WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor:
The story below offers a rare close-up view of a man who is so creepy it’s fascinating. He actually performed some of the dirty, unthinkable deeds you read about in the various exposés on the CIA.
According to the author, the man “looks like Danny DeVito playing the Penguin, and talks like Edward G. Robinson as gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo.”
The Penguin in question is Ira “Ike” Feldman. And the deeds he performed were for MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s program on mind control. They experimented on unsuspecting people, slipping them LSD without their consent, sometimes with devastating results. The project’s architect, Sidney Gottlieb, described in a 1953 memo the ways in which the drug could be used:
Smuggleru2019s Blues: ...
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“‘Disturbance of memory; discrediting by aberrant behavior; alteration of sex patterns; eliciting of information; suggestibility; creation of dependence.”
From all that has been written about the CIA, we find it easy to believe just about everything Feldman says on the subject. But the real value of this story is not so much the information it imparts; it’s the character it reveals about a major player — even if we see him only from the outside. Here, you can witness the way he talks, the attitude he exhibits, the contradictions he ignores, and the self-justifications he declares.
This was originally published in Spin Magazine in 1994 and is just as relevant today.
The author of that vintage Spin article, Richard Stratton, has recently published his memoirs, Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia (Arcade Publishing, April 2016)
The Altered States of America
In the early 1950s, the U.S. government purchased the world’s supply of LSD as just the first step in a debauched program code-named MK-ULTRA. In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operations kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips.
“I was a minor missionary, actually a heretic,
but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because
it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded
American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage
with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
CIA contract agent George Hunter White
The meeting was set for noon at a suitably anonymous bastion of corporate America, a sprawling Marriott Hotel and convention center on Long Island. Driving out of the city, I was tense and paranoid. For one thing, I was leaving Manhattan without permission from my parole officer. What was I going to tell him? “I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD.” My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot.
Then there was the fact that previous run-ins with drug cops had usually resulted in criminal prosecutions. I spent most of the ’80s in prison for smuggling marijuana. How would this ex-agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), take to a retired outlaw writing a story about MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s highly secretive mind-control, and drug-testing program?
Ira “Ike” Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Union’s potential for developing alternative weaponry. The atomic bomb was a sinister threat, but more terrifying still were possible Soviet assaults on the mind and body from within — through drugs and disease. In an attempt to preempt foreign attacks and even wage its own assaults, the CIA funded a group of contract agents and scientists to develop a panoply of means to destroy or forever incapacitate a human being.
For years, Feldman had ducked reporters. He agreed to meet with me only after a private detective, a former New York cop who also did time for drugs, put in a good word. There was no guarantee Feldman would talk.
