As a Private in the Army you do not expect to learn thirty years later you were "used" by the CIA, with the blessing of the Department of Defense and the Army's Chain of Command, in a program that was among other things testing experimental drugs to incapacitate or kill people.
The enlisted soldiers were told they were volunteering for a program that was "completely safe" so safe that in fact the Army would not be doing any type of medical follow up. That we were testing equipment and uniforms for the battlefields of the future. None of the shady parts of the CIA operation were ever explained to the 7120 men from 1955 thru 1975 that volunteered for what was known as "medvols." We were told that by participating that we would be given letters of commendation and the Soldiers Medal that would help those of us that were going to stay on active duty as careerists to receive promotion points and early career advancement. For those that weren't making the Army a career, the fact that we would be paid an additional 60 dollars a month on top of our 200 a month salary plus three day passes every week was the other enticement.
The name I will be looking for in the document release next week when the actual documents are made available is the name Doctor Sidney Gottlieb and this entry further explains the Manchurian experiments he was the master of disaster for the CIA going back to the days of the OSS.
Doctor Gottlieb was a very interesting and twisted individual, and very powerful within the CIA in the early days, I have seen documents where in 1953 he was given 6% of the entire CIA budget for the operations he was conducting at Fort Detrick, Maryland in biological experiments now known as Operation White Coat, he ran it from an office known as the Special Operations Division (SOD) they also controlled the drug experiments and chemical weapons experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland he worked with the civilian heads of the experiments there were two main doctors employed there, one Doctor Van Sim, who was awarded the highest civilian medal the DOD can bestow for the fact that he personally tried every drug ever given to the "medvols", and then there was Doctor Frederick Siddell who became America's foremost chemical weapons authority, during the Tokyo Subway Ricin incident he was sent to assist and also learn what he could from the incident, that was in 1995. It is my understanding two years before his death in 2006, the Army named the new learning center at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland in his honor. (it pulled Edgewood Arsenal under it's command in a redesign in the 1980s I believe, and became one installation)
The Veterans Administration and the department of defense have denied any medical problems resulted to the "volunteers" despite a March 2003 report that shows 2098 of the men (40%) were already deceased as of FY2000 when the data was gathered. The report also shows in the fine print that of the 4022 survivors in FY2000 that 54% of the men or another 2200 reported being disabled, for a combined rate of 74.43%. The government refuses to accept any responsibility for these veterans or their surviving familles. The VA just stonewalls the claims, in my personal case they refused to even address the experimental issues or toxic exposures from DEC 2002 until October 2005 after they got caught lying to myself and Senator Larry Craig, in a letter from Renee Szybala, the Director of Compensation and Pensions.
She claimed in a letter that I had taken ill and left Edgewood Arsenal on 10 July 1974, there fore none of my current medical problems could possibly be linked to the experiments which had not begun yet, both statements were incorrect. My records plainly show I arrived on 25 June 1974 and left Edgewood on 22 August 1974, upon the completion of my 60 day TDY orders. I returned to Fort Lewis, Washington with the other 9 men sent to Edgewood from there.
I have another letter from the Chemical Corp of the Army, that claims many men felt they were used in "secret tests" and there is no paperwork to show that I was ever used in any "secret tests" no there isn't and I have never claimed to be used in "secret tests" I just stated the facts I was used in the "medvol program" which ran from 1955 thru 1975, hardly a secret program, just a highly classified one. It was approved despite the Nuremberg Codes of 1947, by then Secretary of Defense Wilson in 1953, with the approval of President Truman in a top secret authorization now known as the "Wilson Memorandum", but the CIA's DR Gottlieb and the DOD both funded the work at Edgewood and Fort Detrick, for decades, President Nixon stopped the biological work in 1972 after signing the Bio-Weapons Treaty of 1972 and Congress ratified it, Operation White Coat was stopped.
The human experiments with chemical weapons and drugs were not stopped until 1975 when a Department of the Army Inspector General report on Human Experimentation became public and Congressional and public outcry stopped the experimental program. In 1976 President Ford signed legislation banning the use of humans in any future CIA or DOD or any other government agencies involvement in this type of work. President Carter further strengthened these laws in his Administration as did President Reagan.
Personally I will be looking for any documentation in this public offering that mentions DR Gottlieb, MKULTRA, NAOMI, ARTICHOKE, MKSEARCH, BLUEBERRY, Edgewood Arsenal, or Fort Detrick, Operation White Coat, there is also the little known fact of the Nazi war criminals snuck into the United States by the OSS/CIA in the years after WW2 thru Canada, in what was known as Operation Paperclip, it was a program detailed in a 1992 book by Linda Hunt, an investigative reporter of CNN fame, she filed FOIA requests and lawsuits to get into the Nazi records, her work documented the US governments involvement in cleaning up the Nazi's WW2 records to make them acceptable to immigrate to the US, in 2005 then CIA Director Porter Goss, instead of being publicly humiliated by Ohio Senator Mike Dewine in an open hearing in the Senate agreed to open the OSS/CIA records for a commission that was working on identifying the Germans allowed in after WW2, so the war criminals could be identified and finally brought to justice. I have yet to see the names released despite the promise they would be released by February 2007.
I have gotten to the point that I do NOT expect to ever get the VA to recognize me nor the other veterans medical problems related to the experiments or possibly the 77 toxic substances in Edgewood's drinking water drawn from their wells, which were capped due to contamination after an EPA study in 1978. The soil and water of Edgewood is one of the most contaminated sites in the US. I hope maybe to learn a little more about the history of the experiments, why DR Gottlieb was trusted to proceed with no oversight on his activities by anyone, his bosses at the CIA or by Congress. Why was he allowed to destroy so many lives and no one, the Army, DOD nor the CIA can be held accountable, I just don't think this is what is meant by the "American Way of Justice."
The WAPO article on this yesterday has given me hope that more may be learned of the human experiments but I will not lose anymore sleep than usual if it doesn't, after more than three decades why do I expect to learn the truth now, and have the government accept responsibility for my and the other 7119 "volunteers" health problems from the drug experiments, the CIA funded.
· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.