Crimes of the Surveillance State: A Victim’s Story .. How a brilliant Vermont mathematician became an early target of government harassment
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.
In covering this story, The UK Guardian concluded that if America’s system of research universities “becomes captive to government and handmaiden to the surveillance state, that would be an economic and cultural crime of monstrous proportions.”
Unfortunately, the crime was committed long ago.
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.
William A. Pierce, 1961 |
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.
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.”
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 MKULKTRA,” 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.”
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.
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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