Loucks returned to Germany the following day, and he did note in his journal that Richard Kuhn came over to his house for lunch with a special guest, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, the inventor of Preparation 9/91, or tabun gas. With snow coming down outside the Louckses’ home in flurries, Richard Kuhn, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, and General Loucks had a pleasant chat and “lunch of pork chops.”
Decades later, in a speech prepared for the Amherst chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution, General Loucks revealed that this Swiss chemist referred to him by Richard Kuhn had been Professor Werner Stoll, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich. The hallucinatory agent that Loucks was after in Switzerland would be the ultimate “incapacitation chemical” also sought by L. Wilson Greene at Edgewood “to knock out not kill.” The chemical, said Loucks, was called “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” or LSD. Stoll did not discover LSD. That distinction went to Albert Hofmann, a chemist for Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel. Werner Stoll, a colleague of Hoffmann’s (and the son of Sandoz chief chemist, Arthur Stoll), repeated Albert Hofmann’s original LSD experiment and concluded, “modified LSD-25 was a psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a psychiatric aid.” In 1947, Werner Stoll had published the first article on LSD, in the Swiss Archives of Neurology. Stoll’s second paper, entitled “A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts,” was published two years later, in 1949. But General Loucks did not see LSD as a psychiatric aid but rather as a weapon, an incapacitating agent with enormous potential on the battlefield. Soon the army and the navy would all be experimenting with LSD as a weapon, and the CIA would be experimenting with LSD as a means of controlling human behavior, an endeavor that soon came to be known as mind control.
Eventually, physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly operated classified programs code-named Chatter, Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, and others. LSD, the drug that induces paranoia and unpredictability and makes people see things that are not really there, would become a strange allegory for the Cold War.
One day in the late summer of 1948 a call came in to Brigadier General Charles Loucks’s new office in Heidelberg. A lieutenant answered the phone. The caller, a German, left a cryptic message to be relayed to General Loucks. It was short and to the point.
“I can help,” the caller said.
He left a return telephone number and his name, Schieber. General Loucks had been in Germany since June. As chief of intelligence collection for chemical warfare plans in Europe, it was Loucks’s job to determine which Western European countries were developing chemical weapons and to monitor their progress. Loucks was also working on unfinished business back at Edgewood, namely, the continuing failure by the Chemical Corps to develop industrial-scale production of nerve gas, an effort that by now had officially switched from the pursuit of tabun to the pursuit of sarin. The American university professors Loucks had hired back in the U.S. were making very little progress. “We put samples [of sarin] in front of them and everything, but yet they… could not come up with any process to make some Sarin,” General Loucks explained decades later in an oral history for the U.S. Army. A fire in the sarin plant at Edgewood had set the program back even further.
Along came the Schieber call.
In 1947, a thick OMGUS security report had been compiled on SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber. He had been involved with the U.S. Army since the fall of the Reich.
Schieber was a Nazi Bonzen, a big wheel. He was unattractive, fat, and wore a Hitler mustache and false teeth. Since the 1920s he had been regarded as one of Hitler’s Alte K?mpfer, the Old Fighters, trusted members of Hitler’s inner circle who wore the Golden Party Badge. Dr. Schieber was also a loyal SS man and served on the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler.