15
In July 1977, Stark was in Bologna jail complaining to officers from the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism unit. He was annoyed because they hadn’t taken the information he’d given them about the Red Brigades seriously enough. They’d failed to act on his warning about the assassination of a senior judge and his prediction that the Red Brigades would kidnap a high-profile politician. If the Interior Ministry wasn’t prepared to appreciate what an asset he was, Stark was ready to bypass them and channel his intelligence to the CIA via the American diplomatic personnel who regularly dropped by to see him in jail, continuing a relationship that had begun even before his arrest in February 1975. Lodged in Stark’s safety-deposit box was correspondence between him and US counsels based in Rome and Florence. Replying to a request from one of them for his thoughts on whether the army was capable of taking control of Italy, Stark answered that ‘the only important transition that is needed is still distant’.
Stark’s enigmatic response to the embassy official almost certainly refers to a right-wing coup that was set to take place in 1974, before being exposed and swiftly shut down. The plotters behind it were a diverse mixture of members of the military, the secret services, the police, the judiciary, the civil service and a variety of fascist groups, such as the Italian Social Movement-National Right (Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI). Formed in 1946 by Mussolini’s former henchmen, the MSI was a legal fascist party that consistently polled around 5 per cent of the national vote and was strong in Naples, the south and Sicily. Running in parallel to the MSI were extra-parliamentary organisations committed to the destruction of democracy like the Black Order, the Mussolini Action Squads, the Armed Nazi Group and the Rosa dei Venti.
This unholy alliance had already attempted to overthrow the government in 1970. Though they failed, they continued to pursue their so-called ‘strategy of tension’: according to a US Senate report on terrorism in Italy, this meant ‘the indiscriminate use of explosive devices’ to ‘create panic’ and force the ‘adoption of strong measures by the government, including the intervention of the … conservative military establishment’. Beginning on 12 December 1969 with a bomb in a bank in Milan that killed sixteen and injured seventy, the ‘strategy of tension’ set off a vicious cycle of repression and reprisal: each horrific incident – like the spate of attacks on trains full of trade union representatives in October 1972 – raised the temperature of political conflict, creating the impression that the country was spiralling out of control, and by 1974 the conspirators believed conditions were ripe to try and seize power again.
As a prelude to the coup attempt, there were two bomb outrages: on 28 May, there were eight dead and a hundred wounded in a piazza in Brescia; and on 4 August, there was an explosion on the Italicus Express train that killed twelve and injured another forty-four passengers. Because of these atrocities, the authorities were on the alert for any repeat of the 1970 plot, and on 31 October 1974 they arrested General Vito Miceli, the head of Italian Military Intelligence and one of those planning to overthrow the state. Miceli was believed to be behind the Italicus train attack and the escape of two of the seven PLO operatives who perpetrated the 1973 Fiumicino airport massacre, chucking incendiary devices into a Pan Am Boeing 707 and incinerating thirty-two people.
Miceli’s name made several appearances in Stark’s personal papers, and there is evidence that Miceli sought help from Stark’s partner in the Lebanese hashish smuggling racket, the architect Count Roberto Fiorenzi. Their colleague, the car thief who stole the vehicles they hid their hash in, claimed that Stark had told him that one of the organisers of the carnage at Fiumicino airport had stayed briefly at Count Fiorenzi’s home on the island of Syracuse before slipping out of the country. Prosecutors who examined this accusation were fairly sure that it was Miceli who’d asked the Count to shelter the fugitive. The Count was also known to have been at the same hotel at the same time as the right-wing terrorists responsible for the Italicus bombing were preparing the attack.
The common denominators that brought together men as different as Miceli, the Count and Stark were the drugs, guns and money that moved between the mafia and far-right groups through covert channels. At the centre of this maze was the secretive P2 masonic lodge: it had between 1,000–2,000 members, an elite of senior figures from the armed forces, the civil service, the Chamber of Deputies, business, industry and the mob. Miceli joined the P2 lodge in October 1971, when he was appointed head of Military Intelligence. The Count was almost certainly involved with P2, as were three others whose names appeared in the documents seized from Stark: an aristocrat with links to the aborted 1970 coup; the President of the Sicilian State Mining Company who had mafia ties and fled to Lebanon after becoming embroiled in a financial scandal; and Salvo Lima, Sicily’s most powerful politician, a former mayor of Palermo and close friend of the mafia.
Any intelligence Stark had about these sorts of individuals would have been of interest to his friends in the American consulates. The US regarded Italy as a crucial battle ground in the Cold War, and its priority was preventing the country from turning Left and from 1947 the CIA was largely responsible for implementing this policy. Its station head in Italy during the 1950s wrote that the country had played host to ‘the CIA’s largest covert political action program undertaken until then, or, indeed since’. By the early 1970s, the CIA had decided that the far-right’s ‘strategy of tension’ was the most effective way of keeping the Left out of government. In February 1972, Miceli was given $800,000 to coordinate anti-communist propaganda. During a TV interview, an ex-CIA contractor – who worked as a freelancer for the agency – said that he handed over millions of dollars a month to the P2 masonic lodge to finance drug trafficking and ‘create a situation that would favour the outbreak of terrorism in Italy and in other European countries’.
But Stark’s relationship with the murky netherworld of the P2 masonic lodge was of no benefit to him in jail and there is no evidence that he discussed it with the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorist squad. Nevertheless, his decision to collaborate with them seemed to pay off because in September 1977 his sentence was reduced from fourteen years to five. After that, Stark saw no further need to meet with them, and they didn’t seem that concerned about his sudden silence. The Interior Ministry was not especially impressed by what he’d had to say and doubted its reliability. An outline of the Red Brigades’ organisational hierarchy that Stark had provided them with – featuring two distinct operational tiers commanded by a Military and Industrial Information Centre based in Rome – did not correspond to their understanding of it or how the Red Brigades actually functioned, with interlocking cells arranged horizontally within a vertical pyramid structure. According to a local prosecutor who looked into Stark’s affairs, much of what he revealed about the Red Brigades was ‘imaginative or already known and of public domain, or has never been verified’.
Freed from the obligation to play nice with the authorities, Stark befriended Enrique Paghera, an anarchist who belonged to a group called Revolutionary Action, which aimed ‘to wage the armed struggle for a free and equal society’. Revolutionary Action were international in outlook, recruited foreigners and fostered ties with anarchists in other countries. When Stark began cultivating Paghera, Revolutionary Action had not been in existence long and, despite its lofty ambitions, had so far concentrated on settling petty vendettas. Paghera remembered how Stark would spend hours discussing his vision for a global non-Marxist rebel alliance, a band of terrorists capable of waging war on the system. To show Paghera he was serious, Stark concocted a way for Paghera to form an alliance with the PFLP.
Stark gave Paghera a hand-drawn map of one of the PFLP’s bases in the Bekaa Valley – within the territory controlled by his former source of hashish – a letter of introduction and the phone number of a Libyan embassy official in Rome who could help Paghera get where he needed to go. Though several officials from the Libyan embassy visited Stark in Bologna jail, it’s not clear how or when he established this connection. The Libyan regime at the time supported the Palestinian cause and the destabilisation of Western societies, providing aid and sanctuary to a variety of terrorists. According to a report produced by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Libya had been an ‘intermediary in the purchase of weapons’ by ‘the Red Brigades … and Revolutionary Action’ from ‘the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’. The weapons, ‘which range from automatic rifles to portable missile launchers’, were shipped by boat and ‘deposited along the southern Italian coast at selected locations’.
On his release, Paghera intended to follow Stark’s instructions but was arrested in April 1978 with the map in his pocket. Paghera pointed the finger at Stark, who now faced charges of ‘armed banditry’. However, the investigation that was launched to establish the extent of Stark’s crimes was abandoned after only a few weeks when the judge in charge of the case was killed in a car accident. Instead, Stark appeared before the Court of Appeal in October, a right due to anyone who had completed three years in custody. Rather than grab the chance to talk his way out of prison, Stark put on a bizarre and apparently self-defeating performance. Speaking Arabic throughout the proceedings, Stark informed the court that he was in fact Ali Khoury, a Palestinian refugee and member of an international terrorist group based in Lebanon.
Though his adoption of a fake Palestinian identity seemed to make no sense, Stark was preparing the ground for his parole hearing the following spring, where he was hoping to convince the presiding judge that he had been working undercover in Lebanon on behalf of the American government since the early 1970s. Judge Floridia, who was in charge of Stark’s parole hearing, was inclined to believe him, having been won over by what he called ‘an impressive set of scrupulously enumerated proofs’ that showed that ‘Stark had entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organisations in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups’. Judge Floridia also noted that Stark had personal contacts with a number of American officials and received ‘periodic payments’ from ‘Fort Lee’, which was ‘known to be the site of a CIA office’.
Taking all this into account, Judge Floridia concluded that ‘from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services’ and granted him parole on the condition that he showed his face at a police station every week or so. Stark left jail on 11 April 1979 and immediately checked into a hotel before being taken ill with heart problems, aggravated by the Reiters Syndrome – a severe form of arthritis – that had troubled him for years. On 24 April, Stark discharged himself from hospital and promptly vanished. On 17 May, the Chief of Bologna police telexed the Interior Ministry to tell them that ‘a reliable confidential source has reported that Ronald Stark … was in a position to leave the country with the assistance of American personnel’. The telex went on to identify ‘Pisa and Vicenza’ as possible points of departure as they both were close to US airbases.
If Judge Floridia’s assertion that Stark had been employed by the US intelligence services since 1960 was true, it would mean that, from the beginning, Stark’s whole extraordinary career was masterminded by the CIA. Yet Stark’s life in the early years of that decade gave little indication that this was the case. Stark was in Washington, and he did have a government job, but he was arrested and convicted for making a false application for a position at another state department. Though this might have been an elaborate CIA ruse to furnish its new agent with a criminal record, it seems excessively convoluted. There remains the possibility, however, that after he was convicted for fraud and the judge decided that he needed therapy rather than jail, Stark was given LSD while receiving treatment at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which ran LSD trials on its patients that were funded by the CIA as part of its decade-long experiment with acid.
By the beginning of the 1950s, the CIA was trying to perfect ‘enhanced interrogation’ by combining drugs – including cocaine, marijuana, heroin and mescaline – with sleep deprivation, hypnosis and sensory overload at Camp King, an off-the-grid facility in West Germany. During 1953, the CIA decided to expand its mission to find what a senior agency official called ‘material’ that ‘could potentially aid in the discrediting of individuals, eliciting information, implanting suggestion and other forms of mental control’, and a programme with the code name MKUltra was launched with a starting budget of $300,000 under the auspices of the Technical Services Division. Though the majority of documentation concerning MKUltra was destroyed, as many as 149 subprojects have been identified, around fifty of them relating to LSD and four of them to magic and magicians.
The man chosen to run the programme was Sidney Gottlieb, a bio-chemist who had studied plant diseases and the metabolism of fungi. Gottlieb had been in charge of MKUltra’s predecessors – Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke – and had a special interest in LSD, which he’d taken for the first time in 1951; according to Gottlieb, he experienced ‘out-of-bodyness’, ‘a sense of well-being and euphoria’ and felt ‘as though’ he was ‘in a kind of transparent sausage skin’ that covered his ‘whole body’. Gottlieb was certain that LSD was the key to mind control; a truth drug; a brainwashing tool; a means to erase identity and rebuild a person from the bottom up.
To convince others of LSD’s unique properties, Gottlieb acid-tested his colleagues, influential agency personnel (including the head of counter-intelligence who was treated to spiked Cointreau at the secluded Deep Creek Lodge), and other members of staff, often without their knowledge, with results that were sometimes tragic – the suspicious suicide of one unwitting subject – and sometimes farcical; a search party was required to comb Washington’s streets after a hapless CIA desk jockey’s coffee break turned into a nightmare. Having drunk the dosed liquid, he realised he was tripping but couldn’t handle it and fled the building. Once outside, ‘every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes’ and he was forced to hide each time one passed by, trapped in ‘a dream that never stops’.
Beyond the confines of the CIA, Gottlieb proceeded more cautiously. He introduced LSD to selected doctors, one of whom was based at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Stark would later undergo his judge-appointed therapy. With money from MKUltra, the Institute initiated acid testing, which was still happening when Stark was there. Otherwise, Gottlieb sought controlled settings where the patients were unable or unlikely to complain. In that respect, prisons were ideal. In 1953, a doctor at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, wrote to the CIA and gained Gottlieb’s support for Subproject 73, a programme of experiments on prisoners with pre-existing drug problems. Seven African-American inmates were given very concentrated doses of LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days, during which they were kept awake with electric shocks.
At Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Emery University – who specialised in schizophrenia – ran an even more grotesque series of trials. A Boston hoodlum, who was doing time for armed robbery and hijacking trucks, was one of twenty volunteers who took acid every day for fifteen months straight. The young gangster kept a diary and wrote about ‘hours of paranoia and feeling violent’ and ‘horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls’ as ‘guys turned to skeletons in front of me’. By the end of it all, he was depressed and suicidal, while two of his fellow inmates were reduced to ‘growling, barking and frothing at the mouth’. Word of these kinds of experiments filtered through the federal prison system and the use of LSD became fairly standard procedure, though little evidence of the full extent of it has survived. Nevertheless, there is a chance that Stark encountered these practices after he took up residence in Lewisburg State Penitentiary; he was sent there after breaching the conditions imposed on him by the New York judge and spent time in the prison’s psychiatric wing.
While these subprojects served their purpose, Gottlieb was anxious to monitor the effects of LSD in real-world settings and chart how it altered the behaviour of unsuspecting civilians. In the summer of 1953, he hired George White, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who had made a name for himself busting jazz musicians, including Billie Holiday. White, who took a liking to acid and nicknamed it ‘Stormy’, rented an apartment in Greenwich Village. Posing as either a bohemian artist or a merchant seaman, White trawled the bars, picking up a motley crew of drunks, gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, and lured them back to his place to party ’til dawn. Once inside, his guests consumed booze laced with LSD and White would perch on a portable commode in front of a two-way mirror and watch events unfold.
In 1955, White moved to San Francisco to become the Federal Bureau of Narcotics District Supervisor. Always looking for new opportunities, Gottlieb acquired another LSD ‘safe house’ on Telegraph Hill to explore what a CIA psychologist referred to as ‘the combination of certain drugs with sex acts’ and the ‘various pleasure positions used by prostitutes’. Decked out with red curtains and large mirrors, White’s brothel had a fully stocked bar and an array of sex toys, leather gear and pornographic movies. The prostitutes, hand-picked by White, were paid £50–100 per client and were encouraged to get them to open up and chat after sex, pillow talk that was picked up by the four microphones disguised as wall outlets that were connected to two tape recorders situated in a listening post next door. Subproject 42 – which became known as Operation Midnight Climax – ran until 1965 when the San Francisco acid trap closed for good. Its equivalent in New York was shut down a year later. Given Stark’s predilection for sex, drugs and the seamier side of life, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that at some point he found himself drinking spiked cocktails in the Greenwich Village pad.
While these various subprojects were set in motion, Gottlieb was looking for ways to extend the reach of MKUltra and encompass a broader cross-section of society. To encourage LSD testing on campuses and in clinics, Gottlieb set up the Human Ecology Fund. Through it, money for research was funnelled either directly to applicants or through established funding bodies – such as the Geeschichter Fund for Medical Research, the National Institute for Mental Health, and the Office of Naval Research – and then dispensed to suitable candidates. For its first year, the Human Ecology Fund was administered by a doctor at Cornell University Medical Center, and this prestigious institution continued to employ LSD after its initial involvement with MKUltra. While Stark was under orders from the New York judge and receiving treatment at the New York Psychiatric Institute, he was allowed to work as a janitor at Cornell University Medical Center and often posed as a medical student so he could observe the doctors at work with their patients.
There was, however, one serious flaw in Gottlieb’s approach: what if there wasn’t enough acid to go round? The CIA had been getting its LSD from the Swiss firm Sandoz, but its stockpiles were not sufficient to satisfy Gottlieb’s requirements. During 1953, Gottlieb contacted a leading American chemical firm – the Eli Lilly Company – and asked it to try and create a synthetic version of Sandoz’s acid and its crucial organic element, ergotamine tartrate. By the end of 1954, the Eli Lilly Company had completed its task and, with an investment of $400,000 from Gottlieb, began mass production. With its source of supply secured, the Human Ecology Fund was able to be as generous as its budget allowed. There was no shortage of takers. Acid subprojects of one sort or another popped up across the country at forty-four colleges and universities, fifteen research organisations and twelve hospitals.
As many of the participants in these programmes were civilian volunteers – mostly students – they stopped short of the kind of sadistic abuse that was inflicted on prisoners. However, there were exceptions, especially when it came to vulnerable people who could be convinced to sign away their rights. Across the border, at the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, Dr Ewan Cameron persuaded as many as 300 schizophrenics to place their sanity in his hands. Cameron had written to the Human Ecology Fund and in early 1957 Gottlieb awarded him a $69,000 grant to pursue Subproject 68. Cameron had developed a technique he called ‘psychic driving’, designed to totally dismantle a patient’s sense of self, strip them to the core and render them as malleable as putty. With their ears, eyes and skin covered, his victims were locked in a ‘sleep room’ for anywhere between a few days and a few months. Injected with LSD, they were blasted with heat and intense red light, and were forced to listen to tapes of Cameron’s voice intoning the same phrases and monologues over and over again for hours on end. The results weren’t pretty: Cameron observed that one of his patients – a 19-year-old honours student – had been turned into ‘a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor’.
By 1960, Gottlieb and those around him were having second thoughts about LSD. The intention had been to use it to control minds, but it was more and more obvious that they couldn’t control what it did to people. The results were entirely unpredictable; there was no way of knowing how any one individual might react to it; and the insights they might have while hallucinating rarely had any obvious application as far as the CIA were concerned. In 1963, MKUltra was officially brought to an end and its subprojects slowly wound down over the next couple of years. Given that Stark served the various stages of his sentence – both in clinics and prison – during this period, it’s entirely possible that he caught the tail-end of the programme.
Yet Stark may well have been exposed to LSD some years earlier. According to him, he was given psychoactive drugs by a New York psychiatrist in the mid-1950s, when Stark was in his late teens, recovering from the recent death of his father and coming to terms with the realisation that he was bisexual. At that moment, acid and the other psychedelics were not as commonly used by psychiatrists as they were later in the decade. In New York, those that did employ them were encouraged to do so by an influential doctor who had guided Gottlieb through his first acid trip, and gave MKUltra LSD to his colleagues and to members of his Long Island social circle. Stark never named the psychiatrist who offered him the drugs, or described the effect the treatment had on him or whether it was repeated more than once. Even so, considering what he went on to achieve, it would be strangely appropriate if it was the CIA that had inadvertently started Stark’s long love affair with LSD.