How the CIA started the Psychedelic Movement
When people think of the rise of the use of LSD and other psychedelics in popular culture they might think of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who performed questionable research using the LSD during the 1960s, whose flashy and controversial behavior was the first introduction many had to the drug. Others might think of famed musicians and artists such as The Beatles or author Aldous Huxley. But very few would state that the US government had anything to do it. But perhaps we should because a man who worked for the OSS (the intelligence agency that would become the CIA) and later for the CIA itself was at the very center of it. That man knew Leary well. And he was personal friends with Aldous Huxley and countless other celebrities more traditionally associated with starting the psychedelic movement.
Al Hubbard is the piece of the story that gets left out. In part, this is because no one knows quite where to put him. Absolutely no one identifies with him. Not scholars - he pretended to be a scholar but only had a third-grade education and a Ph.D. he bought from a diploma mill. And not hippies - he never pretended to be a hippie (he had a crew cut and inexplicably wore a security uniform and carried a Colt 45). But also, in part, we do not know about him because he was evasive about his own story. One biographer described him as "a man of mirrors and shadows." LSD researcher, Oscar Janiger, once said, "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
Yet he is a central piece of the introduction to LSD to the Western world. He is the one that made it all possible. Biographer Brenden Fahey says that he was, "to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter..."
Who Was Al Hubbard?
Here is what we know about Hubbard. He was apparently raised poor - claiming he didn't get his first pair of shoes until he was twelve. Despite his third-grade education, he taught himself electronics, invented a battery (of which we have little details), and sold the patent for $75,000 (over $1 million in today's money). Popular Science once listed this invention as a "technological hoax." Later, he worked for the mob during prohibition helping bootleggers avoid detection. He was busted by the FBI and served time. But then strange things started to happen to him.
Hubbard started working for a deep cover operation for the OSS in pre-WWII operations and some think that this is where Alan Dulles (an OSS agent and future Director of the CIA) first saw his potential. Congress, who had not authorized it, started to investigate the operation and Hubbard disappeared to Canada where he became a citizen. Then Hubbard was somehow pardoned of all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman. Hubbard then founded a charter boat business and became the 'science director' of a uranium mining company (with some evidence that he was supplying uranium for the Manhattan Project).
Despite being born into poverty, having no education, and being an ex-con who had fled to Canada, Hubbard somehow became a millionaire. He owned a yacht, a fleet of aircraft, a Rolls-Royce, and a private island. And evidence suggests that Hubbard continued to have relationships with several government agencies during this time. He worked as an agent for The Department of Justice. He worked for the Food and Drug Administration. He also worked for the Canadian Special Services. And his FBI file indicates that he worked with the CIA as well (although heavy redactions to the file make the details of this relationship unclear).
Hubbard claims to have had a mystical experience involving LSD and despite being as square as one could be (flattop, uniform, and ostensibly devoutly catholic) started to promote LSD to anyone and everyone he could. He worked his extensive network of government and business contacts to get a massive quantity of LSD (reports vary from 1 liter to "six thousand vials"). He somehow secured an Investigational New Drug permit from the FDA allowing this third-grade educated ex-con to do clinical research in the USA.
His story reminds me of Jeffrey Epstein's who also had limited education yet mysteriously became insanely rich, had deep connections to 'intelligence', and owned a private island. And like Jeffrey Epstein, Hubbard was a master at cultivating relationships among elites.
He brought the gospel of LSD to the highest levels of society. His network included leading figures in business, government, arts, religion, and technology. He was tight with members of the Canadian Parliament, officials in the Roman Catholic Church (convincing Monsignor Brownmajor of Vancouver to endorse his work), Hollywood actors, prominent writers, philosophers, academics, engineers, and notable business leaders. Hubbard claimed to be friends with J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He also claimed to be he was friends with the Pope. People that knew him believed these claims. That is how connected the man was.
Hubbard's connections with US Intel continued throughout his life. There is strong evidence he was in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White. These two men orchestrated Operation Midnight Climax, a sub-project of the MK Ultra program conducted by the CIA/FBI. In Midnight Climax unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose sexual acts were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at expensive hotels in New York and San Francisco. His government connections came in handy when at another point in his life, he was storying LSD at an airport in Switzerland and Swiss officials arrested him for violating drug laws. But when he went to court, blue-suited officials from the Department of Justice were in attendance, and Hubbard was, inexplicably released with no more than a temporary suspension of his passport.
Hubbard's Influence in Bringing LSD to Western Culture
Hubbard's connections allowed him to dose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in 1966. The people he shared it with are a who's who of 1960s culture. In addition to Catholic officials, he dosed Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, and a famed Beverly Hills psychiatrist, who, in turn, turned on Cary Grant. He dosed James Coburn. He dosed Jack Nicholson. He dosed the best-selling novelist Anais Nin Stanley Kubrick.
His work with the academic Humphry Osmond was of monumental influence in the history of LSD. He convinced Osmond that LSD might have therapeutic benefits. And this led to a variety of studies in several institutions on LSD and its effects. Hubbard suggested the treatment room-specific light, music, and imagery. And within a few years, Hubbard had made the acquaintance of much of the psychedelic research community in the United States and Canada. Michael Pollan calls him a 'psychedelic circuit rider.' Researchers across the continent awaited his visits in hopes of getting new supplies from his endless bank of LSD. Soon researchers were exploring all sorts of therapeutic uses for LSD.
But in terms of the popularization of LSD, it is probably his work with Aldous Huxley that was perhaps the most important. He introduced the popular writer to LSD in 1955. Although Huxley had already done mescaline (the subject of his 'Doors of Perception') LSD would put this in the shade in Huxley's mind. Hubbard and Huxley formed an unlikely friendship and their efforts shifted from a narrow focus on therapeutic benefits of the drug to a goal of treating the whole society. Huxley wrote, "... who having once come to the realization of the primordial fact of unity in love, would ever want to return to experimentation on the psychic level?"
In 1955, Hubbard and Huxley established the 'Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination.' Along with Hubbard and Huxley, the board included Humphry Osmond and half a dozen other researchers, a philosopher, and a UN official. Hubbard, despite having only a third-grade education, named himself, 'scientific director' of the new organization. The commission didn't end up doing that much but it did serve as a giant signal: the shift from the medical approach to Huxley's spiritual approach was now taking place.
Hubbard's work continued in other ways. He went to Silicon Valley and distributed LSD to foster 'creative imagination,' among the entrepreneurs there. Hubbard developed a relationship with Lyron Strolaroff, an electrical engineer, a high-level employee at Ampex, an early technology company in the Valley that pioneered data storage methods. Hubbard dosed Strolaroff who later said, "After that first LSD experience, I said, this is the greatest discovery man ever made." Strolaroff shared it with friends in the community and soon there was a psychedelic community. Strolaroff then decided to leave Ampex to follow in Hubbard's footsteps. He started a foundation to research the drug and then, according to his own account, dosed 350 people over the next six years. Al Hubbard was always around and was considered the resident expert. This foundation closed its doors in 1966 so it is unlikely that Hubbard or Strolaroff directly met the wave of young entrepreneurs that would make Silicon Valley what it is today but their effects certainly had an impact. Steve Jobs utilized LSD and told people that these experiences were some of the most important in his life. He once said that Bill Gates would have been better off if he had taken it. But Bill Gates also claimed to have taken it. And the effects of Hubbard's work continue to this day as many titans of Silicon Valley express the benefits of 'micro-dosing' various psychedelic drugs.
The use of psychedelics entered the mainstream in this era. Those that credit Timothy Leary often does so with a limited understanding as to how the movement unfolded. Of the two, Hubbard was much more important, much more influential, and most likely an influence of Leary. Hubbard never personally liked Timothy Leary but the two knew each other. Hubbard supplied Leary with LSD. And Leary in many ways followed Hubbard's approach to popularizing (and spiritualizing the drug).
What Was His Motive?
What was the motive behind this exhausting and unbelievably expensive effort? Hubbard claimed that he was motivated purely by that mystical vision he had. But many of the people around him were convinced that he was spying for the CIA. That he was taking notes on the work of countless academics and giving data back to the Intel Community.
And while these claims cannot be confirmed, we can be sure that the CIA would have been interested. Since 1953, the CIA had been conducting research using LSD in a program called 'MK-Ultra'. This program sought to use the drug as a weapon of war. They examined LSD as a non-lethal weapon (could it be dumped in an enemy water supply?). They examined the drug as a truth serum. But perhaps most notably, they experimented with LSD as a means of mind control. The CIA officer in charge of the program testified to Congress that the goal was to "investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." The CIA destroyed almost all of their files on this program so we do not know all of the details but from what we do know, the details are horrific. The CIA dosed its own employees and unwitting civilians with LSD. The CIA admitted to secretly giving LSD to an army biological weapons specialist named Frank Olson who then committed suicide (although there is quite a bit of speculation that he was murdered by the agency for threatening to go public).
In his excellent book, Chaos, Tom O'Neill details that the CIA's MK Ultra program appears to have been very interested in the LSD drug culture of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. Researcher Jolly West arrived there in 1966 to study hippies and LSD. He said he felt he needed to witness it firsthand. He had secured a government grant to take a sabbatical at Stanford but Stanford has no record of him going there. Instead, he went to Haight-Ashbury and joined as a researcher at the Haight-Ashbury Medical Center (a free clinic focused on helping local young adults in the area). There he led the rest of the staff to conduct research by observing the counter culture. West had experience studying young people and LSD. Before moving to Haight, West had supervised a study of the counter culture at the University of Oklahoma. The title of his project was called, "Mass Conversion," and the funds for it came from Sidney J. Gottlieb. Yes, that Sidney Gottlieb - the associate of Hubbard and one of the leaders of Operation Midnight Climax was also the head of the CIA's MK Ultra program.
Hubbard himself seems to have indicated he was at least aware of the top secret program. He made some enigmatic comments that indicate involvement. For example, he is reported having told an associate, "I tried to tell [the CIA] how to use [LSD], but even when they were killing people, you couldn't tell them a goddamned thing."
But almost all of MKUltra’s records were destroyed by CIA Director Richard Helms in 1973 as fear of exposure of the program was building. Fortunately, the CIA failed to destroy all of the records and 8,000 pages of records (mostly financial documents) survived telling us much of what we know of the program today. But even before that 1973 destruction, the records were likely kept at a minimum. An internal CIA memo from 1957 stated, “Precautions must be taken, to conceal these activities [i.e. the MK Ultra Program] from the American public...The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.”
So not surprisingly we don't have a lot more available information about the relationship between the CIA/US Intel, Al Hubbard, and the MK Ultra program. But we have a lot of overlapping pieces. We know Hubbard at various times worked with the CIA, we know the CIA was very interested in LSD research, and we know that Hubbard had a lot of hard-to-explain resources and contacts that enabled him to become the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.
Sources
'How to Change Your Mind' by Michael Pollan
'Chaos' by Tom O'Neill
'The Original Captain Trips' by Todd Brendan Fahey, High Times Magazine, November 1991