Did you know that there was another Top Secret project at Wright-Patterson AFB in the early 1950s involving the CIA’s most controversial group?

Me neither

It’s been a long time since you and I have chatted about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (aka Wright Patt) and its ostensible ties to Project Artichoke and/or MKULTRA. If you’re new here, Wright-Patterson AFB is located about 55 miles north of Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University. Ron Tammen’s psychology professor, Dr. St. Clair Switzer (aka Lt. Col. St. Clair Switzer), knew it and its brass well. I’ve hypothesized that Wright Patt was stop number one after Ron was (ostensibly) driven from Miami’s campus late at night on April 19, 1953. A couple days ago, I decided to check to see if any new information had been posted online concerning the people who worked at Wright Patt in the 1950s and the experiments that they conducted there. 

And so…into the weeds I hopped…

…and then I became Energized…

Because, although my attempts to find new information on hypnosis and drug experiments at the Dayton facility came up empty (for now), I discovered a document that told me of another Top Secret project that researchers at Wright Patt and the CIA were collaborating on. Its name?

Project Rabbit. 

Have you heard of it? Neither have I! No, seriously, I’m finding nothing about a Project Rabbit online anywhere that fits what this memo is talking about. There’s info on a past program of the Departments of Defense and State involving the processing of visas for refugees from Afghanistan. There’s a book with the title Project Rabbit Hole, which is on a different topic. There’s an album with that title too. But I’m finding no Project Rabbits anywhere, and trust me, I’ve checked—and rechecked—all of my go-to places.

Here’s the document that I’ve found, dated December 18, 1952, that mentions Project Rabbit. This memo was made public as part of the JFK releases—first in 2017 and 2018, and then in 2022, with the latest version disclosing the name of the second guy in a list of three. 

Because it’s difficult to read, I’ll rewrite it here:

*******************

18 December 1952

Commanding General

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

Dayton, Ohio

Attention: PMGO [? I’m not 100% sure about these letters; I’ll explain my logic later, below], Air Force Development Center

Subject: CHRIST, David L.

HEYERT, Martin

DRISCOLL, Walter G.

Dear Sir:

We have been requested to advise you of the security clearances granted by this Agency to the above mentioned persons, who are scheduled to attend a conference at your Command on 23 December 1952 in connection with Project “Rabbit.”

Please be advised that, based on full field investigations and National Agency name checks, the above mentioned persons were granted security clearance for access to CIA information classified through Top Secret on the dates set forth opposite their names below:

CHRIST, David L.          24 November 1950

HEYERT, Martin           11 June 1952

DRISCOLL, Walter G.   25 May 1951

If we can be of further service in this matter, please advise.

FOR THE ASSISTANT DEPUTY/INSPECTION & SECURITY

Ermal P. Geiss

Acting Chief, Security Division

I&SO/ACS:kad

CC: Files of subjects

Chrono

Security Officer, Armament Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB

*******************

I don’t want to dwell too long on this topic since I don’t think it has a ton to do with Ron Tammen or the people with whom he came into contact. However, I’m sharing it because I think it shows that the higher-ups at Wright Patt—the PMGO, if you will, and whoever else—were in communication with one of the more controversial groups at the CIA in the 1950s. I’m talking about TSS, aka the Technical Services Staff, the same people who were up to their eyeballs in Project Artichoke and MKULTRA.

The three people who are mentioned in this memo—David L. Christ, Martin Heyert, and Walter G. Driscoll—were in the Applied Physics Division of TSS. They were experts in things like radio signals and transponders and other topics about which I know very little. Let’s put it this way: to the best of my knowledge, they weren’t conducting hypnosis and drugs research, unlike the folks in the Chemical Division, headed by Sidney Gottlieb. However, it’s within reason to think that they were developing the tools and technologies that the folks over in Chemical (plus anyone else, for that matter) needed to do the things they were doing. In 1967, Gottlieb was put in charge of the entire TSS operation, but in 1952, a guy named Willis A. Gibbons, who’d formerly been in the rubber manufacturing business, oversaw TSS. Gibbons was Gottlieb’s immediate boss. His signature is at the bottom of many of the MKULTRA Subprojects.

So who were these three guys who were planning a trip to Dayton, Ohio, to discuss matters of utmost secrecy, camouflaged by the name of an adorable woodland creature, two days before Christmas? (No seriously, what was so urgent about Project Rabbit that the head honchos at Wright Patt thought December 23 would be the perfect day to talk about highly sensitive and probably scary stuff of national import, thus forcing the attendees to drive or fly back to their homes and families roughly 24 hours before Christmas, while their wives were expected to hold down their respective forts while doing all the last-minute preparations for the big day? I’m sorry, but that’s just bizarre—and thoughtless—even for the fifties.)

Back to the three guys…

David L. Christ

Yowza—talk about kicking things off with a bang. David Lamar Christ is probably the reason that this Wright-Patterson memo was released with the JFK assassination records. David Christ was a radio and audio engineer, which was a useful skill for people who liked to listen in on other people’s convos without their knowledge. Because CIA operatives loved their pseudonyms, he also went by the name Daniel Carswell as well as Philip Alpher.

One noteworthy thing about David L. Christ, Daniel L. Carswell, and Philip L. Alpher was that he’d been imprisoned in Cuba for three years—beginning with his arrest in September 1960 and ending with his release through a prisoner exchange in April 1963. Apparently, he’d been setting up audio surveillance equipment in a Chinese news agency in Havana and got caught. After a military trial, and a couple stopovers at Cuba’s military intelligence headquarters and a prison in Havana, he and two other Americans were soon performing hard manual labor on the Isle of Pines. He remained there until his release.

Also, remember the three so-called tramps who were spotted in the boxcar of a stopped train near the Texas School Book Depository and marched across Dealey Plaza immediately after JFK’s assassination? According to Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, coauthors of “Coup d’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” David L. Christ (or Daniel L. Carswell or Philip L. Alpher) was one of the tramps. The other two were (allegedly) Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, two people we’ve become very familiar with on this website. As we’ve discussed in earlier posts, Frank Sturgis and Ron Tammen both share the distinction of having the number 10 scribbled in the top right corner of several of their FBI records.

So, 8-plus years before all of that ☝️ ☝️ ☝️occurred, David L. Christ, THE David L. Christ, was sitting in a conference room at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, about an hour away from Oxford, Ohio, discussing Project Rabbit.

Martin Heyert

I don’t know a lot about Martin Heyert, but I do know a few things. I know he was a physicist who had expertise in such subjects as radar systems and devices for locating targets. I know that, in 1953, he attended a radio engineering convention in New York along with about 10 other people in TSS, including David Christ and Walter Driscoll. And I’m pretty sure that I know why the CIA had redacted his name in the 2017 and 2018 JFK releases of the December 18, 1952, memo, but unredacted it in 2022. 

Whereas David L. Christ had died in 1985 and Walter G. Driscoll had died in 1993, Martin Heyert passed away only recently, at the age of 94, in 2022, the same year that the CIA released his name to the public. So I think that they withheld his name while he was still alive and then released it after he died. 

What I find interesting about that is that they cited exemption 3 when they redacted his name. Exemption 3, which is also referred to as exemption (b)(3) in the Freedom of Information Act, says that a federal agency can withhold information that is exempted in another statute, which is a super vague catch-all category. They used exemption (b)(3) when they exempted Clark Hull’s and St. Clair Switzer’s names in the March 25, 1952, memo too, for example. Why they didn’t lift the redactions on Hull’s and Switzer’s names after they died is because the (b)(3)’s were accompanied by (b)(1)’s in the March 25 memo, which is more specific and has to do with information “to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.” 

Does the CIA overuse national defense as a reason for keeping information classified? You betcha! For example, they’ve kept the (b)(1) designation next to the title of Clark Hull’s 1933 classic book (paragraph 2, lines 5 and 6), which is:

[                                                                                                ] (b)(1). 

Just kidding! It’s “Hypnosis and Suggestibility: An Experimental Approach.” Martin Heyert is buried in Baltimore’s National Cemetery.

Walter G. Driscoll, Ph.D.

Physicist and biomedical engineer Walter G. Driscoll, Ph.D., probably had the most distinguished career of the three men. From 1940 to 1946, he was working for the FBI as chief of the Chemistry and Physics Laboratories, solving crimes through the analysis of paint, wood, soil, you name it. After receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1951, he began his brief stint with the CIA. I can’t tell if he was embarrassed by his association with the CIA or if he was instructed not to tell a soul about it, but his online bio omits his time at Langley as if it never happened. In a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he described his past position as chief of the Applied Physics Division as if it was with the Department of Defense instead of the CIA. 

But make no mistake: he worked at CIA Headquarters from at least May 1951, when he received his Top Secret security clearance, through 1953. It was during that period that he’d become aware of some of the things his colleagues in the CIA were doing through Project Artichoke. Case in point (see the Mary Ferrell Foundation website for all the details): there was an incident described in a January 1952 memo written by Morse Allen in which “our people” (I presume the CIA) had sent a Bulgarian expat to a U.S. military hospital in Panama because they were concerned that he would become a double agent. They declared to the hospital staff that he was psychopathic, even though they knew it was a lie. The man, named Dimitrov, though the CIA referred to him as Kelly, was so angry about his treatment that the CIA considered using the “Artichoke approach” to help foster in him warm, fuzzy thoughts toward the United States. (A memo from 1977 says that it didn’t happen.) It was Walter Driscoll who’d provided information about this controversy to Morse Allen, perhaps the most in-the-know foot soldier for Project Artichoke ever. And if Walter Driscoll is bringing Morse Allen up to speed on issues pertaining to Project Artichoke, he must have known a lot. Roughly 12 months after that conversation with Morse Allen, Driscoll was attending a meeting on Project Rabbit at Wright Patt.

Shortly thereafter, Driscoll made the decision to get out of the spook business. In 1954, he moved to Cambridge, MA, and became director of research for Baird Associates, a manufacturer of scientific instruments. He continued moving up the ladder, being named director of university research at his alma mater, Boston College, and later, director of research and facilities development at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, as well as director of its new Department of Biomedical Engineering. See what I mean? He was a solid researcher who led a distinguished career who just so happened to know something about Wright Patterson AFB and Project Rabbit.

You know what we haven’t done in a little while? A Q&A!

What are you hoping to achieve by telling us about Project Rabbit, since it doesn’t appear to pertain to Ron Tammen?

I’m telling you this because A) even though Project Rabbit most likely doesn’t pertain to Ron, I believe that Wright-Patterson AFB and the CIA’s Technical Services Staff most likely do pertain to him. And B) at the very least, we’re helping humankind by uploading Project Rabbit into the great Googlesphere. From this point forward, if anyone should conduct a search for “Project Rabbit,” they’re going to wind up here. I want to help that person or persons get started on their journey.

You’d mentioned earlier that you had a guess as to what PMGO stood for. What’s your guess?

Although I’m not 100 percent positive, I think that the letters after the word “Attention” are PMGO, and if so, they likely stand for Provost Marshal General’s Office, even though that’s an Army term, not the Air Force’s. As it turns out, the writer of the memo, Ermal P. Geiss, had been a lieutenant colonel in the Army, so he may have written it out of habit in describing the number one person in charge of policing and security at a military facility. 

As long as we’re on the subject, I believe that Ermal got the name of the center wrong too. He called it the Air Force Development Center, which didn’t exist at Wright Patt. The facility he was attempting to contact was the Wright Air Development Center, aka WADC, which was the center in which all research and development was conducted on the base. The WADC was a subsidiary of the Air Research Development Command, or ARDC, located in Baltimore, which was the R&D hub for the entire Air Force. As you may recall, St. Clair Switzer spent a portion of the summer of 1951 working at the ARDC.

Are there any clues regarding what Project Rabbit was about?

Yes! You’ll notice at the bottom of the memo that one of the carbon copies went to the Security Officer of the Armament Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB. The Armament Laboratory was one of 12 laboratories at WADC. Another laboratory, the Aero Medical Laboratory, was where the biological and psychological experiments were conducted. The Aero Medical Laboratory was also responsible for supervising research and development into biological warfare.

Based on the notation at the bottom of the memo, I believe that Project Rabbit had something to do with research coming out of the Armament Laboratory at Wright Patt. I know, I know. If you’re anything like me, who has zero interest in armaments and armament-related accessories, you may have briefly dozed off just now. But armaments can be interesting too, especially armaments that involve Top Secret knowledge courtesy of the CIA. I have additional thoughts concerning what that Top Secret knowledge might pertain to, but I’ll hold off until I have more information.

Do you plan to do anything more with this info?

I’ve submitted a FOIA request to Wright-Patterson AFB asking for all materials—agenda, attendees list, abstracts, and proceedings—of the Project Rabbit conference of December 23, 1952. I’ll post their response as soon as I receive it.

Hey, wasn’t Ron Tammen’s birthday yesterday?

Correct! It was! Yesterday — July 23, 2025 — was Ron’s 92nd birthday. Happy Belated Birthday, Ron Tammen, wherever you may be. 🎂 If you’re alive, reach out!

Thanks to the National Archives and Records Administration and the Mary Ferrell Foundation for making these documents accessible.