties and would almost assuredly be dead had we stayed. I studied how to experiment on human beings from this man. I never could reconcile that our national security meant we had to protect war criminals and put them in positions of power.
If Nazis taught me my first lessons in how to destroy the human mind, what does that make me?
People think there’s nothing to see in the desert. No life to speak of. But it’s all here. You just have to know where to look. Lizards hide under any shelter they can find so the birds of prey don’t get them. Sidewinder rattlesnakes that move in a way that will always creep me out. I’m not afraid of death. But I’m still afraid of that damn snake.
Mesquite trees. When it rains, the whole desert smells of ozone. There’s nothing quite like it.
The bones left to the elements out here? Some of them easy to identify as human, for someone who knows too much about remains. They turn whiter than other bones. They fracture up and down their sides. Somehow, they are the loneliest bones I’ve known. Stories behind all of them.
1953
After any training, the way Sidney Gottlieb trapped you into silence was to bring you in. The moments you were in a room where these experiences took place was when you became one of them forever.
Gottlieb had me present to study their mind control and interrogation techniques so that I might have a better idea of what they were looking for from my field of expertise. I designed nothing for the test. I didn’t administer any of the tests — I was later put on strategies for assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro.
At the experiments, I was sickened by what I saw. Nothing in my imagination prepared me for any of it.
I witnessed how a man responds to interrogation while he’s sealed in a low-pressure chamber. The pain builds. The body is stressed beyond belief. What did I learn about how a man responds to a high-pressure chamber while he’s being interrogated? I learned that his eyes pop out of his sockets while he’s still alive and screaming and begging to die, which he does.
At first, all the experiments were in Europe. Then Gottlieb managed to start them in the US and Canada — at hospitals and institutions. All of the unwitting test subjects were known, casually and on the paperwork, as expendables.
Some of the other techniques I saw were tests in how a man reacts to hypothermia while interrogated. He freezes to death. How he reacts to 130-degree heat until he, too, can no longer speak and slips into a coma and dies.
Other expendables? Prisoners. Heroin addicts. Children. Mentally ill children and adults. Anyone in a mental institution, no matter how minor the reason they were admitted. It didn’t matter if you were white, so long as you were expendable. But you mattered even less if you were black.
1981
There was a saying in the agency. It’s good to have someone you can trust to have your back; it’s better to trust no one.
Along with an elaborate system of getting information to various destinations, I trusted my mentor, Dr. Hans Krieger. The Nazi. I wouldn’t call it true trust, however. I figured, if I had secrets, his were worse. If the agency taught me nothing else, it was to always have the most leverage in any situation. I didn’t trust Hans. But I trusted Hans to keep his mouth shut for fear that I’d expose him.
If anything happens to me, I’ve left paper trails all over.
1953
I’ve seen the lifeless eyes of a woman who entered a hospital for postpartum depression and then had ten times the normal electroshock dose twice a day for forty-three days in a row. The hope was to empty a person’s mind and then implant thoughts that would make them helpless to protest, or even reflect on, the agency’s commands. They weren’t supposed to be people anymore. They were only vessels for orders. They could be used to do anything, no matter the person they used to be. The goal behind this was to create unwitting assassins. The result, in this case, was a woman with no history. No knowledge of a millisecond of her life. With the cognitive skills of a child. Destroyed.
I’ve seen expendables driven insane, given massive doses of LSD for fifty days or greater in a row.
I’ve seen pregnant women intentionally infected with malaria to see if their babies are born with it. Almost always black women and children.
I have seen people put to sleep for 172 days and played the same recorded sentence every second of it. A command that would replace one’s mind.
I have been, as with the entire inner circle, experimented on.
1981
Hans contacts me via a PO Box in Palm Springs. Over an hour away, but a PO Box in Twentynine Palms would only be useful if you lived a hundred miles away, let alone fewer than five miles from my cabin. Everything is a code. We haven’t spoken or written a word to each other in almost thirty years. If we don’t truly have trust, we share an enlightened self-interest in staying alive.
But with the information I’ve already released, the agency has known for a while that I’m responsible. Hans has told me this much. I have no idea what else he’s told them. Among all the deaths, secrets, double lives, the actual scope of the information could only be from the inner circle. And I am the weak link.
Though I have no idea if they’ve already reached Hans and let him live the rest of his anonymous life in trade for the end of mine.
1953
In my first two months on the job, I was invited to a meeting with Gottlieb and much of the inner circle.
After dinner, the seven of us retired to a large living room with books lining the walls. Every chair some dark wood with deep leather seats, looking as deep and ominous as a Bacon painting.
Gottlieb and a man I didn’t know poured drinks from a carafe. This was used for just five of the drinks — emptied, and then he poured mine.
I had no idea I was given LSD. A dose that was twenty times what would later become a common recreational dose. I lost clear vision. Everything became exaggerated and looked like a funhouse mirror on every side of me. I remember the laughing. Then the menace of two men approaching me, taking me to another room with only a simple chair in the center. It was the brightest-lit room I had ever been in.
I was ordered to strip.