CIA Covert Experiments

August 16th, 1951.

Madness spreads through the village of

Pont-Saint-Esprit in the Gard region of France.

Dozens of villagers have been victim

of these bouts of madness.

The press describes men terrorized

by snakes, swirling in their stomachs.

A doctor recounts the evening of the 25th of August,

where dozens of locals were seized by convulsions,

like in a night of the apocalypse.

Reports from the victims are terrifying.

- In Pont-Saint-Esprit,

they call it the Cursed Bread Drama

because all of those who fell ill

ate the bread from the Brion Bakery.

It's the first time in France that

a whole village has gone mad.

It made headlines in the press,

who wondered what could have caused

this collective hallucination.

In Pont-Saint-Esprit, the locals panic

and nobody will touch the bread.

The hearses quickly arrive in the village.

In total, seven deaths,

300 people poisoned, and around 50

admitted to psychiatric wards.

- The first dead were buried.

The investigators initially thought

it was a return of Saint Anthony's fire,

a disease that killed many thousands in the Middle Ages,

caused by a parasitic ergot fungus that attacks cereals.

The baker was accused of poisoning, then the miller.

Arrested and incarcerated, they were released

after several months.

They say that their confessions were made under duress,

and above all, the evidence proved their innocence.

It was then thought to be water poisoning.

Mercury, fertilizers, or a nearby gas factory.

But, the evidence disapproved these theories one by one.

Since then in Pont-Saint-Esprit,

more far-fetched theories have surfaced.

Nothing is clear

and for decades, the incident goes unexplained.

But, against all expectations, 60 years later,

a new theory is proposed,

not from France, but from the United States.

An American researcher in the Secret Services,

Hank Albarelli, is investigating the suspicious death

of a biochemist from the CIA, Frank Olson.

A specialist in chemical weapons,

he carried out experiments on hard drugs like LSD.

He was also in France a few months before

the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident.

Afterwards, he kept sinking into depression,

telling his wife that he'd made a terrible mistake.

Hank Albarelli then made the link

with the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident.

Could it have been the CIA and the American Armies

spraying LSD onto the bread?

- I have no doubt at all that Pont-Saint-Esprit

was a U.S. Army covert experiment.

Initially, I had doubts

and I think initially, my doubts were

motivated by wishful thinking on my part,

where I didn't want it to be an experiment.

It was hard to fathom the government doing that.

Although, at the same time, there were a number of

research tracks that were being conducted for the book

at the same time.

So, my being naive about what the government

and the U.S. Army was capable of doing was,

the threshold for that was becoming, was dwindling.

- Is it possible that the Americans

drugged an entire village in an Allied country,

causing, no doubt accidentally, the death of seven people?

Improbable, however.

To understand what happened in Pont-Saint-Esprit,

we need to look back at the end

of the Second World War.

When the levels of atrocities committed by the Nazis

was discovered in the camps,

notably horrific experiments carried out

on thousands of prisoners by chemists or doctors,

men lacerated, poisoned, burnt alive,

exposed to radiation.

The Allies hunted the war criminals from Hitler's regime.

In 1946 in Nuremberg, the doctors are put on trial.

22 men and one woman who experimented

on human beings, who they transformed into lab rats,

stand accused.

The trials sets a precedent.

Seven of the accused are sentenced to death,

11 given prison sentences, and five are acquitted.

As a result, the Americans draft the Nuremberg Code,

a model which gives strict rules

for experimenting on humans.

Notably, "The voluntary consent

"of the human subject is absolutely essential.

"The experiment must be designed to avoid

"all unnecessary suffering, physical and mental harm."

With the Nuremberg Trial barely over,

the winners remain cynical.

The American Secret Service begins Operation Paperclip.

Nearly 1,500 German scientists, including war criminals,

are expatriated to America.

They are offered a new life, in exchange

for their knowledge and cooperation.

It was a very serious game

of propaganda that we were playing.

It was almost a show trial.

We're putting the Nazis on trial,

but in fact, behind the curtain,

we're doing some very nasty things ourselves

to basically incarcerated people,

poor people, individuals who, at the time,

were called feeble-minded and locked up in institutions.

If you were in one of those institutions,

whether you were indigent or an unwed mother

or had some sort of mental incapacity,

there's a good chance that you may have been

incorporated in some sort of medical study,

possibly for the government or not,

where you would have been used and abused.

- Assisted by the German scientists,

the Americans begin pursuing

their goal of the ultimate weapon

and everything is allowed in the name of the Cold War.

On the one side, was the Army,

whose priority is to win the nuclear arms race.

At the time, to test the effects of radiation

on a large scale, they used their own soldiers,

who were docile and disciplined.

Between 1946 and 1962,

between 250,000 and 500,000 men

were exposed to radiation on Bikini Atoll,

or in the Nevada desert.

They were exposed with no protection,

unaware of the risks involved,

and afterwards, the radiated particles

were cleaned up with brooms.

These images served as propaganda

for an Army wanting to show off

its technological power.

- How 'bout radiation?

You think there's much danger from radiation?

- Well, radiation is the least of the worries,

but the men I'm thinking about.

- I think most people thought that

radiation was the greatest danger, didn't they?

Where did they learn different?

- We were, prior to our instructions here,

we received a very detailed briefing

before we even came in this close to contact with it.

- On the other side, was the CIA,

who was above all interested in psychological manipulation.

Their goal was to create an infallible truth serum,

wipe memories, turn humans into robots,

and program them to kill.

Conveniently, in 1948, a researcher

in the Sandoz Laboratories,

Albert Hoffman, discovers a molecule

that ignites the Secret Service,

lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

It's derived from the same rye fungus

long held responsible for the incident

at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

It was believed that the hallucinogenic

properties of this drug were key

to psychological manipulation.

Fearing that the Russians

would get their hands on Sandoz's samples,

the Americans bought all of their stock.

The discovery of LSD was a godsend for the Army,

who on the brink of nuclear weapons,

were looking for a weapon that

could defeat an enemy without firing any weapons.

The man who was head of this program longest

was James Ketchum, shown here in uniform.

He was a psychiatrist who was working for the military.

As a patriot, he was prepared to

push the boundaries in his research.

He tested around 30 drugs, but especially LSD

and the dangerous benzilate.

He treated 7,000 soldiers,

hundreds of whom later sued the Army

because of the side effects that they still experience

and attribute to these drugs.

However, when questioned,

James Ketchum sees things differently.

- I think they were very patriotic.

They've not been given credit.

They've been called innocent guinea pigs,

which they certainly were not.

They knew what they were doing

and we told them as much as we could about it.

We had to eliminate the names of the drugs

because some of them were artificially made

and if we were to give out the name, of course,

that would also reveal the structure.

We were afraid the Russians would get that.