G. Richard Wendt

Professor G. Richard Wendt was chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Rochester and a part-time Navy contractor who worked under Dr. Samuel Thompson in Project CHATTER, the Navy's classified truth drug program. A small 46-year-old man with graying blond hair and a fair-sized paunch, Wendt was very much an independent spirit who did not take anyone's orders easily. Ironic for a man whose work aimed at weakening, if not eliminating, free will in others.¹

Navy Contract

Wendt had previously experimented with Dramamine and other methods to prevent motion sickness for the Navy, and the Navy hid his more sensitive research under the cover of continuing that study. At the end of 1950, the Navy gave Wendt a $300,000 contract to study barbiturates, amphetamines, alcohol, and heroin. To preserve secrecy, the money flowed from the Secretary of Defense's contingency fund rather than through Navy channels. For drugs not available from pharmaceutical companies, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics supplied 30 grams of pure heroin and 11 pounds of "Mexican grown" marijuana, delivered by special courier.¹

Self-Experimentation

Like most serious drug researchers, Wendt sampled everything first before testing on assistants and students. The drug that took up the most space in his first progress report was heroin. At weekly intervals, he gave himself heroin injections and wrote down his reactions as he moved through the "full range" of his life: driving, shopping, recreation, manual work, family relations, and sexual activity. He noted "slight euphoria, heightened aesthetic appreciation, absentminded behavior, lack of desire to operate at full speed, lack of desire for alcohol, possibly reduced sex interest, feeling of physical well-being." He concluded that heroin could have "some, but slight value for interrogation" if used on someone "worked on for a long period of time." His interest in heroin appears to have lasted to his death in 1977; the woman who cleaned out his safe found a quantity of white powder, syringes, and other drugs.¹

Student Testing

Wendt recruited student volunteers by posting a notice on a campus bulletin board, winding up with a long waiting list. He chose only men over 21 and paid everyone $1.00 an hour after a long interview. With ample government money, he hired over 20 staff assistants and built a new testing facility in the attic of the school library. He always used both placebos and drugs; students never knew what, if anything, they were taking. According to Thompson, alerting them in advance "would have spoiled the experiment."¹

Operation CASTIGATE

During the summer of 1952, Wendt announced he had found a concoction "so special" it would be "the answer" to the truth drug problem. He adamantly refused to reveal what it contained. The Navy had no source of subjects for terminal experiments, but the CIA agreed to furnish human beings in Germany under the codename Operation CASTIGATE. The ARTICHOKE team, led by Morse Allen and Paul Gaynor, met the Navy group at the CIA's Frankfurt headquarters in the former I.G. Farben building.¹

When Wendt finally confided in Thompson that his secret formula was a combination of Seconal, Dexedrine, and cannabis extract, Thompson was dumbfounded. These were all well-known drugs; even the combination already had a brand name, Dexamyl. Thompson quickly told the CIA men, who were deeply disappointed. Nevertheless, the experiments went forward on five subjects, including a suspected Russian agent, an alleged double agent code-named EXPLOSIVE, and three defectors. The results were uniformly poor.¹

Collapse

The general attitude toward Wendt became "hostile as all hell." With one subject he declared he had given too strong a dose; with the next, too weak. The subjects noticed they had swallowed something. While a subject was being interrogated in untranslated Russian, Wendt played the same pattern on the piano over and over for half an hour. During the final experiment, Wendt and his female assistant got tipsy on beer; Wendt admitted "My thoughts are elsewhere" as his assistant began to giggle. The situation worsened when Mrs. Wendt showed up in Frankfurt and the professor threatened to jump off a church tower.¹

Allen described the trip as "a waste of time and money" and felt he had been the victim of "a fraud or at least a gross misinterpretation." Navy officials canceled their support for Wendt's research and demanded a refund of unspent money. By the end of 1953, with the Korean War over, the Navy abandoned Project CHATTER altogether.¹