‘What was it?’ Natalie asked as they walked toward the main rotunda.
‘It was a nightmare,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s the codename for a covert program run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence back in the 1950s and 1960s. They used American and Canadian citizens as subjects for batteries of illegal tests, often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects involved.’
Natalie stared across at him.
‘Are you kidding?’ she uttered. ‘The CIA was experimenting on people without consent?’
‘For as long as twenty years,’ Ben nodded. ‘They spiked drinks with drugs and other chemicals to induce altered states in subjects, used hypnosis and isolation, sensory deprivation, all kinds of abuses and even torture. The idea was to test the limits of how people could be manipulated in order to carry out tasks for government agents, and they killed several people in the process. The most famous was Harold Blauer, the American tennis player who died as a result of injections of Methylene-dioxyamphetamine. Blauer knew nothing of the experiment being performed on him, and after his death the involvement of Project MK-ULTRA was covered up by New York State, the government and the CIA for more than two decades.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Natalie said, ‘and the CIA wonders why people are suspicious of it.’
‘Well, if the agency wasn’t paranoid before, they will be now,’ Ben said as they walked inside the building. ‘MKULTRA was exposed by Congress through investigations by the Church Committee and the presidential Rockefeller Commission.’
‘This gets better by the minute,’ Natalie said. ‘So you think that maybe they’re doing the surveillance now because they fear we’re onto something?’
‘I doubt that,’ Ben said. ‘MK-ULTRA was shut down somewhere in the late 1970s by the director of the agency himself.’
‘Where’s the evidence from the program?’ Natalie asked. ‘I didn’t see any other references to it in the archives.’
‘That’s because the same director had all of the files burned in 1973 to prevent the Congressional and presidential committees from learning too much about what went on. There were a few Freedom of Information Act requests that uncovered caches of documents, but despite a Senate investigation nothing much came to light.’
Natalie led the way to their office. Guy Rikard was nowhere to be seen but Larry Levinson spotted them immediately and hurried over.
‘Guy’s in a meeting,’ he informed them, ‘but he won’t be gone for long. Did you manage to find out anything useful?’
Larry joined them as they huddled down at her desk and sifted through what they’d discovered.
‘So Joanna Defoe’s father is a former subject of this MKULTRA program?’ Larry asked after they had filled him in.
‘He testified before the Senate in 1973,’ Ben confirmed. ‘After the incriminating evidence was ordered burned by the DCIA, all the investigating parties had left to go on was the sworn testimony of the victims of the MK-ULTRA program. It was enough to build a picture of the scope of the operation but not enough to bring charges against anyone involved, which was almost certainly the motivation behind the destruction of the files.’
Ben slid one of the papers that they had printed out at the archive to Natalie.
‘Harrison Defoe testified in 1973 and gave a detailed account of how, in 1967, he had been a serving officer in the United States Army, working as a translator in Singapore.’
‘He wasn’t a military man,’ Natalie noted, reading the file. ‘He was a languages expert.’
‘And spoke fluent Cantonese as well as Vietnamese,’ Ben said. ‘He was part of an electronic intelligence outfit tasked with monitoring Viet Cong communications with sympathetic communist parties in the Malay Peninsula. They worked on tracking funding and weapons smuggling that came up into Vietnam from the south, instead of the more normal route down from the communist north and Russia.’
‘What was Singapore’s role in all of this?’ Natalie asked.
Larry Levinson replied immediately. Natalie knew him to have an encyclopaedic understanding of world affairs, but even she was surprised at the depth of his knowledge.
‘Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, was a staunch anti-communist,’ he explained. ‘In an economic sense the Vietnam War benefited Singapore. It had just gained its independence from Britain and was able to build immense infrastructure to act as a staging post for the war effort in Vietnam. When the US military moved into South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines were facing armed communist insurgents and a communist underground was still festering in Singapore. Indonesia was in the throes of a failed communist coup and was waging konfrontasi against Singapore, an underground conflict. America’s presence gave Prime Minister Yew the reason and opportunity to rebuild his country’s economy on a war footing and create the nation that it has since become. Harrison Defoe’s presence there would have been a tiny but pivotal role in the unfolding drama of the conflict.’
‘Why would they hit somebody in such a vital role?’ Natalie wondered out loud.
‘Probably because of his language expertise and his service location,’ Larry answered. ‘Harrison could talk to local people and so get information from the ground, which is the best way to find things out. But the people he was tasked with watching were largely well-known civilian figures who were discreetly supporting the communists. Popular with people in the region, if the American military had arrested them or the CIA had arranged for accidents to occur, then somebody, somewhere, would probably know about it and expose them, losing the United States respect and support in the region.’
Natalie realized what Larry was saying.
‘So they start using Harrison Defoe as some sort of programmable assassin or something?’
Ben laughed.
‘Probably not quite like that,’ he said. ‘Harrison testified that he was asked by the CIA if he would like to use newly developed hypnosis techniques to expand his knowledge of Malaysian dialects. He agreed, of course, as language was his passion. Over the next three months he underwent numerous, extensive hypnotherapy sessions. His testimony says that he did indeed learn a great deal about various dialects but that also he began to develop an inexplicably strong sense of outrage toward communist businessmen in Singapore, especially those whom he knew had links to the Viet Cong.’
Natalie smiled bitterly.
‘The Viet Cong were effectively winning the war by the late sixties,’ she said. ‘We were relying on carpet bombing and Agent Orange, and our boys in the jungles were in a living hell of combat. Harrison was a patriot and a pacifist, which could explain some of his mounting anger.’
‘He must have hated the sight of so many body-bags coming back from Da Nang and Saigon,’ Ben agreed. ‘Couple that with some deeply induced hypnotic suggestions about how evil his friends in Singapore were and you’ve got a time-bomb waiting to explode.’
‘Nineteen sixty-eight,’ Natalie read from the sheet, ‘and Harrison Defoe is arrested after the murder of four Malaysian businessmen outside a downtown restaurant. Tried and convicted, he served the next three years in a Singapore jail. Christ, they burned him.’
‘Left him to rot,’ Larry noted. ‘His own country abandoned him despite his loyalty and patriotism. Essentially, the CIA programmed him to murder enemies of the state and then melted away when he was arrested and tried.’