Sometime in the spring of 1947, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal began conducting human experiments with tabun nerve agent. All soldiers used in these experiments were so-called volunteers, but the men were not made privy to the fact that they were being subjected to low-level concentrations of tabun. Some of the tests took place in Utah, at the Dugway Proving Ground. Other tests took place inside Edgewood’s “gassing chamber for human tests,” a 9 x 9-foot tile-and-brick cube with an airtight metal door. One of the people observing the tabun tests was Dr. L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood and a close collaborator of Fritz Hoffmann’s. Greene was a short man with a square jaw and a barrel chest. What he lacked in height he made up for in vision. While observing the behavior of the soldiers in the tabun gas experiments, L. Wilson Greene had a revelation.
Greene noticed that, after soldiers were put in the “gassing chamber,” they became “partially disabled for from one to three weeks with fatigue, lassitude, complete loss of initiative and interest, and apathy.” What struck Greene most was that the men were wholly incapacitated for a period of time but not permanently injured. The men recovered entirely on their own; the antidote was time. Dr. L. Wilson Greene saw in this a new kind of warfare. He sat down and began outlining his idea for America’s war-fighting future in an opus that would become known as “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.” In the monograph, Greene wrote, “The trend of each major conflict, being characterized by increased death, human misery, and property destruction, could be reversed.” His seminal vision for psychochemical warfare—a term he coined—was to incapacitate a man with drugs on the battlefield but not to kill him. Greene believed that in this way the face of warfare could change from barbaric to human. Incapacitating agents were “gentle” weapons; they knocked a man out without permanent injury. With psychochemical warfare, Greene explained, America could conquer its enemies “without the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.”
Greene was not proposing to use low levels of tabun gas on the battlefield. He was talking about using other kinds of incapacitating agents, drugs that could immobilize or temporarily paralyze a person, “hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic drugs… whose effects mimic insanity or psychosis.” “There can be no doubt that their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue,” Greene explained.
Greene proposed that an immediate “search be made for a stable chemical compound which would cause mental abnormalities of military significance.” He sought drugs that made people irrational. In his monograph, Greene provided the army with a list of “61 materials known to cause mental disorders.” These sixty-one compounds, he said, should be studied and refined to determine which single compound would be the best possible incapacitating agents for U.S. military use. Greene requested a budget of fifty thousand dollars, roughly half a million dollars in 2013, which was granted. Research began. Greene assigned his colleague and friend Fritz Hoffmann the job of researching a multitude of toxins for potential military use.
Fritz Hoffmann was by now recognized at Edgewood as one of the most gifted organic chemists in the Chemical Corps. If anyone could find and prepare the ideal incapacitating agent for the battlefield, Hoffmann could. He began a broad spectrum of research on everything from well-known street drugs to highly obscure toxins from the third world. There was mescaline, obtained from the peyote cactus and used by Native American Indians, with side effects ranging from divination to boredom. He studied fly agaric, a hallucinogenic mushroom found on the barren slopes of Mongolia and rumored to facilitate contact with the spirit world, and piruri, a toxic vegetable leaf from Australia, used by Aborigines, that was found to suppress thirst. Yaxee and epena, from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, caused people to see things that weren’t really there. It was a drug that for centuries had been “used by primitive tribes to escape the realities of their plight by using hallucinogenic properties.” Soon Hoffmann would travel the world in search of these incapacitating agents on behalf of the Chemical Corps.
Dr. Greene’s idea of psychochemical warfare would have a profound effect on the future of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps, but it would also greatly affect the direction of the newest civilian intelligence organization in Washington, the CIA. The Agency had deep pockets and big ideas. For the CIA, using drugs to incapacitate individuals had many more applications than just on the battlefield, and the Agency began developing programs of its own. Fritz Hoffmann and L. Wilson Greene were at the locus of a growing partnership being forged between the Chemical Corps and the CIA. Soon, biological warfare experts from Camp Detrick would also be brought into the fold. This particular biological weapons program, which would be run by a group called Special Operations Division, or SO Division, was fueled by Operation Paperclip and would develop into one of the most controversial and collaborative efforts in the history of the CIA.