Two CIA men swap notes. Thank you dallasnews.com.
Today I’m going to offer some thoughts building on ideas from Addiction and Control, where I speculated on how addiction may be used by exploitative organizations such as the ‘intelligence community’ to control its members.
When William Egan Colby decided to publish his autobiography in 1978, he made this rather extraordinary claim:
…I remembered a talk I had with Donovan [William Donovan, OSS head] several years before. I had asked him how you get young paratroopers to behave like choir boys on Saturday night after spending six days learning to be aggressive, devious and heroic. He answered that he didn’t know, but nevertheless it just had to be done. It would be many years before I would have to develop a better answer than Donovan’s.
Colby claims something remarkable in this quote, he claims he developed a system of control for his subordinates that involves them leading a double life: six days doing “devious” work, one evening acting like a “choir boy”. I believe Colby was saying that he found a way to make his subordinates reliably present an ethical face to the outside world, while in reality they spent most of their time being unethical.
Colby may be lying in the excerpt above. However, there is a third party who provides information suggesting that such a conversation may have taken place between Donovan and Colby. CIA/OSS agent Ray S. Cline provides context for Donovan and Colby’s cryptic conversation in Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA, 1976:
It was easy enough for Roosevelt to provide a charter and authorize Donovan to start an agency and spend several millions of largely unvouchered dollars. Still, it was not easy for Donovan to acquire the staff he needed, find office space for them, get them paid either as civil or military personnel, and impart some sense of specific duties to his fledgling outfit…
“Wild Bill” deserves his sobriquet mainly for two reasons. First, he permitted the “wildest,” loosest kind of administrative and procedural chaos to develop while he concentrated on recruiting talent wherever he could find it – in universities, businesses, law firms, in the armed services, at Georgetown cocktail parties, in fact, anywhere he happened to meet or hear about bright and eager men and women who wanted to help. His immediate lieutenants and their assistants were all at work on the same task, and it was a long time before any systematic method of structuring the polyglot staff complement was worked out. Donovan really did not care. He counted on some able young men from his law firm in New York to straighten out the worst administrative messes, arguing that the record would justify his agency if it was good and excuse all waste and confusion…
The second way in which Donovan deserved the term “Wild’ was his own personal fascination with bravery and derring-do. He empathized most with the men behind enemy lines. He was constantly traveling to faraway theaters of war to be as near them as possible, and he left to his subordinates the more humdrum business of processing secret intelligence reports in Washington and preparing analytical studies for the President or the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
Fortunately Donovan had good sense about choosing subordinates. Some were undoubtedly freaks, but the quotient of talent was high and for the most part it rose to the top of the agency. One of Donovan’s greatest achievements was setting in motion a train of events that drew to him and to intelligence work a host of able men and women who imparted to intellectual life in the foreign field some of the verve and drive that New Deal lawyers and political scientists had given to domestic affairs under Roosevelt in the 1930s.
When CIA-yes-man Ray Cline ended his overt career in intelligence, he became a Georgetown University crony.
Cline offers a sympathetic view of Donovan’s management techniques, but I think the underlying chaos shines through anyway. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA in 1947, its leaders inherited a mess of “freaks”, Georgetown party kids, mobsters and NYC lawyers who didn’t mind being unethical, but whose behavior would not stand up to public scrutiny. This presented a control problem for the CIA because in order to survive its early years the organization had to appear to act in the public’s interest. Also, if you build your team out of folks who have contempt for the law, you’ll have a hard time making them follow your rules unless you devise some type of extraordinary system. Who were Donovan and Colby, and how did they find themselves in a position to ‘solve’ the criminal/”choir boy” control problem?
William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was the American manager for the OSS– Franklin Roosevelt’s sidekick organization to British spy William Stephenson’s ‘British Security Coordination’, an illegal spy network designed to undermine FDR’s political opponents and secure America’s participation in Churchill’s war. Long-time a.nolen readers will remember that television chef Julia Child was Donovan’s secretary, and that her husband Paul retired from public service in haste while under suspicion for KGB collaboration.
Prior to his OSS work Donovan was a well-to-do Catholic lawyer in NYC, who had befriended William Stephenson during WWI and became the District Attorney for Buffalo, NY. Donovan first made a name for himself in ‘public service’ during Prohibition by enforcing the anti-alcohol laws against ‘WASPs’ and Buffalo city’s German mayor Francis Schawb, while other mobsters, like the *suspected bootleggers* (and Irish-Catholic) Kennedy family were allowed to enrich themselves. This sort of narrow ethnic favoritism dedication to the Federal Government brought Donovan to the attention of NY’s one-time governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his supporters who in 1942 tapped Donovan to run the OSS, an organization that President Truman would later oppose on grounds that it was an American “Gestapo”. (“Cheka” would have been a more accurate appellation.)
There’s a lot about William Egan Colby’s personality which mimics Donovan’s. William Colby worked under Donovan in the OSS and was a rising star in Donovan’s law firm during the interim period between 1945 and Colby’s joining the CIA. Colby was also Catholic, though of a tortured variety: his father (a military man) had converted after a falling out with this “New England” family and there seems to have been a kind of self-conscious zealotry in Colby’s faith– he even served as an “alter boy” throughout college! Like Donovan, Colby nurtured a persecution complex due to his Catholicism, and he whines about not being invited into more fashionable Princeton University society, though he was admitted into the university. Just as Donovan, Colby always wanted to be part of Protestant ‘clubs’, but was never satisfied with the attention he received once he joined!
Colby describes his family as liberal Catholics, much like how the founder of Ramparts magazine (and Hugh Hefner fanboy) Edward M. Keating described himself. Colby also liked to sing-and-dance about both his father’s and his own championship of Black causes; Black America may be surprised to hear that the CIA’s #1 heroin dealer is actually on their team.
While at Princeton Colby organized a gas-pump attendants’ union; at Donovan’s law firm he joined the ACLU and got his hands dirty in New York City Democratic party politics– i.e. “Tammany Hall”. In a recent interview on C-SPAN, Colby’s son Carl described his father’s political views by saying that the old man had “drunk the milk of FDR”.
So, in many respects, Colby and Donovan were birds of a feather; they were also at the core of what would become the CIA.
Colby left Donovan’s NYC law firm to take up a post at the National Labor Relations Board in Washington D.C.. From there, he would find his way to the CIA.
Despite the skepticism of more far-sighted statesman like Harry Truman, the OSS did live on in what we know as the CIA. However, the agency’s after-the-fact legitimization did nothing to ‘clean up’ the rowdy mess who formed its staff.
I searched the rest of Colby’s autobiography for some explanation of what his “answer” to the CIA’s control problem might have been. There were few clues, except this one about how Colby chose to “educate” his agency underlings:
What was needed, in short, was an educational campaign. In those changing times, when the nation was no longer willing to take it on faith that anyone in government, and especially in CIA, was an honorable man, we were obliged to demonstrate that we were honorable by showing what we were doing. And as Executive Director, I thought I could start the process by making sure that our own CIA employees knew what the facts and the rules were, so they could defend their work in their own minds and to their friends and neighbors. Once this base was laid, we could then consider how to get the message over to the public.
I’m reminded of the rather pathetic list of talking points which NSA employees were sent home with after the Snowden ‘revelations’ so that they could defend their employer from their relatives’ healthy questions over Thanksgiving dinner. In all seriousness though, Colby’s ‘education’ campaign was about keeping the “choir boy” story consistent across agents. In Honorable Men, Colby then goes on to opine how this education campaign should be applied to us, the general public, via journalism. As we all know, Colby was a great friend to journalists.
The “education” quotation aside, Colby doesn’t elaborate on what his “better answer” might have been, however Occam’s Razor may point us in the right direction. The ‘addiction’ answer to Colby’s control problem would have been a very natural one for him to alight upon. He had first-hand experience running the old opiate networks in Vietnam, and it was under his watch that the horrific heroin epidemic swept through American GIs. This grotesque treachery was part of the economic system which kept Colby’s unpopular Catholic candidate in power in South Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem). Later, Colby was head lawyer for criminals who continued this drug trade after Saigon fell.
Madame Nhu at prayer. Nhu was the unofficial South Vietnamese first lady and wife of Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother; Diem was a “lifelong bachelor”. You’ll notice that this image was splashed across LIFE magazine, the CIA front.
The MK ULTRA papers may also offer some insight, because they show that the agency was very interested in addiction and addicts. The CIA even funded one experiment titled: “Use of Benzimidazole Derivative with Potent Morphene-Like Properties Orally as a Presumption Reinforcer in Conditioning of Drug-Seeking Behavior in Rats”, which was presented to an audience at The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH. (See MK ULTRA MORI ID # 151771, 12/24/1959.)
Through the MK ULTRA program the CIA focused on the addictive qualities of prescription drugs, for instance cough-syrup medicine codeine and substitutes for codeine (probably things like ‘OxyContin’); carisoprodol (part of ‘date rape’ cocktails, trade name ‘Soma’– yes, like Brave New World); and phenyramidol (a muscle relaxant, brand name ‘Cabral’). Readers will notice that all three of these drugs are regularly prescribed in the USA, sometimes also in Europe. The CIA worked closely with Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, as well as Smith, Kline and French (now GlaxoSmithKline). The National Institute of Mental Health and the Office of Naval Research were close partners on the codeine work.
The CIA wasn’t just interested in prescription drug addicts, but also alcohol abuse. In John Mark’s book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, he talks about a Naval Intelligence program called CHATTER: another ‘truth serum’ quest which was supported by the CIA out of Frankfurt, Germany. Candidate serums included heroin, barbiturates, amphetamines and alcohol. CIA agents who tested LSD out on themselves would “come down” with “alcohol parties”; according to Marks other CIA research had concocted “a potion to accelerate the effects of liquor, called an ‘alcohol extender’.” George White, himself an alcoholic, would use alcohol as part of his drug-den interrogations. Hard-drinking was (and still is) part of agency culture and in Honorable Men Colby makes it clear that he was a careful student of his CIA colleagues’ drinking habits.
My point is that the CIA was as interested in ‘socially acceptable’ habit-forming substances as it was in fringe drugs like LSD or magic mushrooms, perhaps even more so.
Colby and his friends would not have been interested in the ‘burn out’ type of addict; they’d have needed to harness the ‘highly functioning’ type of addict. For an idea of what ‘functioning’ addicts look like please see my post Addiction and Control.
What makes a functioning addict different? According to employees of the rather painfully named Klean Addiction Treatment Centers:
Believe it or not, addicts can be found in places such as hospitals, law offices, and teacher’s lounges. Addicts are frequently highly driven people who seek extremes in life. They may perform surgery and then step out for a shot of heroin. They may even be preachers, given the community’s trust and the generous donations of parishioners.
It appears that the type of individual Donovan recruited for the OSS was of the type who may be prone to ‘functioning’ addictions. The Klean Center goes on to list three other characteristics which define highly functioning addicts.
1. “Denial”
High functioning addicts and alcoholics must live in a world of denial in order to keep their ruse afloat. They may also rationalize their substance abuse by pointing out that they have important jobs, despite the fact that they experience blackouts on a regular basis. The people who see the truth of the situation, often those closest to them [the addict], must endure the wild mood swings, frantic lifestyle, and perpetual instability of life with an addict.
To me, this strongly echoes Yuri Modin’s observations about the spook hoi polloi, and the self-defeating behavior lionized in Ian Fleming’s James Bond franchise. The “denial” behavior also reminds me of Ernest Hemingway, who until recently was the patron saint of OSS fanboys.
Shaken, not stirred.
2. “Confinement”
A high-functioning heroin addict is often confined to a set routine. He needs his fixes at certain times of the day and he has to rely on his dealer being available when he needs to score. High functioning heroin addicts often are loath to travel, because any time away from their fix will mean dope sickness (early withdrawal) and a frantic search for more… Prescription drugs and high functioning addiction often go hand-in-hand. There are many people who think they are functioning ‘just fine’ since their drug of choice is prescribed to them.
This is where an addiction-based ‘system of control’ has teeth, because the addict will want to stay by people who have access to whatever it is he ‘needs’. That may be a health care plan which subsidies his pills, or the company of other alcoholics/individuals who share his addiction culture, say, at the local military base where he is posted/visiting. Two real-life examples: 1) Back during the Vietnam War, the legal drinking age was lowered for active-duty soldiers on Army bases. 2) Trans-advocates, like Jennifer Pritzker’s Palm Center, are eager for the military to take on the costs of hormone supplements for GIs who opt for sex changes. (Do spooks see something exploitable in the ‘trans’ community, like they see in the homosexual community?) Easy and cheap access to the necessary ‘fix’ serves to bind the addict to their masters.
On that note, here’s a quote from Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, according to ‘Living Theatre’ documentary producers ArthurMag.com:
Anita’s [Anita Pallenberg] Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck… And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days.
In the early 1960s Anita Pallenberg was being groomed by the CIA in Rome through their asset Playboy magazine; the Living Theatre received CIA funds through the Farfield Foundation. Colby ran the CIA’s covert political programs in Italy between 1953-58 and his policies promoted ‘non-communist leftist’ thinking to counteract Moscow’s political influence, so it’s likely that he established whatever programs dealt with Anita.
Readers interested in other ways that ‘confinement’ is useful for control may appreciate my post The Cult of Intelligence and Sullivanians, or The Fourth Wall Cult.
3. “Double Lives”
High-functioning alcoholics and addicts often need to lead a double life in order to satisfy all of their needs. They cannot afford to have one life spill into another and so may go to great lengths. Some will find bars on the other side of town from where they live in hopes of not running into any ″straight″ friends or colleagues. Others will hide in shame of their drug addiction and may disappear during off-work hours, only to reappear at home or work appearing frazzled, tired, and bleary. Family members might look for signs such as mysteriously disappearing funds, extra credit cards, and even secret bank accounts.
Cheryl Steinberg, a recovering addict who writes for Palm Partners Recovery Center says this about functioning addicts:
There’s your ‘typical’ drug addict, the type that’s usually referred to as “junkie,” – you know, the homeless person getting high on the streets, possibly prostituting themselves (male and female) – and then there’s the ‘functional addict.’ This type of drug addict is seemingly “normal.” They have their life together, for the most part. They hold a steady job, have a place to live, have a car…all the typical things that describe a normal, functioning member of society. But the functional addict is really someone who is just good at ‘passing’ for something they’re not.
It occurred to me that the people best suited to live a double life, particularly one that requires hiding behavior, are those people who have a lot of practice lying. Philippe de Vosjoli’s observations about the intelligence community containing compulsive liars may shed light on the criminal/”choir boy” system; what better incentive to maintain the charade than if your ability to feed an addiction depends on your loyalty to the agency? Narcissists also have a lot of practice hiding unflattering behavior from others– and even from themselves.
It seems that functioning addicts develop skill-sets and needs which make their condition a well-suited “answer” to Colby’s criminal/”choir boy” problem. But just because somebody compulsively hurts themselves, does it mean that they would also hurt others? Does addiction predispose someone to unethical behavior?
Alcoholics Anonymous, the alcoholism recovery program that has been in existence since 1939, has recognized an attitude toward life which they characterize as being a “dry drunk”– this means that the alcoholic may abstain from drinking, but hasn’t addressed the underlying personal problems which lead to them seeking comfort in alcohol in the first place. For this reason, “dry drunks” are much more likely to relapse.
Bill Dinker, the admissions director at Discovery Place and a HuffPo addiction contributor, describes the characteristics of a ‘dry drunk’ here, regular readers will notice the similarities to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). This overlap may explain Randi Kreger’s statistics about the overwhelming prevalence of substance abuse amongst people diagnosed with NPD. My point is, “dry drunks” and people diagnosed with NPD tend not to live ethically, and that hinders their recovery and personal growth.
alcoholrehab.com says this under ‘Ethical Living in Recovery‘:
The main reason for why most people will abandon their addiction is because their life has become unbearable. Giving up alcohol or drugs is a great start but it is unlikely to be enough to make everything right in the individual’s life. This is because it was usually the unsatisfactory way they engaged with the world that made substance abuse so attractive in the first place. In order to really gain in recovery the individual is going to need to approach life in a new way. The addict already knows that an unethical life has not brought them any closer to happiness so it makes sense that they now try the opposite way of living.
In Alcoholics Anonymous they like to use the metaphor of the sober horse thief. This refers to the idea that you can sober up a horse thief, but they will still be a horse thief. In order words, just because somebody gives up alcohol or drugs it does not necessarily mean that they will become a better person. More work will be required in order to achieve this.
The same source goes on to say: “Many of the recovery programs such as the 12 Steps advocate ethical living. This is because it is known that those who decide to live such a life are less likely to relapse.” Also, “This attitude [the ethical attitude] to life is all about empowerment and freedom. The individual no longer just does things because they are told to – they understand for themselves what is right and what is wrong.”
Bill Colby wanted to employ “devious” people who did what they were told to do; not the type of people who, unlike addicts, “take responsibility for their actions in the world”. Why? As alcoholrehab.com relates:
Ethically living is not about following the rules. If the individual decides that a rule is unethical they may decide not to follow it.
Ethical people are difficult to control; they don’t make good CIA agents.
I’d like to take a moment here to point out that people with NPD, which can be viewed as an addiction to false beliefs about oneself, rarely ‘recover’. This tragedy may be explained by looking at what Alcoholics Anonymous has learned: to manage addiction, you have to take responsibility for your actions and remove yourself from situations which might lead you into relapse. What if your addiction is to denying responsibility for your actions and your dealer is in your head? Assuming that a narcissist has enough self-awareness to want to get better, the cards are stacked against him. As I’ve stated in other posts, any narcissistic person who makes that ‘leap’ away from NPD behavior deserves a tremendous amount of respect.
If Colby’s criminal/”choir boy” system exploited addiction, particularly addiction to ‘socially acceptable’ drugs, where would the agency have learned about such addictions? Unsurprisingly, Alcoholics Anonymous would have been a good place to start. Hold onto your hats readers, because AA was a spin-off from the ‘Oxford Group’, otherwise known as Moral Re-Armament: that strange cult which swept through US and UK power circles in the inter-war years and that launched Tom Driberg’s spook career. According to L. Allen Ragels in a paper published by California State University’s Dear Habermas journal:
Alcoholics Anonymous – AA as it is generally known – was started in the 1930s as a spinoff from the Oxford Group, a religious movement whose ideas were sometimes alleged to help chronic drinkers. With the aid and approval of key members of the power elite such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., AA grew from an obscure idea to what many have come to regard as a national treasure: society’s premier (practically only) way of treating alcohol, drug, and related addiction problems. By now, AA certainly must have more than a million members, with groups organized in virtually every city, town, and village, along with numerous foreign countries. Moreover, AA’s core doctrine, the famous Twelve Steps, has been adopted by hundreds of parallel organizations with programs that address problems such as gambling, overeating, emotional troubles, and related family issues. Without question, AA and the Twelve Steps are among America’s most well known and revered institutions.
As readers know from my post on Eisenhower’s Money Plates, the Rockefeller clan is never far from spook activity, and they had good reason to be interested in just who attended AA meetings.
2/11/1940 AP article describing J D Rockefeller Jr’s interest in Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you expaa.org.
I’m not saying that the 12 Steps don’t work for some people, nor that there aren’t sincere, knowledgeable people working through AA. I’m saying that the organization is a repository of very valuable information.
I’ve presented some evidence in this post which suggests that Colby may have found a way of harnessing the “freaks”, etc. who staff the CIA by exploiting addiction. I’m not saying everybody who works for the CIA is an addict, goodness knows there are plenty of 9-5’ers there who don’t do much beyond routine bureaucratic work. These aren’t the type who need to be controlled through something like addiction, a steady paycheck is enough in their case. I’ll go out on a limb and say that addiction *probably is* unusually prevalent amongst more trusted CIA employees, the ones who do very ugly, dangerous or illegal things for the agency. These are *not* the type of employees who make it to the top, to ‘Floor Seven’.
William Colby sold drugs, but I’ve never come across anything which suggests that he used them; nor that he drank to excess; had ‘pants problems’, etc. The CIA is an organization which exploits other people’s weaknesses [1], an organization which encourages these weaknesses through vehicles like Playboy and drug networks— its leaders have better reason than most to understand why vices are dis-empowering.
This should give us commoners food for thought, because the agency has shown interest in manipulating us too, for example, through their riot investigations and voter profiling research. How often are promiscuous politicians, drug-addled celebrities or self-absorbed “divas” paraded before us in the media? Are the voter-profilers trying to encourage self-defeating behavior amongst the general public? Are they trying to extend their control beyond Donovan’s network of “freaks”? In The Banality of Mind Control I suggest that this is exactly what they’re trying to do; Colby’s ‘verbal diarrhea’ may offer us insight as to how and why.
[1] In Honorable Men Colby does talk about his early CIA training which focused on exploiting personal weaknesses:
… I [William Colby] was trained in that special branch of psychology and human relations that teaches how to spot and recruit foreigners to serve as agents and then how to be sympathetic but in control, building on their personal problems or political doubts about their loyalty to their own country…
Although I thought the material used in these courses considerably inferior to what I had been exposed to at Princeton, the training was valuable on how to fight the Communist apparatus…
Colby doesn’t explain what training he received during his Princeton days (late 1930s) either, only that he hung out with the most FDR-aligned professors at the university’s School of Public and International Affairs and studied “such problems as black education, the Cuban sugar trade, and civil liberties in Jersey City under Boss Hague”.
