Robert Hyde

Bob Hyde was a Vermont-born psychiatrist and the number-two man at Boston Psychopathic Hospital (later renamed the Massachusetts Mental Health Center), a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A bold, innovative sort, Hyde became the first American to take LSD in 1949, when Max Rinkel obtained a supply from Sandoz after hearing about the drug from a visiting Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders. With Rinkel and the hospital's senior physician Dr. H. Jackson DeShon looking on, Hyde drank a glass of water containing 100 micrograms. DeShon describes Hyde's reaction as "nothing very startling," but Rinkel later told a scientific conference that Hyde became "quite paranoiac, saying that we had not given him anything. He also berated us and said the company had cheated us, given us plain water. That was not Dr. Hyde's normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man."¹

CIA-Funded Research

From 1952 on, the CIA funded the hospital's LSD program to the tune of about $40,000 a year through MKULTRA. Only Hyde and his boss, the hospital superintendent, knew officially that the CIA was the funding source, though according to DeShon, all senior staff understood where the money really came from. "We agreed not to discuss it," says DeShon. "I don't see any objection to this. We never gave it to anyone without his consent and without explaining it in detail." Hospital officials told volunteer subjects something about the nature of the experiments but nothing about their origins or purpose. None of the subjects had any idea that the CIA was paying for the probing of their minds.¹

Hyde set up a multidisciplinary program that brought together psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists, virtually unheard of at the time. As subjects, they used each other, hospital patients, and volunteers, mostly students from the Boston area. They worked through a long sequence of experiments that isolated variable after variable. The Hyde group found out that the quality of a person's reaction was determined mainly by the person's basic personality structure (set) and the environment (setting) in which he or she took the drug. More than anything else, LSD tended to intensify the subject's existing characteristics, often to extremes. A little suspicion could grow into major paranoia, particularly in the company of people perceived as threatening.¹

Covert Operational Consulting

Unbeknownst to his fellow researchers, Hyde also advised the CIA on using LSD in covert operations. A CIA officer who worked with him recalls: "The idea would be to give him the details of what had happened [with a case], and he would speculate. As a sharp M.D. in the old-school sense, he would look at things in ways that a lot of recent bright lights couldn't get. He had a good sense of make-do." The Agency paid Hyde for his time as a consultant, and TSS officials eventually set aside a special MKULTRA subproject as Hyde's private funding mechanism. Hyde received funds from yet another MKULTRA subproject created for him in 1954 so he could serve as a cutout for Agency purchases of rare chemicals. His first buy was to be $32,000 worth of corynanthine, a possible antidote to LSD, that would not be traced to the CIA.¹

Alcohol and the PAS

In 1957 Hyde moved his research team from Boston Psychopathic Hospital to Butler Health Center in Providence. There, with Agency funds, Hyde built an experimental party room in the hospital, complete with pinball machine, dartboard, and bamboo bar stools. From behind a two-way mirror, psychologists watched subjects get tipsy and made careful notes on their reactions to alcohol. Hyde was so impressed with John Gittinger's Personality Assessment System that he made the PAS a major part of his research, routinely giving Wechsler tests to subjects before plying them with liquor. Observers found that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn after several drinks, while uncompensated Externalizers became garrulous. Harold Abramson at Mount Sinai Hospital made similar observations for LSD, finding that an Externalizer was more likely to have a bad trip.²

Hyde died in 1976 at the age of 66, widely hailed as a pacesetter in mental health. His medical and intelligence colleagues speak highly of him both personally and professionally. Like most of his generation, he apparently considered helping the CIA a patriotic duty. An Agency officer states that Hyde never raised doubts about his covert work: "He wouldn't moralize. He had a lot of trust in the people he was dealing with [from the CIA]. He had pretty well reached the conclusion that if they decided to do something [operationally], they had tried whatever else there was and were willing to risk it."¹