I read and watch the clouds change the colors of the mountains to the north. From sharp grays, to, later in the day, a dark tint like on a car window, to a burst near sunset that looks like cotton candy might if it were the most beautiful purples and oranges and reds and whites you’ve ever seen. As colorful as an atom bomb’s mushroom. The place might hold a place of love in my heart, if I didn’t have to be here.
Out here, you never know the secrets of people’s lives. My secrets are more guarded than most — as they are murderous secrets I’ve been keeping since 1953. My actions were born in secrecy, and it’s what I’ve lived in ever since then. In the 1950s I participated in the CIA’s mind control experiments, known as MK-ULTRA. I worked in what were called “subprojects,” but they were all under the ULTRA umbrella. I told myself, at first — before I’d seen or known of the scope of it — that I was doing this as a patriot, knowing the Russians were doing the same experiments. And we in the agency could not allow them to be first. To be able to control people’s minds. Our soldiers. Our POWs. Our spies. Hell, possibly our president. And we did these experiments, I now regret deeply, so we could, with our rapid advancements, be able to control their minds. Any other enemies of the state, domestic and global.
A good man would have told the government and screamed it to the Times. A good man would have risked his life. But while it does nothing to ease my guilt, I have never thought that was an option. To want to quit made you a national security risk. If they didn’t kill you right away, they would torture you and destroy your mind until you were of no use. And then they’d kill you. Or, worse, leave what was left of you alive.
But still, the man I should have been would’ve known he couldn’t keep torturing and killing people and remain a human being.
If I’d become a true security risk by talking, maybe I could have saved thousands of lives by trading my own. Though sometimes I think one man’s word against the CIA’s worst is hopeless.
I became a monster with a useless conscience. What you think of yourself is nothing when you stand it next to what you actually do.
But I could easily be disappeared. People in the project were tortured and killed — though sometimes just killed — and nobody would figure out it was a murder. The CIA was built on the desire for no one to know what they were doing behind the scenes. It’s in the very DNA of the CIA’s birth. It is the CIA.
Even in the agency, though, we were a particularly evil — I think I can use that word sincerely — tributary off the already poison river.
In the previous eighteen months, I’ve leaked as much information about MK-ULTRA as I can. It’s probably what helped the agency find my trail again. When I was silent and on the run, they had better things to do. But now, it’s a matter of time. You can be very hard to find in this world. But never impossible to find.
My best chance is why I originally came to live out here — a hundred and twenty miles from Los Angeles, as I say, and northeast of Palm Springs, fifty miles into the empty high desert.
Wonder Valley is a world where you don’t have neighbors. Or want them. This valley is for people who don’t like or want people in their lives. No one gives a shit about you. The only places I go are the gas station seven miles into town, the grocery store near it, and a little crap bar called the Mouse Trap down Highway 62, away from town and even farther east than I am. It’s not really a bar — not in any legal sense. It’s in a converted garage. The owner Leo built a small bar, put in five mismatched stools. There’s only one beer on tap — whatever keg he got from the liquor store. And even with only five stools, the place is mostly empty during the day. I drink there when I’m sick of drinking alone. Sometimes the generator power shuts down and the swamp cooler stops. And there you are, left to drink in total darkness — opening the door would only bring more heat. Drinking quickly because out here even a cold keg can turn the temperature of a cup of tea in no time.
Leo and I talk. We talk but we don’t communicate. Who does? Neither of us knows anything about each other’s lives. I’ll never know his story, and he’ll never know that I spend my time sending the secrets of the agency to the world in hopes they will be read and heard.
When I started writing all this information down — when I started releasing this information — I signed my death warrant.
More than 90 percent of the ULTRA files were destroyed in 1973 by the director of the CIA, on the order of my old boss, Sidney Gottlieb. Nothing we did was legal, according our government, the CIA, or the Nuremberg Code. If any other country were outed for doing this, our president would call them war criminals. Instead, Eisenhower knew about it and let it go on. After my time, Kennedy endorsed it. Nixon. It seems impossible to me that it’s stopped at all since. There is permanence to the subterranean horror that lies hidden from this nation.
They only ended the Tuskegee Airmen Syphilis Study in 1972, after more than forty years. Did it end because someone with a shred of ethics came to power? No. It ended because it was uncovered.
The people will only ever know — if they find out at all — long after the damage has been done. Long after what’s being done and will be done in the future.
If people knew the truth about the scope of this shadow world, they would realize what a fragile endeavor society actually is.
My death? The agency may torture me — but electroshock and isolation aren’t practical for a portable assassination. LSD or another drug would be too unpredictable, even if quickly administered by IV. There’s no twenty-story hotel to toss me off. I’m guessing a beating with a bat. I only hope it’s not a sniper. I need to see the assassin’s fear when they walk in the door and realize I’m not the only dead man in the room.
1953
I was hired because I was an expert in biochemical developments, and I was excited to have funding for what I thought I was there for — national security. Over time, I would collaborate with major advancements, but all of them were meant for defense, as far as I knew.
Very soon after being recruited and receiving my security clearance — which I was granted despite being a Jew who’d attended, after I’d immigrated to save my life, communist meetings with a girlfriend in the 1930s. She was more possessed with a revolutionary spirit than I was. I thought the American government could be trusted to a degree. Certainly more than the Germany which I’d fled. But I learned painfully and relentlessly that there was not an honest or benevolent government in the world. Savage men run everything. Everywhere.
As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: All men would be tyrants if they could.
Yet, at the time, I was still a patriot. No one is more in love with this country than the immigrant. I wanted to spend my life in service to the ideals, the promise, of my new home. The agency taught me early that the ways to reach closer to that perfect American ideal were as far as you could get from those ideals. A lie in service to the greater truth, a colleague said. No matter how much that truth went against everything people thought the country stood for. They didn’t even have a country. They just never knew.
1981
You do have to understand it was a different time, which excuses the fear, but not the experimenting with human subjects. The agency — the whole government — was terrified at how advanced the Russians might be at controlling a person’s mind. We had no idea and, as people tend to do when they don’t know anything, we feared the worst. And, as is always the reaction, we acted with blind rage over what we didn’t know. So, this was mainly about beating the enemy to discovering the secrets of mind control. And it made for what should have been strange bedfellows.