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Creating Robots
Ofshe’s mentor, psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, has enjoyed a long career in researching and carrying out “mind-control” activities. He has not researched the subject to expose its dangers to American citizens but rather to secretly perfect its covert use on others. He performed this work for the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a document released under the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that the CIA wanted to set West up in a secret laboratory to perform mind-control experiments with hypnosis and LSD. A portion of the LSD, mescaline and other drug experiments that West was enmeshed in on behalf of the CIA were exposed by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church, in the mid-1970s.
The early work to which West contributed resulted in, among other things, the death of tennis pro Harold Blauer in a drug experiment in New York City in 1953. The Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation revealed drugging of unsuspecting targets, electric shocking to destroy memory, and “programming” individuals to kill—robots under psychiatric control.
West’s career highlights include injecting a 7,000-pound elephant, Tusko, with a massive dose of LSD—roughly 1,435 times the quantity, in his words, one would have given to a human in order “to produce for several hours a marked mental disturbance.” Not surprisingly, the elephant collapsed in agony five minutes later and died.
West had taken the powerful drug himself shortly before killing Tusko, the prize of the Oklahoma City Zoo, and was evidently still under its influence at the time he sloshed through the beast’s entrails, performing an “autopsy” which he recorded on film. He later issued a report to advance his “discovery” that elephants could be killed with LSD and to promote use of the drug to cull elephant herds in Africa.
Not long thereafter, the ubiquitous West turned up in Dallas, Texas, examining Jack Ruby during his 1964 trial for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. The New York Times reported in April 1964 that West “treated” Ruby with hypnosis and drugs.
Prisons as Laboratories
Jolly West, however, moved on. In keeping with intelligence proposals to use prisons as experimental laboratories, he drafted a plan for Atascadero State Hospital in California, which involved the use of electric shock and drugs in what was called “aversion therapy.”
In the 1960s, West could be found in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco doing more LSD experiments, this time within the nascent hippie community.
Another West project in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. He proposed to establish one center at a remote, abandoned Nike missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains, in keeping with earlier plans by the CIA to set up “mind-control” stations off the beaten path, where experimentation could be carried out free from such concerns as “human rights.”
West’s plans for such centers were the subject of hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974, whose members were particularly alarmed at reports that West planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, including psychotropic drugs, electric shock and chemical castration—particularly on minority citizens.
Other sites selected for West’s violence centers were Vacaville, Camarillo and Atascadero State Hospitals in California. It has been documented that CIA drug and radiation experiments took place at Vacaville.
Yet another study that West called for was clearly aimed at intelligence agency application: remote monitoring and behavioral control. His plan was to use psychiatric electric shock and other means to remotely control human behavior by computer.
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