The Wright Patt Connection

Greetings everyone! Can you believe we’ve matured another year since I last posted on this blogsite? Can you see how a whole ten years can go by lickety split when you’re working on a book? Yeah, this is the part of book research—and life in general—that tends to suck. As someone once said to me, time flies.

So here we are, on the 67th anniversary of Ron Tammen’s disappearance, in the middle of A PANDEMIC. I hope you all are doing OK. I’m hoping that you’ve been sheltering at home as much as possible. I hope you, like I, have developed a deeper appreciation for soap—that lovely, sudsy surfactant we’ve been using all of our lives, and still the best defense we currently have against the coronavirus. I hope you’ve found cleverly nuanced ways to avoid touching your face. I hope you’re tipping your delivery person with gusto. If the spread of COVID-19 is impacting your life more directly than it has for most of us—if you’re in health care or you’re a first responder or if you’re in food production or food service or food delivery or you’re filling consumers’ online orders for all their needs—my God. You’ve been selflessly carrying the survival of so many of us on your backs. To say “thank you” is hardly enough, but it’s all I have right now, and believe me, it’s from the heart. Lastly, please, every single one of you who is taking the time to read this post, please stay well. Let’s all look out for each other during this historic, surreal, and rip-roaringly bonkers time in our lives and do our part to flatten that curve.

SO…what to tell you? First, some bad news: I have yet to hear back from the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) about my mandatory declassification review (MDR) appeal concerning the two names listed in the third paragraph of the January 14, 1953, CIA memo. If you were hoping to hear the results of that appeal in this post, I’m afraid you will not. This past October, ISCAP updated their log to indicate that they’d received “materials” from the CIA in response to their request for information on my behalf, but unfortunately, that hasn’t seemed to help spur things along. When I asked the folks at ISCAP if that was a promising sign during a livestreamed info session, they quashed any feelings of hopefulness I had and reemphasized how backlogged they are. So…settle in, amigos, it could be a while.

Over the past year, I’ve continued pursuing new leads and tracking down old acquaintances and contemporaries of Ron Tammen. I’ve sought corroboration or, if possible, documentation of some of the more compelling memories that various sources have shared with me from that time period. Last fall into early winter, I dug deep into the fingerprint issue, and spoke with a number of retired FBI employees about their fingerprint retention policies and how unusual it was that they had purged Ron’s prints when they did. (There’s more to be uncovered there and I’m still working on it.) For those of you who follow AGMIHTF on Facebook, you’ve learned some of the day-to-day stuff I’ve picked up along the way. And I’ve been doing some writing.

(Care to share what you’ve been up to over the past year? Or maybe you’d like to focus on what you’ve been doing during the pandemic? Or you could send pictures of yourselves in your homemade masks. Feel free to provide any of the above—plus pet photos!—in the comments.)

Today I want to focus on a question that’s probably crossed the minds of most people when they hear my theory of how the CIA and MKULTRA had something to do with Ron Tammen’s disappearance. And that question is usually something along the lines of: “Hmmm…I don’t know…”

I mean, I feel you. It sounds so far-fetched. Oxford, Ohio, cute-as-a-button college town that it is, is so remotely located—even now—and a long way from Langley, Virginia. Why would the CIA find it prudent to set up shop there during their mischievous MKULTRA years, despite a certain psych professor’s expertise in hypnosis and drugs? What’s more, why would they be drawn to a small town at all, when small towns are known for their ability to pry open deep, dark secrets, adding them, and everyone involved, to the menu of topics for discussion at the local lunch counter?

Although I don’t profess to know all the things that Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Sidney Gottlieb, and the gang were contemplating during this time, I do have some thoughts.

First, the CIA liked doing business with universities. The agency was known to have lots of professors on its payroll, recruiting among the country’s cream of the crop to build up its ranks. In addition, when Project Artichoke and MKULTRA were in full swing, much of the work was being performed at universities all over the country, with Gottlieb, stationed at CIA Headquarters, pulling the strings.

Also, you may recall that the CIA already had a prior history with Miami University. Sidney Souers, the first director of central intelligence, was from Dayton, and had graduated from Miami in 1914. So they were…familiar, shall we say?

But, until today, I haven’t delved into one aspect concerning Oxford, Ohio, that could have outweighed any knock it would have had against it. That one aspect is this: Oxford is roughly an hour’s drive from Wright Patterson Air Force Base (AFB), near Dayton.

Oh, and there’s a second aspect: St. Clair Switzer, Miami’s hypnotically-adept and pharmaceutically-adroit psychology professor, who was also a lieutenant colonel in the USAF and, later, Air Force Reserves, had a longstanding association with Wright Patterson.

Some historical background on Wright Patterson AFB

Wright Patterson AFB—or Wright Patt to the locals—was named in honor of two guys by the name of Wright, and one guy named Patterson. Of course, you already know the first two esteemed fellows. They were Wilbur and Orrville, aka, the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers spent most of their lives in Dayton, OH, after the family had moved  from Richmond, IN. They had a bicycle shop on Williams Street before they began inventing, building, and flying airplanes, and they’re buried in Woodland Cemetery, near the University of Dayton—the same cemetery in which Erma Bombeck is buried. After their experimental aircraft—dubbed “the Wright Flyer”—was successfully launched near Kitty Hawk, NC, in December 1903, the Wright brothers made use of a piece of land called Huffman Prairie to improve upon their invention and, later, to open a flight training school for military pilots. In 1917, the U.S. Army leased the land for its Army Air Corps, renaming the property Wright Field, short for Wilbur Wright Field. (I’m not sure why Wilbur was singled out, but I’m guessing it’s because, by that time, Wilbur had passed away of typhoid fever at the young age of 45, and they probably thought it would be a nice gesture.)

The Patterson part comes from a guy named Frank Stuart Patterson, a test pilot who was the son and nephew of the men who started National Cash Register. Patterson died in 1918, when the plane he was flying crashed in…wait for it…Wright Field. To memorialize him, the Army carved out a slice of Wright Field, renaming it Patterson Field. After the end of WWII, in 1947, the U.S. Air Force separated from the U.S. Army, becoming its own branch of the military. A year later, Wright Patterson AFB was created, and—I think you can see where this is going—the two airfields were rejoined, and a couple adjacent properties were added. (If you’re really into the specifics, I recommend you read this historical document commemorating Wright Patt’s 100-year anniversary. Also, if you haven’t visited it yet, the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which is on its premises, is amazing.)

Before I write another word, I need to make the following statement: Wright Patterson Air Force Base is a world-class hub of aviation ingenuity, leadership, and training that has been a huge asset to the state of Ohio as well as the country. (My mother grew up in Dayton, and her grave-spinning would have commenced immediately if I didn’t take care of that.) Yet, despite its sterling reputation, Wright Patt has had its share of controversies, some of which may involve the CIA’s mind control program, not to mention other related programs.  (Sorry, Mom—I love and miss you, but I still have to go there.)

Operation Paperclip

One such controversy has to do with U.S. activities following WWII, and—spoiler alert!—if this is the first time you’re hearing about this and you’re an idealist with a clear, black-and-white view of right versus wrong, prepare to be outraged. After the war, as one part of the U.S. government was very publicly taking part in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals for the atrocities they’d committed on prisoners in concentration camps, other parts of our government were surreptitiously involved in quite the opposite activity. Some members of the military, the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s forerunner), and others on what was called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency had decided that the United States’ next nemesis would be the Communists, and they speculated about whether all of the science the Nazis had been involved with—including the horrific human experiments—shouldn’t still be put to use somehow. They also didn’t like the thought of seeing the Soviets and Chinese luring those scientists over to their side and using them against us. So, they decided to bring some of the Nazis to the United States (and by “some,” I mean more than 1600) to start mining their knowledge. The endeavor was called Operation Paperclip, named for the process by which sanitized cover sheets were attached to the Nazis’ paperwork to help disguise their fascist backgrounds and speed up the approval process for U.S. entry. Some of the scientists were aeronautical engineers who were later credited with significantly improving our understanding of aviation technology and enabling the U.S. to achieve space travel. (One engineer, named Wernher von Braun, went on to head up NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The National Space Society has created an award in his name.) Others were medical doctors, some of whom had taken part in heinous human experiments without informed consent that could be considered a blueprint for the CIA’s mind control efforts. So yeah…a mixed bag.

According to Annie Jacobsen, author of Operation Paperclip, The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Wright Field was one of the primary destinations for these German men of science and engineering early on. “In the fall of 1946, of the 233 Nazi scientists in America, 140 were at Wright Field,” she writes. Many who arrived at Wright Field were aeronautical engineers, however others would have medical expertise. That’s because the Aero Medical Laboratory there, which had been established by Major General Malcom Grow, the surgeon general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and Lt. Col. Harry Armstrong, the laboratory’s first commander, would be seeking new recruits. During the war, the laboratory had been instrumental in developing equipment that protected airmen from both physiological stressors, such as flying in high altitudes, to the physical ones, such as withstanding artillery fire, and now, writes Jacobsen, the two men “saw unprecedented opportunity in seizing everything that the Nazis had been working on in aviation research so as to incorporate that knowledge into U.S. Army Air Force’s understanding.”

Several of the German scientists who were brought to Wright Field’s Aero Medical Laboratory (as indicated in this historical document) were the same ones who’d been recruited by Grow at the war’s end for the establishment of a similar laboratory in Heidelberg. Those names probably won’t mean much to you—Willie Buehring/Buehrung, Otto Gauer, Ulrich Henschke, Hans Mauch, and Henry Seeler—however, you may have heard of a few of their bosses. Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, and Hubertus Strughold (the one-time director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry), were part of the scientific leadership at the Heidelberg laboratory and they have all been linked to war crimes. (You can page through a book documenting the Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg from 1945 to 1947, with photos of all of the above people. By the way, after Strughold was brought to the States, he was named head of the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph AFB, in San Antonio, and later, chief scientist at NASA. The former war criminal had managed to rebrand himself as the Father of Space Medicine.)

If the above Wright Patt Paperclip scientists weren’t involved in the insidious experiments in wartime Germany, they obviously rubbed elbows with those who had been, as you can see in the Heidelberg photos. However, it’s important to not get ahead of ourselves. As far as I can tell, none of the above medical researchers brought to Wright Patt under the guise of Operation Paperclip have been linked to Nazi war crimes. However, each man is listed on the Federation of American Scientists War Crimes chart with the following caveat: “This is a listing of file subjects compiled by the Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Crimes for which files exist at the National Archives. It should not be inferred that any individual listed below is a war criminal.”

That said, there may also be evidence that at least three of the more notorious Nazi doctors had at least some interaction with Wright Field. In the April 1985 issue of the journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, this detail was included in an article about Project Paperclip:

“…then on June 2, 1946, Brig. Gen. N.B. Harbold, in a memo from AAF Headquarters to the War Department, asked that Konrad Schaefer ‘be contracted for Project Paperclip for exploitation at Wright Field’ in Ohio but be permitted to continue his work at the Aero Center until November 1. On June 14, Harbold sent an identical secret memo to request Paperclip contracts for [Hermann] Becker-Freysing [sic] and Ruff.”

I can’t tell if Harbold’s secret memos were actually requesting that Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng, and Ruff be physically relocated to Dayton sometime after November 1, 1946, or if they were to be “exploited” remotely. But it’s a question worth asking, since all three were considered war criminals. I have some research to conduct in that regard. But, at least at this point, it’s safe to say that Wright Patterson was home base for a hefty number of Nazis not long after the end of WWII.

Was Wright Patterson AFB involved in MKULTRA?

As you know by now, the question of whether Wright Patterson AFB was involved in MKULTRA is not easy to address, since the majority of evidence concerning BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA was summarily destroyed in 1973. This, by the way, should tell you a lot about MKULTRA. I mean, if a secret program focused on sneaking Nazis into the United States a little over a year after the end of WWII was willing to come clean with the American public, but MKULTRA wasn’t, well, MKULTRA must have been truly awful. But we already knew that.

Thankfully, there are remnants that can be patched together to form some sort of picture. And these remnants have led me to believe that MKULTRA was alive and well and walking the hallways of Wright Patterson AFB. Let’s take things step by logical step, as I share my evidence, from the general to the specific. And again, keep in mind that this evidence is cursory. I intend to dig deeper and to FOIA, FOIA, and, if all else fails, FOIA some more (and then appeal).

1. The military brass, including the USAF, was at the table.

We know that the Air Force, Army, and Naval intelligence were all represented at MKULTRA meetings, as is indicated by this memo, date stamped Feb. 18, 1952. The memo is difficult to read, but the important part is under bullet 2a. It reads:

On 2 April 1951, Project Artichoke was discussed at an Executive Session of the Intelligence Advisory Committee attended by the members representing G-2 [Army Intelligence], ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], A-2 [Air Force Intelligence], and the FBI. Except for the FBI which indicated no interest, the members agreed to assist and to appoint a representative to work with CIA on the project.

In John Marks’ book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, he expounded on this:

There was bureaucratic warfare outside the CIA as well, although there were early gestures toward interagency cooperation. In April 1951, the CIA Director approved liaison with the Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence to avoid duplication of effort. The Army and Navy were both looking for truth drugs, while the prime concern of the Air Force was the interrogation techniques used on downed pilots. Representatives of each service attended regular meetings to discuss ARTICHOKE matters. The Agency also invited the FBI, but J. Edgar Hoover’s men stayed away.

2. The USAF was funding ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA experiments.

There’s scant evidence regarding financial support from non-CIA sponsors in the MKULTRA documents that have survived, but I suppose that makes sense. The documents that remained were the CIA’s financial records. The target audience would have been the agency’s bean counters, who were most concerned about their own expenses. However among the MKULTRA subprojects listed in The Project MKULTRA Compendium (Stephen Foster, ed.), at least two projects were either funded or considered for funding by the Air Force.

Subproject 129
Subproject 129 is described as “Computer analysis of bioelectric response patterns: significance for polygraph.” While the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front organization, ponied up $2505 for the project, the USAF Office of Scientific Research paid over ten times that amount, or $27,500. Even though the researcher and university are redacted, a little sleuthing from the grant proposal (and a listing of publication titles he included) turns up the name Herbert Zimmer, an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University. The sponsor representing the Air Force Office of Scientific Research was Albert Biderman, who coauthored a book with Zimmer, titled The Manipulation of Human Behavior, on the techniques used to manipulate Air Force POWS during the Korean War.

Subproject 68
Subproject 68, which was led by Ewen Cameron of McGill University, in Montreal, is one of the most infamous of all the MKULTRA projects. Cameron was conducting psychic driving experiments in which he played repetitious sounds to patients and then tried to psychologically break them down through additional means, in this case, LSD-25. His patients were often severely and permanently damaged, and class-action lawsuits continue to this day. The CIA paid Cameron $60,000 to perform this research. Under “Other Sponsors” is the Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, which is Cameron’s institute, as well as this notation: “17 August 1960 Memorandum for the Record indicates the U.S. Air Force was considering co-sponsorship of effort.” It’s not clear if the Air Force followed through or if they came to their senses and walked away.

Fun fact! On the bottom of both of those projects, is the name C.V.S Roosevelt, who is listed as an approver. That’s Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt, or Corney for short. Corney was head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division for a period, and ostensibly, Sidney Gottlieb’s supervisor. Judging by the number of times he approved the various subprojects, ol’ Corney was up to his neck in MKULTRA.

Interrogation Methods Study
The third example of relevant USAF-funded research is this December 18, 1953, memo that appears to be between two Air Force personnel, one of whom was Col. A.P. Gagge. There are a couple interesting coincidences tied to this memo. First, you’ll note in his obituary that Gagge had been chief of biophysics at Wright Patterson’s Aero Medical Laboratory before moving onward and upward to the top spot of the Human Factors Division of the Air Force’s R&D Directorate, which is his position in 1953. In addition, the memo, which discusses interrogation research, refers to a study that was conducted by Douglas Ellson, of Indiana University, for the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The Ellson study was on the physiological detection of deception, and the letter writer is interested in having the Air Force make use of the Ellson equipment—the main piece being a commercial lie detector—for their study. He adds that the CIA could benefit as well. As it so happens, Professor Ellson had graduated from Miami University in psychology in 1935 and he had been a student of St. Clair Switzer. Eventually, he, too, had received his Ph.D. under Clark Hull.

3. Wright Patterson’s Aero Medical Laboratory sponsored LSD research.

In his book, The CIA Doctors, Colin A. Ross, M.D., points to one LSD study supported by Wright Patterson’s Aero Medical Laboratory as evidence of military involvement in the CIA’s mind control program. The resulting research paper, entitled “Cognitive Test Performance Under LSD-25, Placebo, and Isolation,” was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in January 1966. The author, Leo Goldberger, Ph.D., also happened to be an unwitting participant in MKULTRA research conducted at both McGill and Cornell Universities when he was a graduate student. Goldberger wrote an essay in 1991 about his experience, although, in it, he also argues that the LSD and sensory deprivation research he conducted for the Air Force and other entities was “carried out under quite legitimate auspices, governmental and otherwise. Not everything in these areas of research was tainted by CIA moneys.” He added that the Air Force found the studies useful for the selection of astronauts for the Mercury space program.

4. Wright Patterson experimented with germ warfare.

One extension of the MKULTRA program, called MKNAOMI, focused on the testing and stockpiling of biological and chemical agents for potential use against U.S. adversaries. You may remember that one of the first casualties of the MKULTRA experiments was Frank Olson, a bioweapons expert at Fort Detrick, MD. (Olson is the guy who’d been given LSD by Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, at a cabin retreat in November 1953, and who subsequently died from a fall out of a 10th story NYC hotel window.) In August 1955, Wright Patterson was one of several sites in which so-called “harmless” bacteria were released by the Army. [One of the bacterial species that was used, Serratia Marcescens, is now a recognized pathogen.] Here’s what a March 9, 1977, newswire article reported:

“The test involved the simulated biological agent Serratia Marcescens and another simulated germ known as Bacillus Globigii.

An Army spokesman yesterday said, ‘The reason they used the agent simulants was because they were harmless and easily detectable.’

He said the purpose of the Wright Patterson test—like all of the other tests conducted over the 20-year period—was to determine ‘how far and how fast a biological substance might travel.’

The spokesman, Lt. Col. Hugh Waite, said no other details are available regarding the outcome of the Wright-Patterson test.”

Another interesting coincidence is that, at that time of the above experiment, a highly-regarded physiologist named David Bruce Dill was employed as director of research for the U.S. Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratory, Edgewood Arsenal, a facility that conducted bioweapons testing on humans. Earlier in his career, from 1941 to 1945, Dr. Dill had served at Wright Patterson’s Aero Medical Laboratory. Weirder still, according to author H.P. Albarelli, Jr., in A Terrible Mistake, The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Dill was one of the attendees at a 1952 retreat, much like the retreat in the fall of 1953, to discuss “the use of psychochemicals as a new concept of warfare.” Among the others who attended were: Gottlieb, Lashbrook, and Frank Olson.

I’m not saying that Dill was one of the persons behind the Wright Patterson exercise or that he was involved in the drugging of Olson. I’m just saying that there appears to be a great deal of overlap between people in the world of MKULTRA and this is another area that may call for more digging.

5. A woman who was experimented on as a child remembers going to Wright Patterson for “tune ups.”

Lastly, and most tragically, is the experience of Carol Rutz, who says that, as a child, she was the subject of experimentation through the CIA and MKULTRA. The details are horrifying. Rutz claims that, because she’d been sexually abused by family members beginning at a very young age, Sidney Gottlieb and his associates had deemed her an excellent candidate for MKULTRA. The reason for this, they figured, was that she would have a tendency to “dissociate,” which is to bury the trauma and to create alter egos that could be used for their nefarious purposes. Here’s the passage from a 2003 lecture she gave at Indiana University that caught my attention:

Over the next twelve years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. All the programming that was done to me by the CIA was to split my personality making me a compliant slave. It was trauma-based using things like electroshock, sensory deprivation, and drugs. Later the trauma wasn’t necessary, only hypnosis accomplished with implanted triggers and occasional tune-ups that took place at Wright Patterson Air Force Base not far from my home.I became a human experiment—part of their search for a way to take control of a man‘s mind. During the course of these experiments they created alters to do their bidding—Manchurian Candidates is an appropriate term.

Fortunately, Ms. Rutz was able to overcome these horrific experiences, and she has led a healthy, happy adult life. However, when I contacted her to see if she might be willing to tell me more about Wright Patterson, she let me know that she was retired and no longer doing interviews. She also said that she’d already written everything that she could remember about Wright Patterson. Her book, fascinating as it was, provided no additional details on Wright Patterson.

Was Wright Patterson involved in MKULTRA? And if so, could it be the missing link between the CIA and St. Clair Switzer? As I said earlier, the above evidence is cursory and needs to be further researched. If you or someone you know has information on any of the above topics—if any of the above resonates with you—I’d love to hear from you. Or if you have an opinion about my reasoning or anything else, I’d love to hear about that too. Feel free to weigh in starting…now!