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ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND |
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Chapter 9: Season Of The Witch ARMED LOVE It was a typical sixties scene: a group of scruffy, long-haired students stood in a circle passing joints and hash pipes. The setting could have been Berkeley, Ann Arbor or any other hip campus. But these students were actually FBI agents, and the school they attended was known as "Hoover University." Located at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, this elite academy specialized in training G-men to penetrate left-wing organizations. To cultivate the proper counterculture image, they were told not to wash or bathe for several days before infiltrating a group of radicals. Refresher courses were also held for FBI agents who had successfully immersed themselves in the drug culture of their respective locales. For months they had smoked pot and dropped acid with unsuspecting radicals, and now the turned-on spies had a chance to swap stories with their undercover comrades. Former FBI agent Cril Payne likened the annual seminar to a class reunion. Between lectures on the New Left, drug abuse, and FBI procedure, the G-men would sneak away to the wooded grounds to get stoned while American taxpayers footed the bill. In the late 1960s the Yippies were infiltrated by an FBI agent named George Oemmerle. Known in New York radical circles as "Prince Crazy," Oemmerle wore weird costumes, smoked a lot of pot, and instigated some of the most outrageous street theater actions. He also was a member of the YIP steering committee, and he served as Abbie Hoffman's bodyguard during the Chicago convention. At one point Oemmerle tried to interest the Yippies in a plan to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, but fortunately wiser heads prevailed. They never suspected he was a spook; after all, marijuana was a "revolutionary" drug, and no pig could maintain his cover while under the honest influence of the herb (the old truth drug scenario). So the Yippies believed until they learned the extent of the government's penetration of the New Left. According to Army intelligence documents later obtained by CBS news, nearly one out of six demonstrators at the Chicago convention was an undercover operative. The retinue of spies included Bob Pierson, a Chicago cop disguised as a biker, who latched onto Jerry Rubin during the convention and became his bodyguard. Enthralled by the romantic notion of an alliance between motorcycle gang members and middle-class radicals, the Yippies were easily conned by Pierson's tough-talking rhetoric. He was always in the thick of the street action, throwing stones at police, pulling down American flags, leading crowds in militant chants, and urging protesters to start fires and tie up traffic. Pierson's testimony at the trial of the Chicago Seven was instrumental in putting Rubin behind bars for sixty-six days, before his sentence and those of the other defendants were overturned by an appeals court. The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a massive sub rosa campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joining the FBI in this effort was an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the intelligence divisions of all the military services, and numerous local police forces. Over a quarter of a million Americans were under "active surveillance" during this period, and dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities and personal lives of millions more. Those affiliated with black militant, antiwar, and New Left [1] groups were prime targets of dirty tricks and other underhanded tactics designed to stir up factionalism and "neutralize" political activists. During the Nixon presidency the CIA stepped up its domestic operations even though such activity was outlawed by the Agency's charter. In 1969 the CIA prepared a report entitled "Restless Youth," which concluded that the New Left and black nationalist movements were essentially homegrown phenomena and that foreign ties to American dissidents were insubstantial. That was not what President Nixon wanted to hear. The "Communist conspiracy" had become an idee fixe in the White House, and Nixon pressed CIA director Richard Helms to expand the parameters of Operation CHAOS (an appropriate acronym) and other domestic probes. In addition to monitoring a wide range of liberal and left-wing organizations, the CIA provided training, technical assistance, exotic equipment, and intelligence data to local police departments. The Agency also employed harassment tactics such as sprinkling "itching powder" (concocted by the Technical Services Staff, the unit that oversaw the LSD experiments in the 1950s) on public toilets near leftist meetings, which drove people wild for about three days after they sat down. The FBI, meanwhile, escalated its secret war against all forms of political and cultural dissent in America. The assault on freedom of expression included a systematic attempt to cripple the underground press, which FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover found loathsome because of its "depraved nature and moral looseness." There was also a concerted campaign to make political arrests by charging radicals with possession of small amounts of marijuana. "Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be on the alert to opportunities to have them arrested on drug charges," Hoover stated in a top-secret FBI memo. "Any information concerning the fact that individuals have marijuana or are engaging in a narcotics party should be immediately furnished to local authorities and they should be encouraged to take action." Nixon made the issue of drug abuse a cornerstone of his law-and-order campaign during the 1968 election, and when he took office he pushed through a series of no knock laws allowing police to break into homes of suspected drug users, unannounced and armed to the hilt, to search for a tiny tab of LSD or a pipeful of pot. While no-knock and other draconian legal ploys were allegedly designed to crack down on the abuse of controlled substances, the targets of the antidrug campaign were often involved in radical politics. Examples are legion: in 1969 John Sinclair, leader of the White Panther party in Michigan, was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for giving two marijuana joints to an undercover officer, Lee Otis Johnson, a black militant and antiwar organizer at Texas Southern University, was given a thirty-year jail term after sharing a joint with a narc, Mark Rudd, an SDS militant who played a prominent role in the uprising at Columbia University, was fingered for drugs by an informant; and police in Buffalo, New York, planted dope in a bookstore run by Martin Sostre, a black anarchist who served six years in prison before Amnesty International successfully interceded on his behalf. Drug laws were also used to persecute Timothy Leary and other counterculture leaders. An example of this type of harassment came to light in federal court when Jack Martin, a musician who'd been busted on a dope rap, testified that he was asked to turn informant and assist the Federal Narcotics Bureau in framing Allen Ginsberg on a marijuana charge. The FBI and the CIA kept tabs on Ginsberg's activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while the narcs maintained a file that included a photograph of the well-known poet "in an indecent pose." The picture was placed in a special vault at BNDD headquarters and marked for "possible future use." A number of big-name rock musicians were also targeted for surveillance by the FBI. Hoover's men shadowed John Lennon after he and Yoko Ono got involved in radical politics in the US (Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" became the anthem of the antiwar movement). In addition the FBI kept tabs on Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, the Fugs, and other rock stars, many of whom were prosecuted on drug charges. The harassment of rock musicians was part of a crusade against the emerging counterculture and the alternative lifestyles associated with radical politics in the late 1960s. Some rock groups took explicitly political stands, and their music received wide airplay despite halfhearted attempts at government censorship. As a result large numbers of young people were exposed to the rhetoric of radical politics. While rock music certainly did not politicize its entire audience, it reinforced a pervasive anti-authoritarianism and provided an audacious sound track to the hopes and anger of the younger generation. High energy rock songs were clarion calls to revolt: the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man," Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," the Doors' "Break on through to the other side," Jefferson Airplane's "We are all outlaws ..." "All of these and many more items of popular culture thrived in and reproduced an apocalyptic, polarized political mood," noted former SDS president Todd Gitlin. "In ensemble they shaped a symbolic environment that was conducive to revolutionism out of context, to the inflation of rhetoric and militancy out of proportion to the possible." After the Chicago convention an increasing number of radicals began to talk about the need for violence to raise the domestic political costs of the war in Vietnam. The revelations of My Lai, the tiger cages, the napalm, the cancer-causing defoliants, the carpet bombings, the delayed-action antipersonnel weapons, the images of daily carnage on television -- all this and much more dislocated the sensibilities of young and old alike until it was difficult for some to see anything virtuous in "Amerika" (or "AmeriKKKa"), as it came to be spelled by left-wing militants. The imperial center had to be defeated at all costs for the sake of those who were dying in Southeast Asia. As every legitimate gesture of dissent was rebuffed by another round of US atrocities, antiwar activists were forced to reconsider their tactics. The overwhelming horror of Vietnam made all political choices seem urgent and simple. Radicals were under tremendous pressure to translate their jargon into action, to demonstrate their revolutionary commitment by pushing militancy to the extreme. Although they did not realize it at the time, the ultramilitants were playing right into the hands of the Nixon administration, which seized upon incidents of violence by protesters to justify the imposition of repressive measures against the antiwar movement as a whole. During this period the New Left became open turf for undercover operatives who spouted revolutionary rhetoric in order to incite others to violence. But covert manipulation was not solely to blame for what happened in the late 1960s. The provocateurs' success depended on a climate of tolerance for their wild suggestions and antics. Some radical groups didn't need any provocation. The "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker" collective made their antisocial debut during the New York City garbage strike in early 1968 when they set fire to heaps of rubbish and threw bricks and bottles at firemen who came to douse the blaze. Formed as the Lower East Side chapter of SDS, this band of acid-fueled fanatics supported the student strike at Columbia by occupying a building and sabotaging the school's electrical system. After the strike was over, however, they berated their fellow communards for not slugging it out with the cops. The Motherfuckers proceeded to terrorize other radical organizations, causing havoc at meetings and protest rallies. At one point, they crashed a conference of socialist scholars and denounced the participants as "armchair book-quoting jive-ass honky leftists. ... who are the VD of the revolution." In pursuit of "total revolution" the Motherfuckers divided into small affinity groups and introduced "motion tactics" or "trashing" to SDS. The idea was to get loaded on drugs and run wild through the streets, breaking store windows, spilling trash cans, and smashing windshields in an improvised war dance. It was sheer bravado, a blow for a blow's sake, but there was something almost mystical about it. The political efficacy of trashing was less important than how it felt, the sense of psychic liberation, the existential buzz that came from "doing it in the road." They just wanted to let loose and do whatever they could to put some hurt on the oppressor. The Motherfuckers saw their role as "a permanent fermenting agent, encouraging action without claiming to lead." In a poster disseminated on the Lower East Side they denounced Timothy Leary and his apolitical followers for "limiting the revolution" with their lightweight metaphysical theories and gooey religious rhetoric. Shortly before they dispersed in 1969 the Motherfuckers issued a manifesto called "Acid Armed Consciousness," which spoke in grandiose terms of picking up the gun and correcting the cosmic imbalance: "We are the freaks of an unknown space/time.... We are the eye of the Revolution.... Only when we simultaneously see our magic drugs as an ecstatic revolutionary implement, and feel our bodies as the cellular macrocosm and galactic microcosm will our spiral/life energy destroy everything dead as it races over the planet.... Blown minds of screaming-singing-beaded-stoned-armed-feathered Future-People are only the sparks of a revolutionary explosion and evolutionary planetary regeneration. Neon Nirvanas finally overload their circuits ... as we snake dance thru our world trailed by a smokescreen of reefer." The Motherfuckers might be dismissed as a lunatic fringe had they not prefigured the paramilitary fad that engulfed the New Left as the decade drew to a close. The classic photo from this period appeared on the front page of the Berkeley Tribe, an offshoot of the Berkeley Barb; it showed a hip couple posing earnestly in front of a wooded commune, the long-haired man with a rifle in hand, and his woman in a granny dress holding a baby on her back. This was the mood of the late 1960s. A lot of self-styled outlaws and freaky-looking people were studying karate and learning how to handle shotguns. Former pacifists were now talking about bloodshed as a necessary evil in political struggle. The underground press published instructions on bomb making, and Yippie tactics of humor and guerrilla theater were supplanted by real guerrilla attacks. The Anarchist Cookbook included a recipe for concocting Molotov cocktails as well as LSD. "Acid armed consciousness" -- a far cry from flower power, but that was what the Movement had come to since the Summer of Love. There was no containing the violence any longer. Across the country militants blew up power lines, burned down ROTC headquarters, trashed draft board offices, and traded potshots with police. All told, major demonstrations occurred at nearly three hundred colleges and universities during the spring of 1969, involving a third of the nation's students. A plethora of radical groups sprang up: the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization), the Brown Berets (Chicanos), the GI resistance movement, the Gay Liberation Front, the American Indian Movement, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the car factories of Detroit. High school students were becoming more militant, and women's liberationists were going after Playboy magazine, Wall Street, the Miss America Pageant, and other bastions of sexism. Whether all these groups could cooperate in a comradely way was another matter entirely, but the sum total of their efforts produced a thunderous cacophony that almost sounded like a revolution. Ironically, just when the New Left was experiencing an unprecedented wave of support, its leading organization, SDS, which claimed almost a hundred thousand members and a million supporters, was being torn asunder by internal contradictions. Chapter meetings throughout the country degenerated into ideological squabbles as the Progressive Labor party (PL) a disciplined Old Left cadre, made a power play and tried to take over SDS. The PL people were cultural conservatives, they wore their hair short, dressed straight, mouthed Marxist dogma, and dismissed lifestyle as a peripheral concern that diverted attention from the true working-class struggle. On repeated occasions PL castigated SDS regulars for being "escapist" and "objectively counterrevolutionary" when they spoke in favor of turning on. (Quite a few SDS members would have agreed with Arthur Kleps when he said, "Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes." [1] PL also criticized propaganda tactics like guerrilla theater and rock bands at rallies as "creeping carnivalism," and they even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot. The drug issue wasn't the only axis of division within SDS. Action freaks taunted the "wimps" who emphasized day-to-day grassroots organizing, hippie elements were angry at hard-core militants, and women started to leave the organization in droves, criticizing the New Left for its ingrained male chauvinism. Through it all the ubiquitous FBI and CIA stoked the fires of internal dissension at every given opportunity. A CIA document of April 1969 forecast the fatal rupture that occurred two months later: "The SDS prize continues to be fair game for takeover by any organized communist group on the American scene with the power, prestige, and cunning to do so.... It can be predicted that such efforts will continue until someone succeeds. Then SDS will split and their influence on the American campus can be expected to diminish." The death knell was sounded at the SDS national conference in Chicago in June 1969, when an ultramilitant faction put forward a position paper called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows." The title came from a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a song full of homespun advice to disaffected youth, with the usual Dylanesque overtones of anti-authoritarianism and rebellion that appealed to many SDS members. The Weathermen, as this group immediately came to be known, announced their intention to form urban guerrilla cadres and carry on the revolution with sporadic gestures of violence. Then they walked out en masse after declaring that they had "expelled" PL from SDS. When the dust settled, there were two groups stridently claiming to be the "real" SDS, neither of which inspired much enthusiasm among students. Just as the CIA had predicted, the split marked the end of SDS as an effective organization, and the collapse of the New Left as a whole soon followed. The Weathermen's decision to go underground was formulated during a period when many of their key leaders, including chief spokesperson Bernardine Dohrn, were tripping out on LSD. Dohrn, whose fiery personality and good looks raised eyebrows among her male comrades, showed her solidarity with the youth culture when she organized a be-in for Chicago in the spring of 1967. Her enthusiasm for acid was shared by Jeff Jones, a former Motherfucker who joined the Weather contingent when SDS bit the dust. Some Weather leaders were initially reluctant to experiment with psychedelic drugs. Mark Rudd, who had been chairman of the Action Faction at the Columbia University chapter of SDS, declined numerous offers to turn on with the Crazies (a militant offshoot of the Yippies) on the grounds that it would interfere with his politics. The Crazies chided Rudd and his cohorts for being straitlaced and ignorant of the youth culture, but Rudd's crowd was not to be persuaded. Finally the Crazies took matters into their own hands and put acid in the wine at a Weather party without telling the hosts. Soon the place exploded into a frenzy of song and dance; afterwards the local leadership agreed that LSD was inherently revolutionary, and they ordered every Weatherperson in New York to take the drug and get "experienced." Meanwhile the White Panthers were turning on future Weather recruits in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Billy Ayers was a prominent figure in the Jesse James Gang, Ann Arbor's version of the Action Faction, before joining the Weathermen, and he too had reservations about LSD until Ken Kelley, a White Panther who edited an underground newspaper called the Ann Arbor Argus, turned him on. "I remember when it hit the Weathermen," said Kelley. "That's when they just got out there." While the Weathermen are an extreme case, the degree to which acid accentuated their militant tendencies underscores an essential truth about the drug: LSD does not make people more or less political; rather, it reinforces and magnifies what's already in their heads. Most of the Weatherpeople (at the outset there were three hundred full-fledged members) came from middle and upper-middle-class families and their encounter with LSD dredged up a lot of guilt about "white skin privilege." They felt that all white youth, including themselves, were guilty of crimes against Third World people. This guilt, according to Weather logic, could only be purged in sacrificial blood: white blood must flow to prove to blacks, Vietnamese, and other victims of American imperialism that white revolutionaries were serious. Accordingly the Weatherpeople organized themselves into a network of secret cells, each with ten or twelve members, and prepared to undertake armed attacks against the state. "We have one task," Billy Ayers stated, "and that's to make ourselves into tools of the revolution." Toward this end the Weather collectives embarked upon a rigorous process of internal purification. They sought to overcome their bourgeois cultural conditioning by living in places that were filthy and foul. Sometimes they went without food to save money for more important items, such as guns. They rejected romantic love as a capitalist hangup and abandoned monogamous sexual relations in favor of orgies and freewheeling partner swapping. ("People who fuck together, fight together" was the going slogan.) Their days were filled with weapons training and karate practice; at night they held endless criticism and self-criticism sessions, often with the aid of LSD, in an effort to exorcise their natural passivity and bring themselves closer to that apocalyptic edge where political violence intersects with personal transformation and privileged youth become street fighters. The amount of acid a person could take during these sessions without freaking out was a measure of personal toughness. (For all the talk about the ego-dissolving properties of LSD, the male ego flourished among the Weathermen.) The communal ingestion of LSD also served as a rudimentary security check. In a manner recalling the CIA's use of LSD as a truth drug, the Weatherpeople attempted to weed out suspected informants by putting them through a group acid test. On one occasion a Weather collective in Cincinnati thought they had identified an agent provocateur when Larry Grathwohl, an ex-Green Beret who had fought in Vietnam, announced during an acid trip, "You're right, I am a pig." After mulling over his confession, the Weather cadre concluded he was merely expressing his guilt for having served in the army, and he was accepted into their ranks. They were particularly attracted to Grathwohl's military skills. He supplied guns and drugs and taught them how to make bombs. A few months later Grathwohl fingered two New York Weatherwomen for the FBI. [2] When a group of people trip together frequently, it's easy for them to get caught up in a mutually reinforcing world view and lose sight of the degree to which they've drifted off-center, far from the day-to-day perceptions of most individuals. This was particularly true of the Weatherpeople, who lived a very isolated existence. The collective was their whole world. All their waking hours were geared toward making the revolution. They were totally consumed by it -- eating less, sleeping less, getting charged up until they were oblivious to the outside world. They used to sing a song to the tune of the Beatle's "Yellow Submarine": "We all live in a weather machine, a weather machine ..." And that's how it was; they were like a machine, an integral unit composed of interchangeable parts. "We got carried away," an ex-Weatherwoman admitted. "We were out on limb with each other.... We thought about picking up the gun all the time. We really thought there was going to be a revolution." The Weathermen's fantasies about the coming revolution were nourished by the hermetic quality of their own experience and the hectic atmosphere of the late 1960s. Things were moving so fast during this period, people were going through so many changes, the antiwar cause had picked up such incredible momentum, but hardly anyone paused to absorb what was happening. It was easy to lose a sense of balance as the pace of history accelerated. Committed activists felt as though they had lived through several lifetimes in a few months, which inevitably led to widespread exhaustion. "Inside the movement," Todd Gitlin recalled, "one had the sense of being hurled through a time tunnel, of hurtling from event to event without the time to learn from experience." This dizzying sense of onrushing time was reinforced by the use of psychedelic drugs. An LSD trip encapsulates an enormous amount of experience in a relatively short period, insights that might normally take years to acquire can burst forth in an awesome flurry during an eight-hour acid high. "It was like a cheap form of shrinkdom," Ken Kelley stated. "A week became a decade in terms of your consciousness.... Every single aspect of your life was affected by it.... It was like if Jesus Christ came for the Second Coming and said, 'Follow me.' That's what LSD was like. No one could believe it. All you knew was that you'd find out more of what was going on in the cosmic scheme of things if you took LSD." As a catalyst of psychic and social processes, LSD amplified a chaotic cultural milieu which in the late 1960s was completely saturated by the inflated images of the mass media. Both these perceptual technologies -- LSD and the media -- combined to accelerate the temporal flux and fuel the wishful thinking of the young activists who jumped from rebellion to revolution without knowing what they were really getting into. Television was particularly insidious, reducing history to a series of discontinuous freeze-frames or, as Gitlin put it, "a sequence of tenuously linked exclamation points" -- Columbia! Sorbonne! Chicago! In this mythic "event time," each tumultuous confrontation was a peak moment, like an LSD trip, packed full of vivid experience not always easy to assimilate or put into proper context in the short term. "Tripping ratified and gathered into a single day's experience what, in fact, life had become," an SDS veteran explained. "Life was very trippy from about 1968 on in the worst and best sense, and the conflict was, do you go with it or do you escape it?" Those who lived inside the high-velocity Weather machine chose to go with it no matter what the cost. After months of intensive preparation they plunged into the next mythic showdown, the Days of Rage demonstration in Chicago in October 1969. It was the second anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, and the Weatherpeople were determined to "bring the war back home" by making revolutionary violence a reality inside the Mother Country. Armed with pipes, clubs, poles, motorcycle helmets, gas masks, goggles and flak jackets, six hundred hardcore militants went on a rampage, whipping themselves into a frenzy with Battle of Algiers war whoops. They marched through the streets carrying Viet Cong flags and trashing everything in sight. Hundreds of demonstrators were beaten, a dozen were shot, and half of the Weatherbrigade was arrested within a few hours. For the Weatherpeople, the violent outburst in Chicago was a way of "upping the cost of imperialism." They had little patience for those who were still hung up on building a broad-based movement. "Organizing is just another way of going slow," said Mark Rudd. He and his cohorts wanted to get on with the business of destruction; everything else was dismissed as liberal dillydallying. Drunk on confrontation and intoxicated by an overblown sense of their capacity to "make history," the Weathermen believed they could overthrow the American system by sheer willpower. Theirs was an acid dream of revolution, and the course they had chosen, more by instinct than by rational planning, sent them hurtling down a one-way road to political oblivion. _______________ Notes: 1. The FBI never arrived at a precise definition of the New Left. "It's more or less an attitude, I would think," an FBI official told a senate committee in 1975. 2. Another FBI informant named Horace J. Packer infiltrated SDS and the Weathermen at the University of Washington. Packer later testified that he supplied campus radicals with drugs, weapons and materials for making Molotov cocktails. He also admitted that while posing as a leftwing activist he used acid, speed, mescaline and cocaine.
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