Questions on drink are dull, but the underlying story isn't By Jack Kilpatrick
The legal questions offered to the Supreme Court in Kronisch vs. U.S.
may be dishwater dull. The underlying story is something else. This is a case
haunted by the ghosts of a time gone by.
The time was October 1952; the place was the Cafe Select in Paris.
Stanley Milton Glickman, a promising young artist, had been drawn to the cafe
by an acquaintance who wanted him to meet some American friends. For several
hours they engaged in contentious debate on political issues. U.S. Circuit
Judge Jose A. Cabranes tells the story:
"As Glickman prepared to leave, one of the men offered Glickman a drink
as a conciliatory gesture. Rather than call over the waiter, the man walked
to the bar to get the drink, at which point Glickman observed that he had a
clubfoot. Halfway through the drink, Glickman 'began to experience a
lengthening of distance and a distortion of perception,' and he observed that
'the faces of the gentlemen flushed with excitement as they watched the
execution of the drink.'
"Glickman left the cafe and experienced distortions of color and other
hallucinations. When Glickman awoke the next morning, he was hallucinating
intensely. . . . He was taken to the American Hospital of Paris, where he was
examined and given electric shock treatment. Over the next 10 months,
Glickman remained mostly in his studio, experiencing 'stress, terror,
hallucination and difficulty eating, which reduced his body to a feeble
quality.'
"Back in the United States, in July 1953, Glickman was treated by a
doctor. He saw psychiatrists on a few occasions. His physical condition began
to improve, but his mental condition did not. Over the next 25 years, he held
various odd jobs but never painted again and never led a normal social life.
He died on Dec. 11, 1992."
The core allegation in the pending case is that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, an
agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, was the man with the clubfoot.
Gloria Kronisch, Glickman's sister and executor of his estate, charges that
on that night in 1952, Gottlieb laced her brother's drink with LSD (lysergic
acid diethylamide) as part of a surreptitious testing program. The CIA admits
the program but says it can find no record of Glickman's unwitting
participation. The records that might establish his sister's claim were
destroyed in 1973 at Gottlieb's direction.
In the 1970s, two Senate committees conducted separate hearings on the
CIA's activities in drug research. An agent testified that in 1950 the CIA
received reports that the Soviet Union was engaged in intensive efforts to
produce LSD as a tool for interrogation. In response, the CIA launched a
project that involved the surreptitious administration of LSD "to unwitting
nonvolunteer subjects at all social levels, high and low, native American and
foreign." The CIA's purpose was to develop defensive techniques for resisting
interrogation and to evaluate the offensive uses of drugs as a tool for its
own "unconventional interrogation techniques."
As chief of the chemical division of the CIA's Technical Services
Division, Gottlieb was the man in charge. He drafted an undercover agent of
the Bureau of Narcotics to assist in clandestine experiments with LSD in New
York. He himself took charge of experiments abroad. The CIA acknowledges that
Gottlieb performed interrogations on foreign nationals, but not in France and
not until 1953, a year after the alleged incident at the Cafe Select.
Even before the story broke wide open before the Senate committees,
Glickman had been trying to learn what had happened. His letters to the CIA
drew unresponsive responses. Finally in 1983 he brought suit in U.S. District
Court against Gottlieb and CIA Director Richard Helms under the Federal Tort
Claims Act. The suit bounced up and down in federal courts until May 1999,
two months after Gottlieb's death, when Glickman's case was dismissed on a
motion of summary judgment. The case went up to a panel of the Court of
Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
Cabranes affirmed in large part. He dismissed Kronisch's basic suit
against Helms and the United States as barred by the applicable statute of
limitations. He left open the estate's slim chance of recovery by preserving
a right for Glickman's executor to pursue a personal action against
Gottlieb's estate. The claim must be limited to the allegation that Gottlieb
himself administered the LSD-laced drink that night in Paris nearly 50 years
ago.
I doubt that the Supreme Court will take the case. It does not involve
intra-circuit conflicts, and it presents no novel questions of statutory or
constitutional law. Even so, skeletons in a closet make for good reading. Tom
Clancy? John LeCarre? There's a spy story waiting to be written.Universal
Press Syndicate
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