Some of
his New York neighbours knew him as Paul Galan, some knew him
as Paul Stanley. To others, he was just Paul, a quiet man who
could usually be found on his doorstep with his dog and an ever-present
cup of coffee. But in retrospect, all agree that there was an
air of mystery about the man who invariably greeted passers-by
with a smile and a friendly word.
When ‘Paul’
died in 1992, people in his neighbourhood gathered in the rain,
on the step, to toast him with coffee and pastries from the nearby
Ukrainian restaurant. What none of them knew was that their neighbour’s
real name was Stanley Glickman, and that he had once been a promising
young artist, a dashing American in Paris on his way to great
things. But then a most peculiar event transpired, one that would
change his life forever.
This coming
Tuesday in a US court, Stanley’s past will be the focus of
a lawsuit pitting the Glickman family against the US Government.
At issue will be exactly what happened in a Paris cafe in November
1952 when, according to the family, a CIA official slipped a large
dose of LSD into Stanley’s drink, triggering a psychotic
episode and transforming him into a neighbourhood ‘character’
with a secret.
Glickman
was born in New York City in 1927, the son of a modestly successful
furrier. The youngest of three children, he began showing an aptitude
for drawing and painting in his pre-teen years, attending classes
outside school and winning many prizes. In the summer of 1951,
he sailed for Paris, where he began studies at the Academie de
la Grande Chaumiere, and later at the studio of the renowned French
modernist Fernand Leger. He also traveled to Florence to study
fresco painting, and won a national competition to have one of
his paintings hung in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In autumn
1952, he set himself up in a studio on the outskirts of Paris.
‘My days were spent working in my studio, my evenings usually
spent drinking coffee at the Cafe Dome in Montparnasse,’
he would later recall. His friends were young people from various
countries with whom he got into passionate discussions about ideas,
events and plans for the future. He also met and fell in love
with Ruth Edelman, a young Canadian making a grand tour of Europe.
Her father came to visit, the three dined together, and Mr Edelman
pronounced Glickman very suitable for his daughter. The two became
so wrapped up in each other that Glickman had trouble concentrating
on his work. Reluctantly, he urged Ruth to continue on her tour,
with plans to resume the relationship when she returned to Paris.
One evening
soon after her departure, as Glickman was enjoying his habitual
coffee at the Dome, he was invited by an acquaintance across the
street to the Cafe Select, where they were joined by another group
of Americans whom Glickman did not know. Glickman and the conservatively-dressed
strangers disagreed over politics, power and patriotism; a heated
debate ensued. At length, a fed-up Glickman settled his bill and
prepared to leave.
But one
of the men insisted on buying him a drink as a peace offering.
Glickman, who had been drinking coffee, reluctantly agreed to
accept a liqueur, and although the group had been enjoying waiter
service, the stranger insisted on getting the drink personally.
Halfway through his Chartreuse, Glickman began to feel strange:
his perceptions of objects, sounds and dimensions became distorted.
This hallucinatory state must have been particularly frightening
for Glickman, since it was more than a decade before LSD became
easily available and its effects widely known.
At this
point, according to an affidavit Glickman filed in 1983, the men
around him leaned in, fascinated. One suggested that he was capable
of performing miracles. Fearing he had been poisoned, Glickman
broke free and made his way home; it seemed to him that shadowy
figures were following him. In the morning, he woke to intense
hallucinations. The next two weeks found him wandering the streets
of Paris in a feverish haze. Seeking to backtrack through this
nightmare, he returned to the Cafe Select, sat down at a table
and promptly collapsed. Strangers revived him and drove him to
the American hospital in Paris.
There, according
to medical records, he was given an EEG and a calming dose of
sodium amytal. Not so, according to Glickman, who claimed in his
affidavit that he received electroshock therapy via a catheter
up his penis, and was dosed with what seemed to be more hallucinogenic
substances. He panicked and checked himself out of the hospital,
but soon had himself readmitted, remaining for another seven days
during which time he believes he was given yet more hallucinogenic
drugs. At this point, Ruth Edelman returned from her travels and
signed him out of the hospital. She wanted to stay and nurse him,
but Glickman told her to go home to Canada because he didn’t
want to ruin her life.
For the
next 10 months, he remained a terrified recluse in his Paris flat,
not painting and barely eating for fear of being poisoned again.
His relatives in the US knew nothing about his condition until
a visiting friend of the family saw how thin Stanley was and alerted
his parents. Almost immediately, his brother-in-law arrived to
bring him home. Under a doctor’s care, his physical health
slowly revived, but he never regained his mental equilibrium.
He avoided old friends. Once an avid student, he stopped reading
books.
He never
held a steady job, never had another romantic relationship, and
never painted again.
‘In
1952, the only explanation was madness,’ Glickman would later
write in an affidavit. Although one psychiatrist suggested that
he be institutionalised, Glickman’s family helped him settle
into a small apartment in New York’s East Village. At first
he found it difficult even to leave the apartment; every time
he urinated, he thought of the catheter and the events at the
Cafe Select. But after a while he tried, falteringly, to get on
with his life. He cleaned furniture in a local antique shop, filled
in occasionally for his sick father at the family shop, designed
fabrics, and even opened a small, unprofitable antiques shop of
his own. ‘He would never really try to sell you anything,’
recalls Marilyn Appleberg, a neighbourhood association chairman.
‘(His shop) was a place for him to be, to socialise.’
Just getting through each day seemed a challenge. He would walk
his two big red dogs Charlie and Gent, and, after they died, a
smaller black one called Kuma. Even in an area known for street
characters, he cut a striking figure, with his shock of white
hair and a red-and-black silk scarf, knotted like a cravat. But
most of the time, he just sat on his step with a cup of coffee.
There were two names on his mailbox: Glickman and Galan. Nobody
knew for sure who he was. No neighbour ever entered his apartment.
Yet someone
else did share Glickman’s secret: his sister Gloria. In 1977,
she was watching televised Senate hearings about CIA abuses, chaired
by Ted Kennedy, and she called Stanley, urging him to turn on
his television. One of the witnesses described a government drug-testing
programme known as MKULTRA, which had used innocent Americans
selected as human guinea pigs. ‘There was no advance knowledge
or protection of the individuals concerned,’ the witness
said. The CIA’s mandate is to preserve and protect the liberties
guaranteed in the American constitution, yet this CIA-sponsored
‘research’ directly violated the Nuremberg Code, established
in the years after the Second World War to deal with the ‘crimes
against humanity’ committed by the Nazis during their notorious
medical experiments. The Code stipulates that patients must give
‘informed consent’ before any experimentation may begin.
The witness
before the Kennedy committee went on to justify the CIA’s
experiments on grounds of national security. With the Soviets
looking into the possible use of hallucinogens as ‘brainwashing’
agents, the United States had to be prepared to fight back even
if it meant giving drugs like LSD to unsuspecting American citizens.
‘Harsh as it may sound in retrospect, it was felt that in
an issue where national survival might be concerned, such a procedure
and such a risk was a reasonable one to take,’ he said.
Shortly
after watching the hearings, Glickman began seeking answers on
his own. He contacted Kennedy’s staff and the office of the
US Attorney General, to no avail. He was advised he needed a lawyer,
but that would take money. Unable to raise funds on his own and
perhaps seeking further catharsis, he decided to write a film
treatment.
One day
in 1981, the movie Ragtime was filming down the block, and one
of Glickman’s neighbours, Dean Corren, was working as an
extra in it. Glickman approached Corren and asked him if he would
try and get his film treatment to Ragtime’s director, Milos
Forman. Corren agreed, and took the story home to read. He was
stunned: ‘There was something about it that defied fiction.’
Then Glickman, who had apparently never told anyone outside his
family about the Paris experience, told Corren the whole story.
Nothing
came of Glickman’s treatment. He was no writer, and as for
the story itself, perhaps even Hollywood found it too fantastic.
But Corren became intrigued by Glickman’s account, and spent
the next five years looking into it. In 1981, on an unrelated
trip to Washington, he visited the Centre for National Security
Studies and read about the architect of MKULTRA Sidney Gottlieb,
the same man who had testified before the Kennedy committee about
the policy of spiking the drinks of unsuspecting Americans.
After reading
a description of Gottlieb, Corren telephoned Glickman in New York
with a question: did one of the men in the cafe, by any chance,
have a club foot? Glickman’s response was immediate: he recalled
the man who had gone to get him the Chartreuse, and, as the man
stood at the bar, noticed that he had a misshapen foot. That’s
curious, Corren replied. So does Dr. Gottlieb.
Gottlieb,
the antagonist in this drama, is a well-known figure: Norman Mailer
devoted a whole section of Harlot’s Ghost, his novelisation
of the history of the CIA, to him. With a doctorate in biochemistry
from the California Institute of Technology, Gottlieb was a rarity
among higher-echelon CIA officials, who tended to be Ivy League
graduates with equal parts self-assurance and naivety.
As well
as being born with a club foot, which left him with a noticeable
limp, the New York native was also plagued by severe stammering.
Nevertheless, Gottlieb became head of the CIA’s Chemical
Division at 33, and quickly impressed colleagues with his curiosity
and energy. ‘He was one of the most imaginative, creative
people I’ve ever worked with,’ says Dr John Gittinger,
who worked under Gottlieb and later became chief psychologist
in the CIA’s Clandestine Service.
In a 1953
memo to a researcher, Gottlieb gave an indication of the kinds
of mind control issues he was interested in for both offensive
and defensive purposes: ‘Disturbance of memory; discrediting
by aberrant behaviour; alteration of sex patterns; eliciting of
information; suggestibility; creation of dependence.’ He
seemed driven to excel in the Cold War battle against the Soviets,
working with a zeal that Gittinger attributes to guilt that his
disability kept him out of the War. Ultimately, Gottlieb would
admit that MKULTRA tested an array of techniques and substances
on dozens of unsuspecting people, and there may well have been
hundreds.
Most striking
to all who knew him in those days was the ease with which he overcame
his disability. A keen dancer, while travelling, he seized every
opportunity to learn new dances and steps, which he eagerly demonstrated
to friends and colleagues on his return. When not trying to find
out whether a person could be coerced into changing his or her
political loyalty, the head of MKULTRA enjoyed life on his Virginia
farm, raising goats, Christmas trees and corn.
Ironically,
Gottlieb, who has never been willing to discuss his role in MKULTRA
in any great detail or to apologise for its excesses, would years
later turn to Zen Buddhism and become a volunteer in Aids hospices.
He would only grudgingly admit to the Senate committee that MKULTRA
was a failure: ‘In looking backward now, the real possibility
of the successful and effective use (of mind control) either against
us or by us was very low.’ In the 1950s, though, Gottlieb
was sufficiently supportive of unanticipated ingestion of LSD
that he personally spiked the drinks of scientists working with
him. In one incident, an Army scientist, Frank Olson, was given
a massive dose and, in a delayed reaction some days later, ended
up jumping through the 10th-floor window of a Manhattan hotel.
President Gerald Ford later apologised, and Congress authorised
a $ 750,000 payment to the family. (In Manhattan, a grand jury
is currently looking at Olson’s ‘suicide’ new evidence,
not linked with Gottlieb, indicating that he may have been hit
with a blunt instrument before his body hurtled out the window.)
Shortly after finding the CIA documents in Washington, Dean Corren
began searching for a lawyer to take up Glickman’s case.
At least a dozen firms said no before their luck turned. Then,
one after another, firms accepted but later handed the case on
when their approaches were thwarted by government obfuscation.
Time and again, courts simply took the agency’s word on what
information could be safely released from its files. Even 45-year-old
documents were not made available without heavy editing.
The US government
has over the years issued various qualified denials in the course
of seeking to have the case dismissed. In one brief, government
lawyers assert that ‘there is no evidence that TSD (the Technical
Services Division, whose Chemical Division was headed by Gottlieb)
ever engaged in or funded LSD testing or research overseas’.
But the
Glickmans, distrustful of such claims, eventually found someone
with impressive credentials to back them up. In 1988, Glickman’s
then-counsel Ramsey Clark called Dr Lester Grinspoon, an associate
professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and one of the world’s
leading authorities on LSD and hallucinogenic drugs. Grinspoon
had himself tried to get CIA records about the testing programme
back in the 1970s while working on a book; he too had been stonewalled.
So when the call came from the Glickmans, he readily agreed to
examine Stanley.
Grinspoon
saw Glickman on several occasions, and spent a good deal of time
with him. He examined old film footage of Glickman going to Italy
shortly before the events in Paris. ‘As far as I can tell,
Stanley was a very healthy young man,’ says Grinspoon. ‘He’s
not a person who could have been said to be mentally disturbed.’
Glickman told Grinspoon that, after accepting the fateful drink,
he saw the walls in the cafe moving and halos around the lights,
and became convinced he could levitate wine bottles on the shelves.
‘When he got back to his apartment, he began to feel that
the whole world could see through his eyes,’ says Grinspoon.
‘He thought his voice was transmitted back through the radio
to the people who were broadcasting. He looked at the lines on
his hands and saw all kinds of meaning in them. The colours became
bright and intense.’ Grinspoon, who has written two books
on psychedelic drugs, says this is unquestionably a description
of what is commonly known as a ‘bad trip’.
Bad trips
afflict a relatively small number of people, but can be prolonged
and cause permanent damage. According to Grinspoon, the personality
of the user, the environment in which the drug is taken, the dosage,
and whether or not the user is aware that he or she has ingested
LSD, all affect the outcome. Giving LSD to someone surreptitiously
could seriously aggravate the harm especially in 1952, when few
people, even doctors, were aware that such a drug existed. ‘No
wonder he suffered so terribly,’ says Grinspoon.
Glickman’s
hospital records revealed other intriguing clues. When Glickman
collapsed at the Cafe Select, he was brought to the American hospital,
where earlier that year the same attending physician had treated
Glickman for hepatitis. This fact took on much greater significance
for Glickman’s legal team when they learned that CIA files
from that period contained a 1951 Swiss research article addressing
the effect of LSD on people with hepatitis.
The CIA
and Gottlieb were apparently aware that when LSD was given to
hepatics, its effect was heightened. A CIA Information Report,
summarising intelligence acquired during an 11-month period beginning
in November 1952 (when Glickman entered the hospital), notes that
‘subjects in whom only a slight modification of hepatic function
is present make a marked response to LSD’. This sentence
might have been written about Glickman himself. Certainly, he
would have been an ideal guinea pig.
Another
physician listed in the hospital records as having treated Glickman
had previously published an article in the Revue Neurologique,
describing experiments he had conducted on rabbits using LSD.
Furthermore,
the CIA has been forced to admit that there were other cases in
which it used foreign doctors for research that was illegal under
US law. In the late 1950s, for example, a CIA-funded psychiatrist
in a Montreal psychiatric hospital administered an array of drugs
and electric shocks to people who had checked themselves in for
problems ranging from anxiety to post-natal depression. A long-running
lawsuit resulted in payment by the US government of more than
a million dollars in total to nine Canadian citizens.
Even assuming
Glickman ingested LSD in October 1952, was it the CIA that slipped
it to him? It is known that in the summer of 1952, nearly six
months before the Cafe Select incident, Gottlieb asked a government
narcotics agent named George White to begin testing hallucinogens
on unsuspecting citizens. Nobody but the CIA and the Swiss company
Sandoz (which discovered LSD accidentally in 1945) had access
to the drug at that time, and Sandoz had agreed to help control
the supply by notifying the Agency every time it shipped the substance.
Tests on
consenting volunteers were already under way. White, a hard-drinking,
fast-living man who had failed in his efforts to join the Agency,
worked for the National Bureaux of Narcotics (forerunner of today’s
DEA), and was deliberately chosen as an outside operative for
the CIA.
He began
dosing unwitting guinea pigs in autumn 1952, following his summer
discussion with Gottlieb. (He would later, with Gottlieb’s
approval, set up safe houses in New York and San Francisco where
he played host to prostitutes, drug dealers and their customers
and handed the unsuspecting guests drinks laced with LSD.) Records
indicate that Gottlieb and White met on 20 October, 1952, in New
York and again in Washington on 30 October to discuss the plan
to administer LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting targets. The
Glickman team points out that there was plenty of time for Gottlieb
to get to Paris, spike a Chartreuse, and be back for his subsequent
meeting with White. Gottlieb says he wasn’t in Paris at all
in 1952. But both he and the CIA have been unable to locate his
passport to verify that. And, more significantly, Gottlieb and
his boss, Richard Helms, had in an unprecedented and controversial
move ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed in 1973. A few financial
records survived, but in the absence of any other documentation,
the case is dependent on the defendant’s word against an
abundance of compelling, but circumstantial, evidence.
Towards
the end of 1992, Glickman’s physical health began to deteriorate.
The 62-year-old’s stomach became distended. ‘I told
him a thousand times to go see a doctor,’ says Scott Wolfeil,
a neighbour. But Glickman would always refuse, saying he did not
trust doctors. Finally, he couldn’t even make it down the
steps to walk his dog. Eventually, his sister Gloria came with
her husband Ed, and despite Glickman’s protestations, took
him to a doctor. Weeks later, on 11 December, Gloria called to
tell Wolfeil the sad news: his friend Paul had died of heart failure.
The struggle,
however, was not over. Gloria replaced Stanley as plaintiff, and
the roller-coaster legal ride began once more. Since then, various
hearings have left the Glickmans unable to press their case against
the government or former CIA director Richard Helms, but they
have been given leave to proceed against Gottlieb. And so, after
16 years of legal struggle and nearly half a century of uncertainty,
the family of Stanley Glickman will finally get their day in court.
The trial
is expected to be brief; it may be over in a week. The Glickman
side has continued seeking new witnesses, and surprises are possible,
even likely. The government is expected to stress seeming inconsistencies:
for example, the fact that Glickman only ‘remembered’
the club foot after being prompted. And there is the matter of
the stutter: Gottlieb’s former CIA colleague Dr. Gittinger
says that, if Gottlieb had been there, Glickman would have noticed
his stutter, something he never mentioned.
Yet every
person interviewed describes Glickman as scrupulously honest.
‘Even Dr Klein, who examined him for the government, would
agree,’ says Dr Grinspoon, the LSD expert. ‘He was a
straight shooter. He said, yes, yes Gottlieb had a club foot,
but he didn’t remember the stutter, and wasn’t going
to say he did.’ Glickman’s family and friends believe
he would have wanted them to continue the case. ‘Stanley
had no interest in a monetary settlement,’ says Grinspoon.
‘He wanted the American people to know there was an Agency
that could act so arrogantly, so irresponsibly towards one of
its citizens. He was terribly concerned that the story get out.’
