Morse Allen

Morse Allen was a Central Intelligence Agency officer and a deception and polygraph expert who played a significant role in the agency's early programs investigating altered states of consciousness and truth serums. In 1952, he was promoted to serve as the director of Project Artichoke, a classified program that was a precursor to Project MKUltra¹.

Allen's primary objective was to search the globe for potent drugs that the Central Intelligence Agency could exploit for intelligence purposes. This quest was influenced by the Nazis' Ahnenerbe Institute's research, which had pushed human physiology to extremes in concentration camps to measure and monitor results¹.

In October 1952, Allen learned about the Mexican field mushroom, teonanáctl (God's flesh), which, according to ancient Aztec legend, endowed certain "sensitive" or psychic individuals with supernatural abilities. He believed this mushroom could act as a truth serum or provide divinatory powers¹. In early 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency dispatched a scientist to Mexico to gather samples, but the initial attempt was unsuccessful due to the mushroom's elusive nature¹.

Allen then traveled to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania, the "mushroom capital of America," and secured a contract with a top mushroom grower, planning to mass-produce the hallucinogenic mushroom once located¹. The quest for God's flesh was later renamed MKULTRA Subproject 58¹.

In late summer 1954, Allen discovered that Captain Henry Karel "Andrija" Puharich of the U.S. Army Chemical Center, a Project MKUltra partner, was also searching for the hallucinogenic mushroom. Despite Puharich's extensive knowledge of mystical and supernatural research, the Central Intelligence Agency ultimately bypassed him, approaching R. Gordon Wasson directly through their chemist, James Moore, who posed as a professor¹. Allen's efforts to keep the drug a secret psychic weapon under military intelligence control were ultimately undermined when Wasson published a twelve-page account of his experience in Life magazine, highlighting the mushroom's alleged ability to enhance ESP¹.

Earlier Career

Allen, a 40-year-old CIA security operator, had spent most of his earlier career rooting out the domestic communist threat, joining the Civil Service Commission in the late 1930s and setting up its first security files on communists. During World War II he served with Naval Intelligence, pursuing leftists in New York and then landing with the Marines on Okinawa; afterward he joined the State Department, left in the late 1940s feeling it was whitewashing communist cases, and moved to the CIA's Office of Security, where he was made head of the BLUEBIRD program in late 1950.²

Terminal Experiments

Allen held that experimenting on informed volunteers proved nothing, since they knew they were playing a make-believe game; only subjects "for whom much is at stake (perhaps life and death)" would give operationally reliable results. He and his coworkers called such tests "terminal experiments," carried through to completion regardless of the subject's welfare and usually without the subject ever knowing he had been experimented on at all.²

Field Operations

Three months after BLUEBIRD's approval, Allen led the first team to Japan, arriving in Tokyo in July 1950, a month into the Korean War, to test sodium amytal and benzedrine on four suspected double agents and attempt to induce amnesia; around October 1950 the team used "advanced" techniques on 25 subjects described as North Korean prisoners of war. In 1952 he led the ARTICHOKE team to Frankfurt, Germany for Operation CASTIGATE, where G. Richard Wendt's truth-drug experiments collapsed; Allen called the trip "a waste of time and money."³

Hypnosis Experiments

Intrigued by Hypnosis, Allen took a four-day 1951 course from a stage hypnotist and then ran CIA secretaries through exercises in which they stole SECRET files, started fires, and reported to a strange man's bedroom. On February 19, 1954 he simulated the creation of a programmed assassin: he hypnotized a secretary, told her that her rage at being unable to wake a sleeping colleague would be so great "that she would not hesitate to 'kill,'" and left an unloaded pistol nearby; she picked it up, "shot" the sleeping woman, and afterward had apparent amnesia. He remained unconvinced the result would hold in operational settings, and also pursued an "electro-sleep" machine and explored Electroshock for inducing amnesia.⁴