"I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations
describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption,” wrote Professor Matthew
Green on Sept. 5. “Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed
appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine."
Widely circulated online Green’s words reflected the betrayal felt by
other scientists and academicians who have often worked in secret with the
government. In response, however, the acting dean of the engineering school at Johns Hopkins asked him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art. He
also warned that if Green resisted or continued he would need a lawyer.
 |
| William A. Pierce, 1961 |
Green’s story reminds me of a professor I met decades ago – William Pierce,
a gifted mathematician, a former university professor with a Harvard Ph.D., and valedictorian of the University of Vermont’s 1943 graduating class. He was 57-years-old when we met in 1978 and was no long working at a university. But he’d attended
a local talk about intelligence community abuses and claimed he had an even more
explosive story to tell.
Even before the Internet it was easy to verify some details,
particularly his academic credentials and past employment. William Augustus Pierce
had indeed been an academic star. Born in Lyndonville in 1921, he’d received
the highest academic grades as an undergraduate at UVM since John Dewey.
In 1950, attracted by “an excellent group of research scholars,” Pierce
joined the Math Department at Syracuse University. But the City of Syracuse “was
then a hotbed of anti-Communist activity,” he told me, “and the University was under
considerable pressure to do something about ‘them reds on the faculty’ –
especially the Jewish reds in the Math Department.”
A few months after he arrived, Dr. Donald Kibbey, then acting
Math Department chair, fired two members of the Syracuse faculty for alleged
activities in “controversial” political groups. Several other mathematicians
submitted their resignations in solidarity, and one colleague, Prof. Paul
Rosenbloom, warned Pierce that he “was terribly wrong to stay at Syracuse.”
More than 25 years later, he still chided himself for not listening and
seeking a teaching post elsewhere, as some colleagues were doing. “I was
certainly untrue to myself,” he admitted. “It was the worst mistake I have ever
made.
“At Harvard and Syracuse I was considered a left-winger,” Pierce
acknowledged. “The label resulted partly from my membership in peace groups and
opposition to the Cold War, but it was primarily my criticism of FBI
investigations and security procedure in areas of human learning. There was
some trouble, for instance, when I described Russian advances in certain fields
of mathematics and science, and then urged that Americans wage a more
effective, peaceable competition with the Soviet Union.”
“Listen buddy,” a colleague snapped in response, “”if you don’t like
your Uncle Sammy, get the hell back to Russia.”
Pierce felt that security clearances were out of place in the academic
community and didn’t hesitate to publicly say so. In April 1953, for example, he
spoke out about a Presidential Executive Order establishing new security
requirements for government employment that included a “loyalty” standard. To
him it looked like a form of profiling, another tool of the notorious McCarthy era blacklist.
Earlier that year Prof. William Martin, head of the Syracuse Math
department in the 1940s and then chair at M.I.T., had been called before the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Once a member of the Communist
Party, he buckled under questioning and named others who he claimed had once joined
the party.
“My Syracuse colleague Professor Abe Gelbart, Dean of Science and
Technology at Yeshiva University in New York, was on the list,” Pierce said. “FBI
agents moved into Gelbart’s situation and questioned him at length. They even
asked him about his associations with me, and said they had observed us
drinking in local restaurants.”
That summer Pierce nevertheless went to Los Angeles to consult for the National
Security Agency (NSA) at UCLA. “I had a temporary, low-level clearance for work on
S.C.A.M.P. and I suppose a security check was initiated.” S.C.A.M.P. was the
acronym for the Southern California Applied Mathematics Project, a top secret
operation conducted on behalf of the Defense Department. The official purpose
was research on numerical analysis, but those involved focused mainly on
cryptology.
It was a summer of suspicion and unsettling Cold War developments. On
June 19, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted for the alleged theft of
atomic bomb secrets. “Your country is sick with fear,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre
in response. A month later Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada barracks
in Cuba, an early attempt to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. At his trial,
the future Cuban leader proclaimed, “History will absolve me.”
A day after the Moncada attack, on July 27, an armistice ended the
Korean War. More than 50,000 American had been killed in what had been
designated a “police action,” at least 100,000 were wounded, and about 8,000
were still missing. Less than a month later, Mohammed Mossadegh, the elected
Prime Minister of Iran, was overthrown. Few people knew it, but the coup had
been orchestrated by the CIA.
While Bill Pierce was in L.A. he noticed headlines about Abe Gelbart’s HUAC
appearance. On television Sen. Joseph McCarthy complained that his colleague
was receiving a Fulbright Fellowship “even after taking the Fifth Amendment 47
times.” He also noticed reports that McCarthy was “setting out for California
on another Alger Hiss case.”
Shortly after returning to Syracuse, Pierce’s government-funded
research was abruptly cancelled.
One reason may have been Pierce claim that advanced technology was being used to
control subversive activities. Directional bugging devices “were snooping and
spying on undesirables,” he said. “Psychological harassment was being widely
adopted.”
Most of what he said was hard to dispute. The development of nuclear
weapons by the Soviet Union, plus the memory of Pearl Harbor, had indeed made
intelligence activities a high national priority. “You have to remember, people
were desperate about the so-called Communist threat,” Pierce noted. “Some of
them, although sincere and well-meaning, had a paranoid idea about domestic
security that was being encouraged by ambitious opportunists. Vigilante extremism,
faked investigations and security procedures sprang up across the country.”
A bit harder to accept at the time was his claim that “organized
sociology” and “applied psychology” were being mobilized to manipulate
reputations, attack the mental reliability of government critics, and conduct
systematic psychological harassment. “There were fearsome new ways to attack
the mental health, the very sanity, of their victims,” he said ominously.
Given that context, his theory was that he'd attracted the attention of
some extreme anti-Communists at Syracuse. But it was “impractical to call me
before HUAC or file judicial charges,” he concluded, “and so instead, they used
underhanded psychological harassment to isolate me from the academic community.”
In 1955, when his troubles began, and in 1964, when he first committed
his experiences to paper, he had no solid proof that mind control
projects were being pursued by the federal government. But once the surviving MKULTRA
documents were declassified in 1977 – most of them were destroyed before they
could be reviewed by Congress -- his descriptions and speculation began to look
uncannily close to the experiments being pursued at the exact same time by the CIA.
Even prior to MKULTRA, considerable research had been done by the
government on amnesia, hypnotic couriers and efforts to create a Manchurian
Candidate – a label commonly used after the release of a 1963 conspiracy thriller
with that title. The CIA’s goal was to develop “brainwashing” techniques and program
subjects with a hypnotically implanted trigger, thus turning them into secret
agents who wouldn’t remember what they had done. In scientific terms, the
objective was to deliberately and experimentally create dissociative identity
disorders, with associated amnesia barriers, and use this technique in both
simulated and actual covert operations.
MKULTRA was officially launched by the Central Intelligence Agency on
April 3, 1953, and continued for a decade until it was rolled into another
project, MKSEARCH, in 1964. That ran for another eight years, until CIA
Director Richard Helms ordered most of the MK documents shredded in June 1972.
Despite this, and redactions to most documents that survived, they revealed that
there had been hundreds of separate “sub-projects.”
In an August 1963 “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA,” Deputy CIA
Director Marshall Carter acknowledged a problem: “Research in the manipulation
of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related
fields to be professionally unethical, therefore the reputations of
professional participants in the MKULTRA program are on occasion in jeopardy.”
Beyond that, “the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests
of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” As a result, the paper trail was being kept to a
bare minimum, operational control was delegated to the Technical Services
Division (TSD), and the entire project was exempted from audit.
During the preceding decade the “avenues to the control of human
behavior” had expanded to include “radiation, electro-shock, various fields of
psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment
substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.”
Under a heading titled
“Advanced testing of MKULTRA materials,” the 1963 CIA report asserted the “firm
doctrine in TSD that testing of materials under accepted scientific procedure
fails to disclose the full pattern of reactions and attributions that may occur
in operational situations.” It added that TSD had “initiated a program for covert
testing of materials on unwitting U.S, citizens in 1955,” the same year Pierce
said that his own harassment began.
The ultimate test for any drug, device or technique, argued the report,
was “application to unwitting subjects in normal life settings. It was noted
earlier that the capabilities of MKULTRA substances to produce disabling or
discrediting effects or to increase the effectiveness of interrogation of
hostile subjects cannot be established solely through testing on volunteer
populations.”
To keep the loop small and secure, “certain cleared and witting
individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics” provided various drugs for testing on
those “deemed desirable and feasible.” Some of the most “feasible” subjects were
informers and criminals. But as the report added, “the effectiveness of the
substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American
and foreign, is of great significance and testing has been performed on a
variety of individuals within these categories.” After several tests the “subject
has become ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one
case.”
By this time, Pierce was no longer at Syracuse. After a year at
West Virginia University, he had moved to Stillwater to teach at Oklahoma State
University in September, 1962. But he was still writing letters to prominent people
and newspapers about “right-wing extremism” and “security procedures.”
In mid-October, he was removed from his teaching duties and
ordered by the university administration to undergo a psychological examination.
According to Pierce, extremists were trying to discredit him. But a few
students, along with the manager of a local coffee shop, told President Oliver
Willham that Pierce was the one creating the disturbances. Word rapidly spread
across campus that he was “psycho.” It was precisely the type of harassment and
discrediting tactics described in the MKULTRA documents.
In a letter written by Pierce and published in the Oklahoma City Times
on Oct.19, 1962 the focus was the arrest and hospitalization of Maj. Gen. Edwin
A. Walker, whose fiery rhetoric had recently helped to spark a violent riot on
the University of Mississippi campus. On September 30, after hundreds of people
were wounded and two were killed, Walker was arrested on charges including sedition and insurrection.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered Walker held in a mental
institution for 90 days of psychiatric examination. But that decision was
challenged by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued that psychiatry
shouldn’t be a political tool, as well as by the American Civil Liberties
Union. After five days Kennedy backed down and Walker was released.
Pierce didn’t agree with Walker’s politics but did identify with his
situation. “Admittedly, Walker’s extreme views on ‘liberals’ and his alleged
defiance of the government (including alleged incitement to violence) suggest
mental unbalance; but the presumptions of enforced mental tests and/or
treatment should cause us grave concern,” he wrote. “It is only a short step
from psychiatric tests for rioters to psychiatric tests for victims of crime and
political persecution. A favorite technique of the latter is clever misuse of
the ‘psychopath’ label; and, even worse, revolutionary devices of psychological
warfare and brainwashing capable of crippling almost any human being, and in
such a manner that the victim’s factual description of the attack sounds like
mental illness.”
A few days after this letter was published a police officer and sheriff’s
deputy showed up at Pierce’s apartment with a warrant for his arrest,
apparently at the instigation of OSU President Willham. Although Sheriff
Charlie Fowler had never met Pierce, the detention order claimed that Fowler
had “personal knowledge” that he was violent and showed the potential to injure
himself or others.
A week later, he was involuntarily committed and, without knowing it,
placed in the care of Dr. Louis J. West, one of the CIA’s influential MKULTRA doctors.
Ever since Pierce shared his story I have been assembling the missing
pieces. Before he died we wrote to many federal agencies, requesting any
records they had about him under the Freedom of Information Act. All of them claimed that no such records existed. Yet just last week, as Matthew Green was
dealing with his NSA problem, I conducted another online search and found some correspondence
between Pierce and the CIA.
Dated August 1, 1960 and addressed to him at the Syracuse Math
Department, it included this statement: “Mr. Dulles (CIA Director at the time) asked me to acknowledge and
thank you for your letter of 9 July 1960 enclosing a message to Dr. Glennan of
NASA and Mr. D.H. Lewis. The thoughtfulness in bringing our attention to your
proposal is indeed appreciated.”
And what was the proposal? Electronic mental telepathy, Pierce called it. “Though
the technical requirements have already been met, the process and application
are new,” he wrote. It was basically a fishing expedition, an attempt to discover whether his suspicions were true. In a letter to NASA, he pointed to the work being done at
the Aviation Medicine School in Texas, where tiny transmitters were being used
for research, as well as cybernetic work underway to assist with space exploration, and “extensive
use of various voice analyzers and signal separators.”
Every agency we wrote, including NASA, NSA and CIA, denied ever hearing from Pierce or knowing anything about him. Yet he
apparently did get their attention.
Greg Guma’s new novel, Dons of Time, which looks at the dangers of the
surveillance state, will be released in October by Fomite Press. More of William Pierce's story will be released in coming months.
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