[Updates below: Maybe ergot, maybe not. The CIA's obsession with acid.]
After ‘Duke of Edinburgh asks female sea cadet if she works at a strip club’, the most popular story on the Telegraph website at the moment accuses the CIA of having secretly fed LSD to the villagers of Pont-Saint-Esprit in France in 1951.
It’s a serious accusation. Not only would this be chemical warfare against an ally (or quasi-ally at least), the Telegraph tells us that five people died and ‘dozens were interned in asylums’ after the ‘quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations.’
The timing of the story is very odd. It is based on an obscure book by HP Albarelli, which was published in 2008 and is now out of print in the UK.
[Albarelli has been in touch to say that the book is newly published, despite showing as 2008 on Amazon UK. According to his publisher, TrineDay, the book was out November 2009.]
Albarelli’s theories are dismissed out of hand by Steven Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History at Cornell University and a noted bread expert (yes, really).
Kaplan has also written a book about Pont-Saint-Esprit, in French, entitled Le Pain Maudit. He was not interviewed by the Telegraph, however, but he made the following comment to France 24:
I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople…
It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread. As for pulverising it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.
Now maybe Albarelli is right and Kaplan is wrong, but you’d think the Telegraph would make some effort to talk to Kaplan before publishing a story that has gone around the Internet like wildfire. It’s not as if Henry Samuel, the Telegraph France correspondent, wasn’t aware of Kaplan’s work.
After all, parts of his article bear an extremely suspicious resemblance to a review of Kaplan’s book, published by the New York Times in 2008.
Here’s the NYT:
What became a national disaster began on Aug. 16, 1951, when the inhabitants… were suddenly stricken by frightful hallucinations of being consumed by fire or giant plants or horrid beasts.
A worker tried to drown himself because his belly was being eaten by snakes… A man saw his heart escaping through his feet and beseeched a doctor to put it back in place. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
And here’s the Telegraph:
On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.
One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes… Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
The details that are not from the Times (“An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs.”) come from this French blog post from Monday this week .
It presumably prompted the paper suddenly to jump on Albarelli’s conspiracy theory (and yes – it’s a fairly close translation):
Un gamin de 11 ans, Charles Granjhon, tente d’étrangler sa mère… Un homme saute du deuxième étage de l’hôpital en hurlant : “Je suis un avion.” Les jambes fracturées, il se relève et court cinquante mètres sur le boulevard avant qu’on puisse le rattraper.
Questions for the Telegraph’s editor:
1. Did Samuel read Albarelli’s book or speak to him? [Albarelli says he wasn't called by the Telegraph.]
2. Did he speak to Kaplan or any other sources?
3. Does he accept that the Telegraph plagiarized the Times?
4. And shouldn’t he set the bar a little higher before publishing stories of this type?
As an added bonus, enjoy LSD a Go G0, a short film from 2004 that Albarelli says he contributed to.
Update: Edited for clarity.
Update II: The Atlantic rounds up some more sceptical reaction. James Redford points to a contemporaneous account from the British Medical Journal which blames what is still thought to be the most likely cause – ergot poisoning.
Symptoms lasted for a fortnight or more in some people, despite what was believed to have been just a single day when infected bread was ingested. The worst symptoms appeared after six days and included ’severe delerium’ in 25 cases:
Towards evening visual hallucinations appeared, recalling those of alcoholism. The particular themes were visions of animals and of flames… The delirium seemed to be systematized, with animal hallucinations and self-accusation, and it was sometimes mystical or macabre. In some cases terrifying visions were followed by fugues, and two patients even threw themselves out of the window.
After fifteen days, four people had died – three were elderly, but one was only twenty-five years of age.
According to this review, however, Kaplan report that ergot was finally dismissed as a cause, but that other potential contaminants in the flour (mercury or bleach, for instance) were suspected. The book sounds like a fascinating study of France in the long, hard years after the war:
Rationing had ended just two years earlier, but bread was still under tight controls to keep the prices low. The cost of living was very high and the quality of a great many foodstuffs, principally that of bread, remained nearly as bad as during the Occupation… The dirigiste nature of [the distribution] system meant that the bakers were assigned to specific millers, something they detested…
As the daily baguette tended to be lousy long after the Liberation, disgusting flour and grey or bad-smelling bread did not necessarily set off the alarms that it would have in better times.
In the same year as the collective poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, there were quite a few instances of food-borne illness around the country: 110 people in Eure-et-Loir got sick from eating horsemeat; three people died from tainted pâté du foie in the Ruhr; contaminated powdered milk sickened many children in Metz.
Update III: In Wired, David Hambling writes about the CIA’s ‘obsession with LSD’, citing an account by Dr David Ketchum, who led the military’s experiments with the drug.
In 1953, the Agency attempted to purchase ten kilograms of LSD, supposedly for testing purposes. This was enough for over a hundred million doses. They were informed that the total amount manufactured was only ten grams.
However, on a Monday morning, a rather curious incident occurred. Ketchum found that his office had acquired a new piece of furniture, a steel barrel like an oil drum in one corner of the room. At first he ignored it, but eventually curiosity got the better of him, and one evening when he was along Ketchum undid the fastenings. The barrel was packed with jars:
Neatly labeled, tightly sealed glass canisters, looking like cookie jars, filled the entire drum. I cautiously took one out and examined it. According to the label, it contained approximately three pounds of pure EA 1729 (LSD).
Ketchum estimated that the barrel contained at thirty to forty pounds of the drug, a few hundred million doses and with a street value of something like a billion dollars. The sort of amount the CIA had been after. Ketchum was not given any explanation for the giant stash, and on the Friday morning it had disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.
Allegedly, the CIA ran brothels (!) in New York and San Francisco to experiment on unwitting punters. This from a 1977 Time exposé of Operation Midnight Climax (really), which Time sources to Senate testimony:
At night, women lured men to the hideaways and fed them LSD or marijuana, while other men watched the action through two-way mirrors and tape-recorded the sounds.
Scenes from seamy bordellos? Havens for desperate voyeurs? No, these were taxpayer-financed operations of the CIA, which was experimenting with drugs during the 1950s and ’60s in a project with the sophomoric code name Midnight Climax. The women, apparently moonlighting prostitutes, were paid $100 for each assignment by the CIA. The operation, conducted by CIA alchemists from 1954 until 1963, was part of a quarter-century hunt for a psychogenic philosophers’ stone. The purpose was to discover the secret of brainwashing, to protect U.S. agents and gain control over enemy spies.
March 12, 2010 at 3:13 pm | More on Influence and networks, UK | Comment
It’s no wonder the markets are raising questions about UK public finances – neither of the main parties has anything approaching a clear message on fiscal tightening.
From Labour, you get blithe assurances on taxes. Liam Byrne didn’t quite ask us to read his lips yesterday when promising no new tax increases, but he might as well have done. Carl Emmerson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies was unimpressed:
I cannot see how the Government can promise to not affect front line services when you look at the scale of the cuts they have got to plan for.
Liam Byrne is talking just about the first four years and after that there will undoubtedly have to be more pain and that is likely to be tax rises or even greater public sector cuts.
But the Tories are not in the clear either. I was baffled by William Hague’s recent speech at the Conservative Party Spring Forum. Half way through his speech, he lays out the Tory pitch to the undecided voter:
And to those who say they do not know what the Conservatives will do, let us tell them. We will cut the spending that cannot go on and the borrowing that leads to ruin.
So what follows? Here are all the commitments Hague makes that will cost money:
(i) Cutting taxes on business to give the UK the ‘most competitive’ tax environment in the G20
(ii) reversal of Labour’s planned national insurance increase
(iii) abolition or reduction of inheritance tax
(iv) two year freeze on Council tax (despite promises of the ‘biggest ever’ transfer of power to Councils)
(v) stamp duty abolished for first time buyers (despite unsustainable prices in the housing market)
(vi) more university places and apprenticeships
(vii) nursing care in their homes for the elderly.
And here are all the commitments is the only commitment that will clearly save money (though not much):
(i) Scrap ‘a large slice’ of expensive quangos.
And voters are supposed to be convinced this adds up to “vision of a Britain restored.”
Both parties need to convince the electorate they can get Britain back on its feet (the slogan I’d advise either to run their campaign under). But as Martin Wolf argues in today’s FT, at the moment it’s shaping up to be an election that both sides deserve to lose.
March 12, 2010 at 10:35 am | More on UK | Comment
Just to press on with the Daily Mail vendetta for a tad longer, the superb Will Tooke has caught the ‘newspaper’ in another piece of fakery. This time, taking liberties with James McKie, the war hero who threw a grenade back at the Taliban.
I saw the grenade come over hit Captain Kerr on the back of his body armour and land between me and him, about a foot away from me, right next to him.
Instinctively, Captain Kerr dived, tried to get away from the grenade, but there wasn’t a lot of room. He ended up on top of me, away from the grenade.
I dived forward, picked up the grenade and threw it off the roof. It detonated half way down in the alley, two feet away from us, with most of the frag going into the wall…
When I saw the grenade there, I thought, I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.
(Do watch the whole interview with McKie – it’s quite extraordinary.)
A story that’s right up the Mail’s Straße but - as Tooke points out – there was a catch:
The problem was, the [only] picture was taken when all the action was over, and it seems [it] just wasn’t dramatic enough for the Daily Mail to match the story of intense bravery. If only there was a picture of Rifleman McKie doing the sort of high octane daring do you see in war movies, you know, like that film The Hurt Locker that just won a load of Oscars. Gosh, that would be perfect.
So what did the Mail do? They took this photo of McKie:
…purloined this one from the Hurt Locker (which pops up in Google image search)…
…and photoshopped the two together to make this doozy…
Journalism – it’s easy. If you’re shameless.
March 11, 2010 at 7:53 pm | More on Influence and networks, UK | Comment
[Important updates below - Facebook says the Daily Mail knew its story was untrue, but printed it anyway. Legal action is promised. The BBC has now picked up on Global Dashboard's story. Journalism.co.uk has a piece as well. Guardian has followed our lead too. Mashable. Belle de Jour chips in.]
In the early hours of this morning, the Daily Mail published an astonishing attack on Facebook under the title “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.”
Here’s the opener:
Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.
I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.
So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.
The article is written by Mark Williams-Thomas. Here’s his biog:
Mark is a former police detective who has far-reaching experience of working at the centre of high profile investigations. During Mark’s police service, he specialised in child protection and major crime and he is renowned throughout the UK’s police forces as well as the national media for his expertise in these areas.
It’s an odd story. Facebook isn’t really a chat site – and it’s certainly not Chatroulette, where there are plenty of men ready and waiting to jack off in front of you (sfw). Presumably Williams-Thomas set his privacy settings to zero and befriended loads of strangers. But how did those strangers find him (her) so quickly?
Fast forward twelve hours and the online version of Williams-Thomas’s article has undergone some editing. New title: I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you. And new text, with Facebook replaced with an unnamed ’social networking site’.
Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.
The url, though, has not been changed: I-posed-girl-14-Facebook-What-followed-sicken-you.html [This url was subsequently set to redirect to a new one - 12/03/2010]
So what gives? If it was Facebook that Williams-Thomas was using, then why turn so coy? And if it wasn’t, how on earth could the Mail have pretended it was?
Update: Via Twitter, I asked Williams-Thomas for clarification. Here’s his reply:
So why was Facebook named in the first place?
Update 2: Apparently the story – with Facebook named – was a front page splash in the print edition, and then a double page spread inside.
Update 3: Just had a call from Facebook – they’re incandescent and say that:
- Williams-Thomas claims that he was 100% clear that his social network experiment had not involved Facebook.
- When the Mail sent him a first draft of the story with Facebook named, he asked for them to make a correction.
- Even so, they went ahead and published a story their own expert had warned them was untrue.
When Facebook protested, the Mail corrected the online story, but not the printed version, which had already hit the news stands. Their online retraction failed to include any apology or explanation of their mistake.
Facebook says that legal action against the Mail is pending. What an extraordinary piece of negligence and/or malice from the paper!
Update 4: The Mail appended a fairly mealy mouthed correction last night:
In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight.
Will they be happy to pay damages to Facebook too? Another version here, which begins: “In an article by a criminologist yesterday, we wrongly stated…” – half-maintaining the fiction that Williams-Thomas actually wrote the piece…
Update 5: From last year, another great Daily Mail headline: “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.”
Update 6: Instead of retreating to lick her wounds, Mail journo, Laura Topham has doubled down with another article on Internet safety – again using the Facebook killer as a hook and with the same oddly prurient image from yesterday’s story.
Before her Facebook howler, Topham’s main claim to fame was dating 100 men and writing about it, outing Belle de Jour [or not - see Belle's comment], and running up huge amounts of debt because the government inveigled her into taking out a student loan.
Her big break in journalism came in 2005 when she shafted David Blunkett.
Update 7: PC Pro quotes Facebook’s spokeswoman as challenging the Daily Mail to name the social networking platform that is really to blame. I was given exactly the same message. Facebook think it knows which service Williams-Thomas used and is desperate for one of its competitors to get shafted.
A representative of Williams-Thomas justifies anonymity thus: “The reason he does not want to [name the service] is because he does not want there to be another opening for paedophiles to head straight for.” Hmm. Maybe.
March 10, 2010 at 4:08 pm | More on Influence and networks, Key Posts | 27 Comments
In today’s FT, William Hague underlines (again) that a new Conservative government will see the European Union as a platform for achieving progress on global issues.
With David Miliband’s enthusiasm for a G3, we’re left with robust cross-party consensus on Europe’s role as a foreign policy actor (whether it can fulfil this role is another matter).
I’m reminded of how Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham reacted when asked, shortly after the new Tory government took office, to write a report on how the government could build public support for the European Community.
According to Robert Harris, Ingam wrote that:
A community of 250 million could achieve more than a ‘debilitated nation of 55 million, however much the latter may trade on past imperial glory‘.
Government publicity should stress this, ‘with all the instruments of the orchestra, not only central Government, reading the same score, playing the same tune and coming in on cue.’
True in 1980. Even more so thirty years’ later.
(Photo from Iain Dale.)
March 10, 2010 at 11:33 am | More on Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK | Comment
More disgraceful drivel from Con Coughlin, who is still employed by the Telegraph as its “executive foreign editor” (yep, there’s a story behind that job title).
Coughlin – last noted on Global Dashboard cheerleading for torture – hopes that the Queen gave South African president, Jacob Zuma, “a lesson in etiquette.”
About the only good thing that can be said about South African President Jacob Zuma’s State visit to Britain is that he might learn some lessons about how to conduct himself in public.
Just why the Labour government thought it a good idea to extend an invitation to the legendary philanderer, who loves nothing more than to prance around a stage in tribal dress waving a machine-gun, is something of a mystery…
Having been exposed to the brilliant pageantry that Britain puts on for visiting heads of state, and the quiet dignity with which the Queen conducts herself on such occasions, one sincerely hopes that the experience will give Mr Zuma pause for thought. Mr Zuma is, after all, the head of state of a country with a rich and proud history, something that should be reflected in the dignity of his office.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Coughlin goes on to accuse Zuma of a lack of gratitude to the UK. And what should be thank us for? Nothing more than the end of white majority rule in South Africa.
Yes – according to Coughlin - ”It was Britain’s opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regime that eventually allowed his ANC freedom movement to seize power.”
Update: A good time to recall Coughlin’s track record helping MI6 plant stories in the press, and his work fuelling the rumour that Saddam was behind 9/11.
March 4, 2010 at 6:36 pm | More on Africa, UK | 1 Comment
Yesterday, I was at the wonderful Gresham College for a seminar on housing – I posted some highlights earlier. But here’s a lightly edited version of my talk.
It explores the risks posed by the UK’s partially deflated housing bubble and sets out some radical options for reform (elucidated in more detail in the Long Finance paper from the talk is drawn).
And for those of you don’t know Gresham, I recommend Michael Mainelli’s brief history…
Sir Thomas Gresham (1519 to 1579) traded cloth and linens between England and the Low Countries at a time when Cambridge and Oxford had a duopolistic hold on higher education in England. A Cambridge man himself (Caius College), if Gresham’s skippers had visited an Oxbridge College they would, at best, have had the door of a college opened to them and then been laughed at in Latin for their ignorance.
If you’re going to backstab some one properly, do it from the front. Sir Thomas died of apoplexy in 1579 bequeathing one moiety of the Royal Exchange to the Corporation of London and the other moiety to the Mercers’ Company, charging them with the nomination of seven Professors to lecture in Astronomy, Divinity, Geometry, Law, Music, Physic and Rhetoric. He required the lectures to be in Latin and, horror horribilis, English. In effect, Sir Thomas, who pursued monopolies himself, used his will of 1575 anti-monopolistically to crack the Oxbridge oligopoly by bribing seven professors to give lectures to the public, in English.
Gresham College is about ‘new learning’. Sir Thomas felt strongly that the ‘new learning’ should be available to those who worked – merchants, tradesmen and ships’ navigators – rather than solely gentlemen scholars. In the 17th century, the Royal Society was founded to explore “natural philosophy”, new learning through experimentation. So, it is no surprise that the Royal Society was founded and housed at Gresham College for half a century (1660 to 1710) and numbered among its associates Gresham Professors Petty, Boyle and Evelyn.
March 3, 2010 at 5:56 pm | More on Economics and development, UK | Comment
Just how did this ridiculous competition between right and left to pose as a victim become so tediously commonplace?
Take this pathetic drivel from Iain Martin, the Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, headlined Will the Left Be Generous on Passing of Thatcher?
Rightly it’s heartfelt tributes all round to Michael Foot. He was, as Michael Gove remarked on the Daily Politics, a great British patriot…
But it does make one wonder whether the left will be generous with its tributes to Margaret Thatcher when, as it must eventually, that sad day comes? You only need to ask the question to know the answer.
For a start – ‘passing’ is what you do with wind. People die. And who cares if some people are nasty about Maggie when she dies? She was the Iron Lady, not some porcelain idol. Her record – for good or ill – will speak for itself.
March 3, 2010 at 4:13 pm | More on UK | Comment
I gave a talk at Gresham College yesterday, drawing on my paper for the Long Finance Foundation on risk and resilience in the UK housing market.
Also on the panel was Channel 4’s Economics correspondent, Faisal Islam. He had a couple of great quotes. This from Gordon Brown’s first budget speech in 1997 (click through to admire the retro styling of the last 1990s Treasury website):
For most people the acquisition of a house is the biggest single investment they will make. Homeowners rightly expect their investment to be protected by sensible policies pursued by Government.
I am determined that as a country we never return to the instability, speculation, and negative equity that characterised the housing market in the 1980s and 1990s. Volatility is damaging both to the housing market and to the economy as a whole.
So stability will be central to our policy to help homeowners. And we must be prepared to take the action necessary to secure it. I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of the recovery.
When Brown spoke, the average house cost £75k - about £10k above the early 1990s nadir. A long long boom was just beginning. Prices would peak in February 2008 at an average of… £232k!!!
In other words, Brown promised not to let house prices spiral out of control and then allowed them to treble, during a period when household disposable income increased by only 30% or so.
The second quote is a more recent one – from Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England. Last month, Faisal asked King whether the current re-inflation of the housing bubble was sustainable. Prices are currently only around 7% below their peak and seem overvalued by every measure. Only cheap money – pumped into the markets by the government – and very low interest rates is keeping the market afloat.
Isn’t the market going to deflate very rapidly once government funding is withdrawn? King’s response:
No one can forecast asset prices, so I don’t think you can predict that asset prices will fall back. I don’t see why that should in and of itself lead to a change in asset prices, because we all know this problem is there and that’s already reflected in to current asset prices.
As Faisal points out, this shows confidence in the efficient market hypothesis that is breathtaking given a global financial crisis that was driven by an asset price bubble. In King’s fantasy world, buyers know that there will be much less credit available in the future – so this concern is already included in current market prices.
King’s insouciance – and Brown’s negligence – both beggar belief.
March 3, 2010 at 10:50 am | More on Economics and development, UK | Comment
Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy today published a working paper today that drops the following bombshell (here’s a free version):
Our main conclusion is that Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought. The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period. In particular, the speed at which Africa has reduced poverty since 1995 puts it on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty relative to 1990 by 2015 on time or, at worst, a couple of years late. If Congo-Zaire converges to Africa once it is stabilized, the MDG will be achieved by 2012, three years before the target date. These results are qualitatively robust to changes in our methodology, including using different data sources and assumptions for what happens to inequality when inequality data is not available.
Not much reaction yet – but I’m intrigued to see what other economists are going to make of their work…
Update: Xavier Sala-i-Martin has a wonderfully crazy Columbia University website – he likes FC Barcelona, Salvador Dali and Beavis and Butthead.
Update II: These Economist articles from 2004 (one, two) offer useful background. The crux of the matter seems to be that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy use GDP to measure poverty (working out distribution of income from household surveys) – the World Bank’s figures are derived directly from the surveys themselves.
March 1, 2010 at 7:54 pm | More on Africa | 1 Comment
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