Stanley Lovell

Stanley Lovell was a Cornell graduate, self-described "saucepan chemist," and Boston industrialist whom General William Donovan appointed to head OSS Research and Development and to serve as the secret agency's liaison with the government scientific community. A confident, energetic man with a particular knack for coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others, Lovell was an outspoken patriot who wrote in his diary shortly after Pearl Harbor: "As James Hilton said, 'Once at war, to reason is treason.' My job is clear, to do all that is in me to help America."¹

Donovan's Mandate

General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he expected of Lovell: "I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese, by our own people, but especially by the underground resistance programs in all the occupied countries. You'll have to invent them all, Lovell, because you're going to be my man." Lovell had never met anyone with Donovan's personal magnetism.¹

Scientific Recruitment and Weapons Development

Lovell quickly turned to leading lights in the academic and private sectors. A special group called Division 19 within James Conant's National Defense Research Committee was set up to produce "miscellaneous weapons" for the OSS and British intelligence. Lovell's strategy, he later wrote, was "to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell.'"¹

Working with Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who would later become science adviser to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, Lovell oversaw the creation of "Aunt Jemima," an explosive disguised as pancake mix that looked and tasted like pancake mix. Kistiakowsky personally took it to a high-level meeting at the War Department and ate cookies baked from it in front of officials to demonstrate the invention. All one had to do was attach a powerful detonator and it exploded with the force of dynamite. Disguised as pancake mix, it was credited with blowing up at least one major bridge in China.¹

Harassment Substances

Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find something that would offend Japanese cultural sensibilities. His staff anthropologists reported back that nothing was so shameful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel movements. Lovell had the chemists work up a skatole compound duplicating the odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible tubes, flown to China, and distributed to children in enemy-occupied cities. When a Japanese officer appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind him and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the product "Who? Me?" and credited it with costing the Japanese "face." Unlike most weapons, it was not designed to kill or maim but to lower the morale of individual Japanese soldiers, a "harassment substance" inspired by behavioral scientists who tried to make a science of human behavior.¹

Plots Against Hitler

Lovell pursued multiple schemes to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He seized upon one of Walter Langer's ideas, that Hitler might have feminine tendencies, and got permission to try to push the Führer over the gender line: "The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano." Lovell used the OSS agent network to try to slip female sex hormones into Hitler's food, but nothing apparently came of it. Nor was there any payoff to other schemes to blind Hitler permanently with mustard gas or to use a drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main problem in all these operations, which were all tried, was getting Hitler to take the medicine. Failure of the delivery schemes also kept Hitler alive, as the OSS was simultaneously trying to poison him. Lovell later wrote that he "supplied now and then a carbamate or other quietus medication, all to be injected into der Führer's carrots, beets, or whatever."¹

Hypnosis Proposal

Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler would be to hypnotically control a German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the Nazi regime and then give the subject a hypnotic suggestion to assassinate the Führer. The candidate would be let loose in Germany where he would take the desired action, "being under a compulsion that might not be denied." Lovell sought advice on whether this scheme would work from New York psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie and from the famed Menninger brothers, Karl and William. The Menningers reported that the weight of the evidence showed hypnotism incapable of making people do anything they would not otherwise do. Equally negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a German prisoner had a logical reason to kill Hitler, he would not need hypnotism to motivate him.¹

The Gottlieb Continuity

Sidney Gottlieb would later preside over the CIA's postwar Mind Control programs on a far greater scale than Lovell's wartime work, tracking down every conceivable gimmick that might give one person leverage over another's mind, from advanced research in amnesia by Electroshock to dragnet searches through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves and barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler moustacheless, Gottlieb's office would devise a scheme to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out. Like Lovell, Gottlieb would personally provide operators with deadly poisons to assassinate foreign leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and he would be equally at ease discussing possible applications of new research in neurology.¹