CIA-Connected D.C. Hospital Chief Advised Warren Commission
As a WC consultant, Dr. Winfred Overholser had long-time links to the intel world. He led Top Secret WW2 "truth drug" experiments, and helped in the cover-up of U.S. use of biological weapons in Korea
Introduction
When I was in my early teens I read Mark Lane’s critique of the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination, Rush to Judgment. It was, along with what I was reading about the Vietnam War at the time, a living part of my political awakening.
While I read a good deal more about the JFK assassination over the years, and greatly respect many of the people who have pursued the topic (along with the other 1960s assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, and Robert Kennedy), I never was interested in pursuing the subject as a matter of original research. I was a consumer of information, nothing more.
But I am dropping my passive consumerist stance on this issue. It seemed to me that, due to my original research into events as seemingly disparate as the U.S. use of bioweapons in the Korean War and the CIA mind control experiments of the 1940s and 50s, only I really could write up this otherwise neglected byway of JFK assassination lore. If nothing else the story that follows offers some tantalizing suggestions about an otherwise unknown or little regarded aspect of the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination.
This article also will demonstrate how major U.S. institutions, such as publicly funded federally-run hospitals, make themselves subservient to the CIA.
When some years ago I came across the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s depository of documents on the Kennedy assassination, it was because I was pursuing information on the censored text of the House of Representative’s Pike Report on U.S. intelligence activities. I was not seeking information about the Kennedy assassination.
The Mary Ferrell (MF) database remained a source of documentation on subjects I was interested in researching, particularly the CIA’s MKULTRA and Operation Artichoke programs and their offshoots. In 2014, I referenced a number of documents at the MF archive that pertained to the “Kelly case,” an unusually well-documented example of CIA’s Artichoke mind control and interrogation program that had been the primary subject of a 2010 Truthout article I had co-written with author-researcher Hank Albarelli (now deceased).
The Kelly case also had an angle concerning the Kennedy assassination, but that had been Albarelli’s contribution, not mine. Readers interested in that aspect of the Truthout article can follow it up at the article itself. I was interested in the torture and Artichoke aspects of the “Kelly” story. As the years wound on, my research interests turned towards exposing the truth around the U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, and on the cover-up of that crime. It was in pursuit of documents related to the latter that I decided some months ago to do a search at the MF archive.
What I found led me to write the current article on an otherwise unexplored aspect of the original government “investigation” into the murder of John Kennedy. The material below will describe a number of findings, including the links between three nationally-known doctors, the CIA, and the Warren Commission, in addition to Agency links with the major Washington D.C. mental hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, where two of these doctors were superintendents at different times. The intelligence links to St. Elizabeth’s probably deserves its own article, but is included here because it is so pertinent to the documentation of the CIA links of these doctors.
This article will also examine a key example of how claims of “brainwashing” worked as a cover-story surrounding U.S. military officers’ admissions of use of bioweapons in the Korean War. It also will review the history of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) top secret research into “truth drugs.” That’s a lot to cover in one article, so I hope readers utilize Substack’s Table of Contents feature to jump around to different sections, if they need to.
In the end, I believe I am left with more questions than answers. Why were officials involved in U.S. mind-control activities, such as “truth drugs,” MKULTRA or Project Artichoke, involved with the Warren Commission? What exactly was the impact of their contributions? How much did members of the Warren Commission understand about using such individuals for their deliberations?
A Psychiatric Consultant to the Warren Commission
The primary doctor of interest I will be discussing is psychiatrist Winfred Overholser, who as Superintendent at the U.S. government’s Washington D.C. mental hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, led a storied career. After his retirement, he was hired as a part-time consultant to the Warren Commission. Overholser died on October 6, 1964, and was famous enough to rate a full obituary in The New York Times.
The obituary mentioned Overholser’s link to the Korean War-era biological weapons (BW) charges. After citing Dr. Overholser’s role in absolving the famous poet Ezra Pound of treason charges after World War II, the Times continued:
Dr. Overholser was also called to testify in a case of a similar nature after the Korean war. Col. Frank H. Schwable, a Marine Corps flier and World War II hero, was being tried by a military court for signing a fraudulent “confession” of participating in germ warfare while being held a prisoner.
The psychiatrist testified that no man could resist Communist methods indefinitely and that the accused, a man of 45 years, might have had less physical stamina than younger men.
“They say that black is white,” the doctor testified in explaining the pressures used by the Communist captors. “At first you argue against it,” but after weeks of solitary confinement “you wind up agreeing.” Dr. Overholser said that he did not believe the colonel was “in his right mind” when he signed the “confession.” Colonel Schwable was acquitted of the charges.
Throughout his professional career, Dr. Overholser displayed this humane consideration for the frailties of his fellow men.
Dr. Overholser was a key witness in the Schwable inquiry, and his testimony provided strong potential corroboration to the government’s contention that the confessions of Schwable, and by implication the other biological warfare confessors, were due to Communist brainwashing and/or torture. Nothing was said at the inquiry, so far as I can tell, that Col. Schwable, along with all the other returning POWs who confessed, had been threatened with prosecution for treason unless they recanted their confessions.
The ironies of the Times characterization of Dr. Overholser’s career will become evident as we consider his intelligence links.
First, however, we will consider Dr. Overholser’s relationship with the Warren Commission, and then we will examine his history of intelligence and military links. I believe by the close of the article the potential importance of the generally overlooked contribution by Dr. Overholser (and his successor) to the work of the Warren Commission — contributions that to this day seem hazy and not fully documented — will be evident.
If nothing else, the Overholser case provides another confirming example of the influence of the CIA and possibly other intelligence agencies on the work of the Warren Commission. A much more comprehensive examination of the latter has been made by former Washington Post journalist, Jefferson Morley. See in particular this recent article on how the CIA was tracking and possibly utilizing Lee Harvey Oswald.
A search on Overholser at the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s website brought up twenty interesting documentary mentions (though some of them are duplicates of material from other documents). From these documents we can construct some idea of what Dr. Overholser’s contribution to the Warren Commission was.
On November 17, 1977, Howard P. Willens, Assistant Counsel to Chief Warren Commission Counsel J. Lee Rankin, testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Assassination of JFK, part of the House’s Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Willens had worked full-time for the Commission, and among other things had been responsible for “hiring lawyers and investigators.”
Asked to comment on a chart the Select Committee had created on the organizational structure of the Warren Commission, Willens said very little about Overholser, who the Committee had marked on the exhibit with a query. The chart, labeled “JFK Exhibit No. 66” is shown below.
Willens stated briefly, “There are references in the materials to Overholser which would make clear what his anticipated function was to be. He was at that time associated with St. Elizabeths Hospital” (pg. 316). Willens’ obscure explanation on Overholser seemed cryptic to me. But before continuing on with the Overholser story, it makes sense (for reasons soon to be made clear) to first examine the background to one of the Warren Commission members, John J. McCloy.
The Personification of the Establishment
One of the lingering mysteries of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is why his autopsy was so terribly bungled. The official autopsy report, as described by the Warren Commission, contradicted the testimony of the FBI agents present at the autopsy. The procedure itself was undertaken by doctors inexperienced in forensic autopsies.
Even though the Warren Commission had been assembled to basically rubber-stamp the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the president, the autopsy dilemma hung over the commissioners like a tantalizing loose — and unwanted — thread. WC commissioner John McCloy believed he had a solution to untangling the confounding issues surrounding the autopsy, and it involved using Overholser.
John J. McCloy was one of the most respected and senior members of the Warren Commission. He personified the term “Establishment.” In his well-known book, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Gerald McKnight described McCloy as “the country’s ‘most influential private citizen,’ a respected member of that select fraternity of ‘wise men’ presidents frequently called upon for advice…. During World War II he had served as Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s right-hand man; he had been president of the World Bank and then chairman of the Chase financial empire before returning to private practice at a large Wall Street law firm. McCloy’s towering achievements in public life resonated not only at home but also with the international community.” (McKnight, University Press of Kansas. Kindle Edition, pg. 90)
McKnight didn’t mention it, but McCloy also had two other more notorious claims to fame. As Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy had been instrumental in pushing through the World War II U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans. The Wright Museum of World War II cited McCloy’s infamous comment on the constitutionality of putting U.S. citizens in a concentration camp, “If it is a question of safety of the country, or the Constitution of the United States, why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
McCloy, who, according to The New York Times, also “oversaw the [Japanese] relocation program” itself, defended his actions for decades afterwards. He even claimed he would support other such internments based on national origin if future wartime situations warranted it.
McCloy also played a controversial role in his assignment as post-World War II High Commissioner in Occupied Germany. Appointed in 1949, a little over a year later McCloy reviewed and then commuted the sentences of dozens of Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. As a result, a number of Nazi war criminals escaped the death sentence, while others were released from prison years early.
At the time of the Kennedy Assassination, McCloy was chairman of the Ford Foundation (FF), where according to author James Petras, “McCloy integrated the FF with CIA operations. He created an administrative unit within the FF specifically to deal with the CIA.”
Despite these links to the CIA, as a member of the Warren Commission, “McCloy was the only commissioner,” according to author McKnight, “to at least entertain the possibility that Kennedy’s assassination might have been the result of a domestic conspiracy.” (McKnight, p. 90)
A Part-time Hire
In notes written by staff of the 1990s Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), I found the fascinating interchange between McCloy and other WC members reproduced below. The discussion about Dr. Winfred Overholser, someone who otherwise has only been known as a very minor member of the Warren Commission auxiliary group of experts, surprised me.
Overholser had played a major role in the only judicial hearing of a military officer who admitted to U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, as has been discussed above, and will be examined in even more detail farther on in this article. In addition, as the person in charge of the World War II Office of Strategic Operations (OSS) Top Secret “truth serum” program (also discussed further on), Overholser had major intelligence connections. As we shall see, Overholser had even significant contact with CIA in his role as head of St. Elizabeth’s. Was something more going on here?
The WC interchange on Overholser appears in a file named CATHY_NOTES.WPD at Mary Ferrell Foundation’s archive of JFK material. The original document apparently is stored at the National Archives. The “Cathy” involved was most likely Catherine M. Rodriguez, who “served as the [AARB] Technical Assistant for Research and Analysis and provided support to the General Counsel from August 1996 until the closure of the Review Board in September 1998.”
The notes transcribed here begin with a discussion of the controversy over the dubious autopsy report on the JFK assassination. The footnotes are left in as they reference documents in the original. All ellipses, brackets, and emphases, and numbers for footnotes are as in the original, unless otherwise indicated by my initials. As an aside, text presented in bold italics below were both bold and underlined in the original, but Substack doesn’t allow for underline formatting of non-linked text.
The WC individuals referenced include Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY); Hale Boggs, U.S. Democratic Party House of Representatives member from New Orleans; J. Lee Rankin, the Warren Commission’s General Counsel and a former U.S. Solicitor General; and, of course, McCloy.
21 January 1964 -- Lee Rankin tells Warren Commissioners: ". . . we don't have the minutes of the autopsy, and we asked for those because we wanted to see what doctor a [sic] said about something while he was saying it, to see whether it is supported by the conclusions in the autopsy and so forth . . ."37 Also see both , Jim Jenkins: ". . . possibly Humes made recorded notations . . ."38 and Godfrey McHugh: ". . . the pathologists recorded minute notes . . ."39 and compare to recommendations of medical panel regarding oral notes.40 Was this autopsy recorded? [All emphasis added]
Cooper: . . . Overholser.
Warren: Overholser, of course, is not a lawyer.
Cooper: No.
Warren: He is a doctor. I think those of you in Congress, members of Congress, certainly know him. He has been the head of the St. Elizabeths Hospital here for many years.
Boggs: St. Elizabeths Hospital.
Warren: Just recently retired and his [sic - JK] a very well-recognized, a very competent man, and we felt that we ought to have someone who in, that field who, could advise us on matters concerning the life of Oswald and possibly the life of Ruby also.
Rankin: He is on a part-time basis, Dr. Overholser, whenever the Commission or the staff need him.41
McCloy: I think of an interview between the doctors and Overholser, let's find out about these wounds, if is [sic - JK] just as confusing now as could be. It left my mind muddy as to what really did happen. Overholser could tell about that, why didn't they turn the body over, who turned the body over, who were the people up there, and why did the FBI report come out with something which isn't consistent with the autopsy when we finally see the autopsy? [Emphasis added]42
It would be nice to see the original documents that AARB staff were taking their notes from, but I will have to use what I have. The interchange above suggests a number of points.
One, Overholser was well-known to the people on the Warren Commission. Indeed, Earl Warren states that the members of Congress present would know him. This was probably because of Overholser’s trips to the Hill to testify about budgetary matters and other government medical issues. One witness at a Congressional hearing called Overholser, the Superintendent at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital [1] in Washington, D.C., “the highest psychiatric official in the Federal Government, who is also consulted when psychiatric problems come up in the Federal Government.”
A perusal of a catalog of Overholser’s papers held at the National Archives shows that Earl Warren and Overholser had some sort of correspondence back in Spring 1949. While I don’t know what that correspondence consisted of, the existence of the correspondence demonstrates that Earl Warren had a long acquaintance with Overholser. Interestingly, Overholser also had some sort of correspondence with John Kennedy in September 1962.
Two, it seems that Overholser was hired by the Commission “part-time” to work on psychological profiling of both accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby. For the record, the WC final report included as appendices the Commission biographies of Oswald and Ruby (appendices 13 and 16, respectively). We can assume that Overholser, as well as his successor (see next section), was involved in their construction.
In a “progress report” memorandum from Warren Commission Chairman Earl Warren to the rest of the Commission members, written sometime between late December 1963 and early-to-mid January 1964, Warren explained the Overholser hire:
In addition to legal personnel, we have given some thought to specialized services which may be of assistance to the Commission. Dr. Winfred Overholser, recently retired as Superintendent of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, is available to advise the Commission and staff on psychiatric and related issues which are developed in the course of the Commission's work. [pg. 2]
Three, it was McCloy who suggested that Overholser become involved in the autopsy controversy and try and work out the problems the issue was causing. But did McCloy know that Overholser had intelligence connections? And if so, would he have suggested him? One thing Overholser was not: he was not a forensic pathologist or an expert on autopsies, though he was an expert on psychiatry and the law. Even so, the Washington, D.C. psychiatrist was not without critics in this area.
What did Overholser have to say about the autopsy issue? Did he actually provide any input on the subject? Was he hired to help with the cover-up, just as he helped the government in the Schwable case? We just don’t know. But we do know that another St. Elizabeth’s doctor did specifically work with the Commission on the ostensible motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Another St. Elizabeth’s Consultant to the Warren Commission
After Overholser retired in 1962, his assistant superintendent, Dr. Dale C. Cameron, took over Overholser’s position. According to a list of papers from Warren Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin, held at the National Archives, on June 17, 1964 Rankin received a letter from Cameron “concerning motivation of Oswald” (Folder 7). A separate folder in Rankin’s file also carrying the same date, is labelled “Dale C. Cameron (St. Elizabeths Hospital) memo to J. Lee Rankin with attached summary re: motivation of Lee Harvey Oswald” (Folder 106).
It seems possible that with advancing age and perhaps poor health — Overholser died in October 1964 — the role of psychiatric consultant on the Oswald and Ruby cases was turned over to Cameron. Indeed, there is documentation in regards to Cameron’s collaboration with the Warren Commission. Cameron himself served as superintendent at St. Elizabeth’s until 1967. He died in 1993.
A number of documents at the Mary Farrell archive describe Cameron’s work with the Commission. Various files describe how in May 1964 Rankin sent a number of Top Secret documents on Oswald to Cameron in Mexico City, where Cameron was attending a psychiatric convention. The FBI (cited by CIA code name ODENVY) had thought it weird that Top Secret files on Oswald (code name GPFLOOR) had been declassified even prior to the issuance of any Commission report. See this document for one such example of discussions on this issue.
Other documents describe Cameron’s work for the Committee, notably records collected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which show that on July 9, 1964, Cameron was one of three psychiatrists who had a seven-hour meeting with McCloy, Dulles, and four Commission staffers “to develop a psychological profile of Lee Harvey Oswald.” The evidence was gathered by journalist Tad Szulc and the editors of The New Republic, and published as part of a three part series. (See this selection from The Daily Olympian, 9/23/1975.)
The other psychiatrists present at the meeting were Dr. Howard P. Rome, then president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, and Dr. David A. Rothstein, Staff Psychiatrist at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. The Commission staffers were Wesley Liebeler, Albert E. Jenner, Jr., David Slawson, and Howard Willens.
According to Szulc and The New Republic editors, “The commission appeared to have used this [psychiatric] material in a highly selective manner, incorporating some of the views of the doctors in the final report while rejecting others.” (HSCA, Pg. 163) One example of rejected material was the psychiatrists’ theory that Oswald’s rejection by his wife the night before the assassination led to the dreaded deed. Gerald Posner recently referenced Cameron’s work with the WC on Oswald to help buttress his case around Oswald’s guilt, but never mentioned that Cameron may have had, through either Overholser or St. Elizabeth’s administration, links with the CIA. To be fair, Posner likely was unaware of such links.
Of primary interest here is the fact that a St. Elizabeth’s superintendent, the head of a facility that had special arrangements with the CIA (as is described further below), played a prominent consultation role with the Warren Commission.
On a side note, but of some interest, at the July 9 meeting, Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA, told those present that it was clear to him that Oswald was “not the kind of man any intelligence service would want to pick up.” This goes against evidence gathered by Jefferson Morley that Oswald indeed had intelligence connections, as cited above. Dulles appears to be clearly lying here, and misleading other WC staff.
An Artichoke Connection
While we don’t know the full extent of Overholser’s contributions to the work of the Warren Commission, I did find one surprising instance which linked both Overholser and the Commission by association to yet another instance of CIA interrogation experimentation.
In a copy of the Warren Commission logbook, released by the CIA to the AARB in 1993, an entry for January 29, 1964 briefly describes a letter to the Commission from Dr. Overholser. The letter is apparently in response to a message the Commission sent Overholser about “psychiatric help from Dr. Wedge.” (See pg. 30 of the logbook.)
We don’t know the particulars about this exchange, but the “Dr. Wedge” referred to was most likely Dr. Bryant Wedge. According to a Washington Post obituary of Dr. Wedge, dated September 16, 1987, Dr. Wedge “had been an adviser to the U.S. government. For the Central Intelligence Agency, he developed psychiatric profiles of various world leaders, including former Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.”
The Khrushchev consult for the CIA had been exposed in a September 1968 article for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. At the time, the CIA “would neither confirm nor deny the report.”
Wedge’s CIA work probably began after he left Yale University’s Department of Mental Health, where he had been “psychiatrist-in-chief,” and wandered Europe, Africa and the Middle East for a year as an Eisenhower Exchange Fellow, where according to a September 1963 newspaper article, he “investigated cultural attitudes”. When he returned to the U.S., he published some of his observations on the Soviet Union in Yale Scientific Magazine. It is likely he secretly briefed CIA officials on his trip. In 1962, he founded the Institute for the Study of National Behavior at Princeton University.
The Washington Post obituary provided an explosive piece of information on Wedge. According to the Post, Wedge “served in the Army from 1952 to 1954 as assistant chief of psychiatric services at the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania.” This was precisely the time when the CIA was conducting at Valley Forge a Project Artichoke experiment on U.S. POWs returning from the Korean War.
The Valley Forge experiment had been controversial from the very beginning, when an April 1953 Associated Press article exposed plans to use “unique psychological devices” on the returning POWs, who had been specially isolated and sent under armed guard to the Pennsylvania hospital. The scandal led to a temporary cessation to the Artichoke experiment at Valley Forge, but according to my research, the experiments were undertaken anyway after the controversy had died down.
An April 29, 1953 memo from the Chief of CIA’s Office of Technical Services, Sidney Gottlieb, described the “proposed activities” at Valley Forge. The returning POWs, who were suspected of Communist sympathies, would be subjected to use of Artichoke procedures — use of sodium pentathol, methamphetamine, hypnosis, and in the case of Valley Forge, an experimental drug, possibly a hallucinogen like LSD — which Gottlieb described as a “modified ‘truth serum’ approach.”
The novel drug was “colorless, odorless, soluble in water, and the effective dose” was some 30 to 40 micrograms. Whether for the administration of the new drug or for other reasons, Gottleib felt a “top-flight anesthesiologist” should be present for the drugged interrogations.
The Valley Forge Artichoke experiment required at least five subjects drawn from the returning POWS who had been labelled the “hardcore type,” that is, supposed committed Communists. In addition a minimum of five “indoctrinated type” ex-POWs were also required, that is, types that had allegedly been won over in the camps to a Communist world view, or at least to support for certain Communist or antiwar causes. It was understood that all the subjects would be concurrently undergoing medical treatment, and “some probably will receive psychiatric care.”
Gottleib thought it “conceivable that some of the ARTICHOKE work might be brought to bear in direct connection with medical treatment.” In any case, he was enthusiastic about the Valley Forge experiment moving forward. “Cover in this situation is perfect,” he exulted, “a pure medical cover in a controlled area” (emphasis in original).
Since Dr. Wedge was at this time the assistant chief of psychiatric services at Valley Forge Army Hospital, it strains credulity to think that he was not at the very least informed of the CIA experiments, as they would affect high-profile patients in his department. It is possible too that Wedge was even involved in the experiments themselves.
From Bryant Wedge’s biographical information and stated interests — an August 1963 news article quotes him on how to understand and treat the “alienated personality” — it seems likely that Wedge possibly approached the Warren Commission to offer his expertise, or that Overholser and Wedge were working together somehow on the psychological profiles of Oswald and Ruby.
Whether or not either Overholser or Wedge were acting in concert with the CIA in any fashion whatsoever in relation to the Warren Commission is a question worth asking, though speculative and probably unlikely to be adequately answered anytime soon.
A Far-right General
In one last instance of Overholser’s potential links to the larger world of events connected to the Kennedy assassination, in October 1962, the Justice Department appointed Overholser, along with another psychiatrist, Dr. R.L. Stubblefield, to provide a psychiatric assessment of far-right, segregationist Major General Edwin A. Walker. Walker had been arrested and charged with “insurrection and seditious conspiracy” for his role in an anti-integration riot at the University of Mississippi, according to an article in the Austin American-Statesman. Overholser, however, was removed from the case after protest from Walker’s attorney.
The attorney decried Overholser’s history of “pressing for [psychiatric] commitments,” an allusion, possibly, to Overholser’s twelve-year psychiatric commitment of World War II fascist propagandist for Mussolini, the poet Ezra Pound. Pound had been set up in special “guest” circumstances at St. Elizabeth’s, where Overholser acted as his chief therapist. Overholser’s “celebrity” treatment of Pound came in for some harsh criticism.
Of interest for our purposes is the fact that according to the Warren Commission, Edwin Walker had allegedly been the target of an assassination attempt by Lee Harvey Oswald in April 1963. No material evidence has ever been produced that shows Oswald ever shot at Walker at all. The sole witness to the event saw two men leaving the area after the shot, but did not identify Oswald. Nevertheless the Walker assassination accusation became a key component of the Warren Commission report’s framing of Oswald as a violent, left-wing extremist.
There’s nothing necessarily untoward in Overholser’s assignment to assess General Walker. He was certainly competent in conducting a psychiatric assessment. Perhaps his aborted appointment was only a coincidence, but when intelligence agencies are in the mix of any story, it’s worth noting all apparent data points.
“Truth Drugs” and Treason Trials
It’s likely that some of the Warren Commission members, especially former CIA chief Allen Dulles, were aware that Overholser had intelligence links. Cathy Rodriquez’s AARB notes include a small biographical sketch on Overholser. I will reproduce that in its entirety here:
Winfred Overholser was a psychiatrist who headed the Washington, DC area mental institution, St. Elizabeths, from 1937 to 1962. St. Elizabeths is a federal institution, and under Overholser pioneered the use of therapeutic agents and techniques which included psychodrama and tranquilizing drugs. Born April 21, 1892, in Worchester, Massachusetts, he graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1912 and received his M.D. from Boston University in 1916. After graduating from medical school, he joined the Army where he served in the neuropsychiatric section and received multiple citations. From the Army, Overholser began a distinguished career, affiliated with (to name a few) the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, George Washington University, Boston University, St. Elizabeths Hospital, and many other prominent facilities and government agencies. He was also the recipient of several honorary degrees.43
He figured prominently in two high profile treason cases, Ezra Pound and Col. Frank Schwable. Both of men [sic - JK] were either acquitted or had the indictment against them dropped primarily due to Overholser's diagnosis. In the case of Pound, Overholser had him confined to St. Elizabeth's for 13 years, 1945-58.
Overholser headed the OSS's "truth drug" experiments which for the most part were conducted at St. Elizabeths. In search of a perfect "speech-inducing agent," Overholser tested numerous drugs until finally producing a success — an odorless, colorless, tasteless extract from cannabis that could be surreptitiously placed into food, or injected into a cigarette or cigar. These studies were so secret that they were conducted under the auspices of the Manhattan Project.
It’s important to keep in mind that Overholser’s leadership of the secret OSS study on “truth drugs” was never revealed during the Schwable inquiry. Nor is it mentioned in any WC documents that reference Overholser. It only came out years later, with the publication of John Marks’ book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which will be discussed further on in this article.
Cathy’s notes are incorrect as regards the Schwable case. Colonel Frank Schwable was never formally accused of treason. Nor did he face trial or court martial for treason. He underwent a quasi-judicial hearing by an ad hoc Marine Corps “Board of Inquiry” that investigated his prisoner of war confession that the U.S. had used biological weapons during the Korean War. That confession had included a great deal of detail on the command structure that ordered the BW campaign; the course of the operations; and other incredibly embarrassing and revelatory organizational details.
But there were many in government, including the CIA, that were leery of putting any of the BW confessors (there were 25 in all) on trial. These officials were worried that details about secret operations would leak out. It was as a matter of compromise with incensed Marine Corps officials who wanted to punish Schwable for leaking details on the BW program, that Schwable was forced to undergo the board of inquiry in lieu of a more formal court martial. The latter would have come with charges, evidentiary discovery, etc., all dangerous to the project of keeping secret the Pentagon’s germ warfare research and capacities.
It was many years later that damning documentation of the use of bioweapons was declassified in the form of CIA communications intelligence reports based on decrypted Communist military communications during the Korean War. These documents, released in 2010, still remain mostly ignored in historical accounts of the period. One exception to this is Nicholson Baker’s recent book on FOIA and the Korean War BW allegations, Baseless. (See my review of Baker’s book here.)
The Schwable Inquiry
Frank Schwable was no mere prisoner. He was the highest ranking Marine Corps prisoner in the Korean War, and the second-highest ranking U.S. prisoner of war overall. According to a Marine Corps obituary, during World War II Schwable “trained and commanded the first Marine Corps night fighter squadron to see action in World War II,” where he distinguished himself by downing four or five Japanese planes.
At the time of his capture during the Korean War, he was not actually serving in theater as a Marine Corps pilot. He was Chief of Staff of the First Marine Aircraft Wing. It’s unclear why he was on a mission when he was shot down. As I wrote in a comprehensive article on the germ warfare confessions of high-ranking U.S. officers:
Schwable’s position was quite senior. According to researcher-author, Raymond Lech, “The First Marine Wing was huge, consisting of thousands of men and hundreds of planes.” (Tortured into False Confession, p. 24) Four colonels reported to Schwable, including those responsible for intelligence (G-2), operations (G-3), and logistics (G-4). According to an official Marine Corps history of operations in Korea during the war, while Schwable’s deposition to his captors was “a most convincing lie,” Schwable’s confession nevertheless “was, unquestionably, damaging.”
Schwable’s testimony was as damning as it was detailed. This short excerpt should provide a flavor of the whole:
The general plan for bacteriological warfare in Korea was directed by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in October, 1951. In that month the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a directive by hand to the Commanding General, Far East Command (at that time General Ridgway), directing the initiation of bacteriological warfare in Korea on an initially small, experimental stage but in expanding proportions.
This directive was passed to the Commanding General, Far East Air Force, General Weyland, in Tokyo. General Weyland then called into personal conference General Everest, Commanding General of the 5th Air Force in Korea, and also the Commander of the 19th Bomb Wing at Okinawa, which unit operates directly under FEAF….
The basic objective was at that time to test, under field conditions, the various elements of bacteriological warfare, and to possibly expand the field tests, at a later date, into an element of the regular combat operations, depending on the results obtained and the situation in Korea….
Security measures were to be thoroughly tested — both friendly and enemy. On the friendly side, all possible steps were to be taken to confine knowledge of the use of this weapon and to control information on the subject. On the enemy side, every possible means was to be used to deceive the enemy and prevent his actual proof that the weapon was being used….
During the latter part of May, 1952, the new Commanding General of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, General [Clayton C.] Jerome, was called to 5th Air Force Headquarters and given a directive for expanding bacteriological operations. The directive was given personally and verbally by the new Commanding General of the 5th Air Force, General Barcus.
Colonel Schwable was repatriated at the end of the Korean War, along with all the Air Force and Marine Corps personnel that had signed depositions detailing U.S. use of biological weapons. The very existence of this group of 25 different officers posed a huge dilemma for the U.S. government. I have described the cover-up surrounding their testimony in a number of articles.
Recently, I was able to document that prior to the flyers’ posting to duty in the Korean War, they were instructed that when captured they had permission to “tell all” they knew about operations. This was likely because the U.S. feared torture of these officers, and because the Pentagon brass figured the Koreans and Chinese already knew all the important details anyway.
This special dispensation was given to the air crew on the germ war missions and apparently no one else, and revelations about this caused a controversy at the time. But the controversy was squashed by the Pentagon, as details surrounding these particular instructions were classified at the end of the Schwable inquiry. Luckily details had leaked out during the inquiry itself, allowing me to rediscover the special interrogation instructions as documented in the press at the time.
The military’s special instructions that Schwable and others like him were allowed to reveal information under interrogation throws an entirely different light upon the government’s “brainwashing” and torture narratives. The latter are revealed as mostly propaganda devices and components of a cover story. But even as the CIA was cautioning the military against prosecuting any of the BW confessors, the Marine Corps brass in particular were incensed at what they felt was Schwable’s betrayal. They insisted a special inquiry be held, something less than a court martial, but outwardly carrying all the trappings of a military trial.
Schwable’s defense was that he had been tortured into confession, and his defense team assembled a group of supposed “experts” on such mental coercion. Overholser was called as an expert witness. Others included Dutch-American psychiatrist Joost Meerloo, who had coined the term “menticide” (a “catch-phrase” Eisenhower’s Psychological Strategy Board disliked) to replace “brainwashing,” and Dr. Alan Little of the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.
Little had worked with the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II. But he was not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or even a medical doctor, but had an advanced degree in archaeology. Even so, Little was allowed to testify at Schwable’s hearing as an expert on “menticide” and the works of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov.
Overholser was a different story. He had been a prominent psychiatrist for decades. Like Alan Little, Overholser had worked with the OSS (where it’s possible he may have met Little) during the war. Significantly, as will be described more fully below, he was in charge of a special 1942-43 OSS study on “truth drugs.”
Dr. Overholser became superintendent at St. Elizabeth’s in 1937. He would remain the hospital’s chief administrator until 1962, when he retired. According to a history of the institution, published by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), “During [Overholser’s] tenure another long list of invasive and noninvasive treatments was implemented, including psychodrama, art, dance, and group therapy and electroshock and insulin shock therapy. During Overholser's tenure, tranquilizing drugs were introduced.”
The hospital underwent a great deal of change during Overholser’s tenure. According to a U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) history of St. Elizabeth’s, written by Thomas J. Otto, the institution was a center for the use of prefrontal and transorbital lobotomies in the 1940s and 1950s, under the guidance of St. Elizabeth’s Dr. Walter Freeman (who would become the director of the hospital’s laboratory) and his colleague, surgeon Dr. James Watt. Watt conducted most of the lobotomies, including on children as young as five years old. Over time, the lobotomies were performed less and less.
The medical staff at St. Elizabeths never warmed to Freeman’s transorbital procedure. Twenty-six patients at St. Elizabeths were given prefrontal lobotomies in 1950. In 1951, thirty-five were given, and in 1952 only fourteen were given. Overholser noted in 1952 that he still didn’t generally condone transorbital lobotomies, but did allow one “under very unusual circumstances”.
Overholser and his medical staff continued to believe that prefrontal lobotomies were “drastic and mutilating operations” and should only be used as a last resort. (Otto, pg. 274)
The NARA essay on St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, written by Frances M. McMillen and James S. Kane at Prologue Magazine, described how after World War II, the patient census at St. Elizabeths began to decline. For one thing, military cases were being sent to the new Veterans Administration facilities. This was followed by “the deinstitutionalization and community health care movements, [which] ultimately led to a drastic reduction of the number of people hospitalized at St. Elizabeths. More than 7,000 people received inpatient care during the 1940s. In the 1980s, around 1,200 patients were hospitalized. Currently there are only a few hundred.”
One famous resident who entered St. Elizabeth’s locked criminal unit in the 1980s was John Hinckley, who grievously wounded but failed in assassinating Ronald Reagan in March 1981. Hinckley was not the only would-be assassin incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s as criminally insane. According to an article at Psychiatry Online, “Richard Lawrence, who tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson on January 30, 1835, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent 20 years in a Maryland hospital before becoming patient number seven at St. Elizabeths.”
Administrative control of St. Elizabeth’s was transferred in 1987 from the federal government to the District of Columbia.
What Otto, McMillan and Kane either didn’t know, or kept secret, was that St. Elizabeth’s, under Overholser’s leadership, became a primary location for the treatment and hospitalization of CIA personnel, and their families, and others deemed national security risks, who were referred for mental health treatment and even involuntary hospitalization or commitment.
CIA’s Relationship with St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.
A set of November 1952 “Diary Notes” by a high CIA bureaucrat, probably the CIA’s Director of Personnel, describes how Dr. Samuel Silk, St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric Clinical Director, told the CIA’s Medical Services Director, Dr. John Tietjen, that he was working on a “a procedure which is entirely legal” whereby St. Elizabeth’s could get CIA-linked patients to “bypass” referrals to Washington D.C.’s Gallinger Municipal Hospital Psychopathic Ward and be directly admitted to St. Elizabeth’s, where presumably the CIA had more direct access.
Medical records from St. Elizabeth’s patients were shared with the CIA, and CIA did not follow ethical protocols on its possession of such records. One July 1954 memo to Dr. Tietjen’s “Special Assistant,” was adamant that the medical records of one St. Elizabeth’s patient, who was applying for employment at the CIA, should remain in CIA hands. “There is no obligation to return it to St. Elizabeth’s at her request,” the memo stated.
By the late 1950s, during the latter years of Dr. Overholser’s administration, St. Elizabeth’s had formalized their relationship with CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS). An undated interdepartmental memo from CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DDA), written probably in the late 1970s, noted:
Since 1959, OMS has maintained a formal written agreement with St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the administration and treatment of referrals. [pg.3]
Even so, the memo added as a matter of context, “Since 1959, their facilities have been rarely used.” Rarely used they may have been, but as we shall see below, cooperation between St. Elizabeth’s and the CIA became even more bureaucratized over the years.
The CIA’s formal relationship with the government D.C. hospital continued for decades, long after Dr. Overholser retired in 1962. It’s not known if that relationship continues today, especially since the administration of the facility transferred to the Washington, D.C. local government in the late 1980s.
But before the federal government relinquished control, almost two decades after Overholser retired from St. Elizabeth’s, a January 16, 1980 memo from the CIA’s General Counsel office to the Executive Director at DDA detailed “Guidelines Implementing the Agreement with the VA and St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Admission and Treatment of CIA Beneficiaries.” The CIA memo described a great deal of latitude granted CIA in regards to control of patient admission and/or treatment. Some selections from the “Guidelines” are offered below:
According to the Jan. 1980 memo, the CIA fashioned an “ad hoc” group consisting of representatives from the CIA’s Director of Medical Services, Director of Personnel, the Director of Security, and the General Counsel’s office. The Ad Hoc group would “determine whether voluntary Admission procedures or involuntary commitment action will be necessary.” The CIA beneficiaries covered by the Agreement with the Veterans Administration and St. Elizabeth’s facilities included CIA employees and agents, defectors to the U.S., and, ominously, any “other individual” who the Ad Hoc committee found “to be the responsibility of the Agency.”
The Guidelines also make clear that psychiatric commitment, including at the nation’s Veterans Administration hospitals, could be made for non-clinical purposes, i.e., “to protect classified information or intelligence sources and methods from disclosure.” Such psychiatric commitment would be decided by CIA personnel, not doctors.
CIA’s cozy relationship with St. Elizabeth’s was not only related to clinical matters. The U.S. government’s primary psychiatric hospital was a recruiting ground for CIA medical staff.
One CIA Office of Personnel report for the week ending June 9, 1978 described how the Clinical Director of St. Elizabeth’s Clinical Psychology Training Division, Dr. Elliott Blum, invited a CIA Office of Personnel recruiter to “brief his intern class.” A March 15, 2016 Washington Post obituary for Dr. Blum, reposted at Ancestry.com, reported that for some 20 years Dr. Blum was in charge of St. Elizabeth’s Clinical Psychology Training Program, where he oversaw “the instruction of hundreds of externs, interns and residents… creating a program that was renowned throughout the country….”
The June 1978 CIA report described how the Agency’s personnel recruiter would be accompanied by a representative of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services’ (OTS) Behavioral Activities Branch, who was seeking new Assessment psychologists for its operations.
OTS was a division of CIA that for some time had responsibility for CIA’s MKULTRA program. It was OTS that prior to 9/11 initially hired Air Force SERE psychologist James Mitchell, who became one of the architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program.
Today, much of what was once St. Elizabeth’s medical and administrative offices is now the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its iconic Center Building now houses around a thousand DHS employees.
Overholser and the Search for a Truth Drug
The NARA and GSA essays never mention Overholser’s history of intelligence work, even though that ultimately became public knowledge. In his 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, former State Department intelligence officer John Marks, who had retrieved via FOIA the bulk of the materials the CIA failed to destroy on the MKULTRA and other mind control and interrogation programs, described Overholser’s government work on finding a reliable “truth drug.” Marks, who had previously worked for the State Department’s intelligence branch as staff assistant to the Director for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, wrote:
Even as the S.S. doctors were carrying on their experiments at Dachau, [in 1942] the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's wartime intelligence agency, set up a "truth drug" committee under Dr. Winfred Overholser, head of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington. The committee quickly tried and rejected mescaline, several barbiturates, and scopolamine. Then, during the spring of 1943, the committee decided that Cannabis indica—or marijuana—showed the most promise, and it started a testing program in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, the TOP SECRET effort to build an atomic bomb. It is not clear why OSS turned to the bomb makers for help, except that, as one former Project official puts it, "Our secret was so great, I guess we were safer than anyone else." Apparently, top Project leaders, who went to incredible lengths to preserve security, saw no danger in trying out drugs on their personnel.
The Manhattan Project supplied the first dozen test subjects, who were asked to swallow a concentrated, liquid form of marijuana that an American pharmaceutical company furnished in small glass vials. A Project man who was present recalls: "It didn't work the way we wanted. Apparently the human system would not take it all at once orally. The subjects would lean over and vomit." What is more, they disclosed no secrets, and one subject wound up in the hospital.
John M. Crewdson and Jo Thomas at The New York Times revealed more about the program. Examining the personal papers of OSS officer George Hunter White, a Federal narcotics officer who also moonlighted as an MKULTRA operative, the Times reporters wrote in 1977, “the White papers call into question recent assertions by the C.I.A. that official interest in the properties of mind‐altering substances in this country arose only in the postwar period, and then only as a response to reports that the Soviet Union was investigating the use of drugs as aids to interrogation.”
In Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Marks described how White “and a Manhattan Project counterintelligence man borrowed 15 to 18 thick dossiers from the FBI and went off to try the marijuana on suspected [U.S.] Communist soldiers stationed in military camps outside Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans.”
According to a Manhattan Project counterintelligence official working with White, they concocted an experimental interrogation technique using cigarettes laced with a highly potent marijuana extract:
Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed the pack.... We sat down with a particular soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something like "This is better than being overseas and getting shot at," and we would try to break them. We started asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the folder on them... We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass. The stuff actually worked.... Everyone but one—and he didn't smoke—gave us more information than we had before. [ellipses in original, pg. 7]
The reports presumably would go to Overholser, who oversaw the program. Additionally, according to Marks, some of the experiments were conducted at St. Elizabeth’s itself.
The top secret OSS experiments were also the subject of a September 1, 1983 Rolling Stone article by Martin A. Lee, “High Spy.” The article detailed the CIA’s search for drugs for mind control purposes, including use in interrogations. The article doesn’t appear at Rolling Stone’s website. A portion of the article rests on CIA servers, and I downloaded it from the CIA reading room for research purposes.
Lee, who with co-author Bruce Shlain wrote the highly regarded 1994 book, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, described in some detail the OSS Truth Drug Program. According to Lee, the wartime OSS program “to develop a speech-inducing drug for use in intelligence interrogations…. was the first concerted attempt on the part of an American espionage organization to modify human behavior through chemical means.”
Overholser was chair of the truth drug panel. Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (predecessor of today’s Drug Enforcement Administration), was also on the panel. According to Hank Albarelli’s book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (Trine Day, 2009), the truth drug panel was a joint effort by the OSS and the National Defense Research Council. Members included, besides Overholser and Anslinger, Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor John Whitehorn (who later would serve on the Board of Directors of the CIA’s MKULTRA cutout [Senate testimony, pgs. 84-85], the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), and Columbia psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. The men worked in secret, “reporting only to Stanley Lovell, who reported to OSS director William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan,” according to Albarelli (“A Terrible Mistake,” p. 395).
The panel considered numerous drugs, some of which were the object of experiments on both witting and unwitting subjects. Overholser’s crew looked at mescaline, barbiturates, scopolamine, alcohol and marijuana (code-named “TD”). Reportedly, the marijuana gave the best results, but experts determined that no fool-proof method of administering truth drugs or “serums” was ever found. But that doesn’t mean the CIA didn’t continue to pursue the subject, or that researchers hadn’t determined certain subjects were more vulnerable to such drugging than others.
By July 1963, only four months before the Kennedy assassination, the years of “truth drug” interrogation experiments were encapsulated in the CIA’s “KUBARK” interrogation manual for use in counterintelligence interrogations. In the manual’s section on “Narcosis,” the CIA had concluded that while “there is no drug which can force every informant to report all the information he has,” the use of “drugs can be effective in overcoming resistance not dissolved by other techniques.” The unwitting application of drugs can increase a subject’s susceptibility to “hypnotic trance.”
The CIA further noted that since the data derived from drugged interrogations “cannot always be considered valid,” the use of drugs in interrogation should be primarily “to cause capitulation” and “aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation” (See discussion at KUBARK, pgs. 99-100).
One robust conclusion from the CIA and Pentagon mind-control effort was that due to the variability of human beings psychological makeup, some people, perhaps a minority, were uniquely more susceptible to the influence of mind control techniques, or “brainwashing,” than others. Hence the CIA put a good deal of effort into the psychological assessment of its experimental or intelligence “subjects,” a subject that we must leave alone for now, but hopefully can revisit at a future time. (Interested readers can further pursue the CIA assessment project in John Marks’ book, or at this well-written article at The Memory Hole.)
Much more could be said here about the OSS program, and later secret CIA and military programs to use drugs to elicit information, but the point of this article is to show that Overholser had a definite intelligence background. He was also not averse to bending ethical behavior to meet intelligence agency purposes.
While it’s not known if St. Elizabeth’s was a testing site for MKULTRA programs during Overholser’s post-WWII tenure, by the early 1950s at the latest, the hospital had made special arrangements to work with the CIA, as is discussed above.
Conclusion
The main importance of the Overholser hire at the Warren Commission is to link yet another CIA asset with the work of the Commission. It’s not clear in the end what work Overholser did for the Commission. Perhaps he was hired and then did very little. But the perusal of Overholser’s work with the Commission has also led to other interesting findings.
For one thing, it allowed for the identification of one of the psychiatric officials at Valley Forge Army Hospital at the time of the CIA’s Project Artichoke post-Korean War experiment there. The attempt to understand Overholser’s work at St. Elizabeth’s also uncovered special arrangement the D.C. hospital had made with the CIA over the years, including highly unethical protocols for psychiatric commitment based on the recommendation of high CIA officials.
This investigation also allowed me to revisit the relevance of Overholser’s contribution to the cover story of supposed “brainwashing” of U.S. prisoners of war by their North Korean and Chinese captors. In retrospect, Dr. Overholser was a key component in the construction of the cover-up of U.S. use of biological weapons in the Korean War, providing expert psychiatric authority to burnish a false narrative.
Perhaps over time, we will understand more about Overholser, Cameron, and Wedge’s work for the Warren Commission. It may yet have some significance to the overall story of the cover-up surrounding the JFK assassination.
Update: On October 30, 2024, a week after posting this article, I wrote the Public Affairs Office at the Veterans’ Administration, offering them the opportunity to comment upon the article’s assertion that the VA had an agreement with the CIA in the 1980s to take in psychiatric patients referred via an “ad hoc” body within the CIA. I also asked whether the VA still had such an arrangement with the CIA. They did not respond to my queries.
Endnotes
[1] The name “St. Elizabeth’s” is spelled both with and without an apostrophe in numerous documents. I’ve gone with the apostrophe in my own written material, but have left the non-apostrophe alternative spelling intact in quoted material that contains such spelling. Hopefully, readers will not be confused by this.
This is good, important work. I'm not sure what to make of it, but Overholser was also a Freemason and a boardmember of the Scottish Rite Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox in the '30s. I believe the org (renamed the Scottish Rite Schizophrenia Research Program) was later used as a funding conduit for MKULTRA. Overholser's predecessor at St. Elizabeths, Dr. William Alanson White, was also on the committee; apparently Overholser took over the superintendent position upon White's death.
The CIA was well represented on the Warren Commission with Allen Dulles and McCloy from the OSS days and Overholser. Stephen Kinzer suggests that Pres. Johnson put Dulles on the committee to "systematically use his position to keep the commission safely within bounds. . ." David Talbot argues that the Kennedy assassination was actually planned by Allen Dulles who had recently been fired by Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs operation.