Louis Jolyon West was a fairly well-known psychiatrist in the mid to late twentieth century. He was a loquacious sort who had a knack for wheedling himself into positions of influence. He was referred to as Jolly, befitting his later benign, grandfatherly appearance. But those who knew him best said he cultivated that appearance to deceive and manipulate; subjects West himself purported to be the foremost expert in. They referred to him as “a devious man”, “egotistical”, “narcissist”, “a womanizer” who was full of “phoniness and dishonesty”; someone who “could charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.” That checks West off as positive on the most critical items of the sociopath checklists of preeminent psychopath expert Dr. Robert Hare, see e.g. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us; Hare, Pocket Books 1995. Sociopathy was earlier, and perhaps more accurately, described by L. Ron Hubbard in the same book that exposed West and his colleagues’ MK Ultra hijinks (see Science of Survival and the description of the individual at covert hostility on the book’s emotional tone scale). Had it not been for West’s demonstrable lack of conscience, perhaps he would not have been chosen to serve as MK Ultra’s most long-lived participant.
West was the third MK Ultra shock doc to be granted establishment authority status concerning L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology after Winfred Overholser and Ewen Cameron, see Deep State and Scientology and The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard. Like his predecessors West was an American Psychiatric Association big wig, serving as Trustee. In keeping with the deep state’s increasing frustration with the rise of Hubbard and Scientology popularity despite its attempts to destroy them during the 50’s and 60’s, West’s tactics became more aggressive and persisted from the seventies all the way through the nineties. From his position of Trustee, he kept the APA at constant odds with Scientology.
As Trustee of the American Family Foundation (AFF), West went further. AFF presented itself as society’s protector against ‘destructive cults.’ In practice though, West and AFF surveilled and smeared virtually any group that did not toe the white line of establishment mental health orthodoxy. West’s personal papers demonstrate he investigated the following groups during his AFF stint and filed them under “Cults”: B’nai B’rith, Opus Dei, Abbey of Regina Laudis, Catholicism, Church of Christ, Church of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name but a few. But, West – ever loyal to his CIA MK Ultra predecessors (The Deep State and Scientology) – devoted most of his effort to attempting to discredit Scientology. AFF itself was primarily funded by serial CIA front-group financier Scaife Family Foundation; making West a CIA funding recipient for at least four and perhaps five decades). As we will explore in later articles, AFF and West were active participants in a lawfare campaign against Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard that made the deep state/DNC coordinated lawfare assault on Trump of 2020-2024 look like child’s play.
Since West’s purported Scientology expertise to this day is central to all of corporate media, all of academia, most of the deep state, all search engines and AI platforms, his history deserves a deep dive. West’s (and his predecessors’) judgment forms the foundation of public thought on the subject of Scientology. What sort of mind (along with the likes of Overholser and Cameron) dreamt up the fundamental establishment definition of Scientology? And what were its motivations?
Beyond Scientology, our exploration serves as an education on how the establishment, and its deep state and media enforcement arms, continue business as usual at the same old stand: elevating its favor-producing chosen and attempting to destroy its designated nemeses. Oftentimes they do so on faulty or downright fraudulent bases.
MK ULTRA – CIA Mind Control
The head of CIA chemical, biological, and mind warfare during the 1950s and 1960s was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. His nicknames over the years are telling of his character and conduct: “The Black Sorcerer”, “Dr. No”, and “Poisoner in Chief.” He worked directly for CIA chiefs Dulles and Helms for over twenty years. The trio saw to the not-so-hostile, yet complete takeover of and merger with Dr. Mengele’s Nazi concentration camp experimentation network. In Gottlieb’s now-CIA labs of the 50s and 60s every atrocity imaginable occurred. From concocting bioweapons and spraying them on unwitting U.S. citizens, producing untraceable poisons, to programming assassins to commit murder against their own wills. It is telling that Gottlieb’s lab began as the Technical Service Section (“science”) but when in full swing became part of the Clandestine Operations division (“covert warfare”).
It is documented fact that Gottlieb and company plotted, and sometimes executed or attempted, assassinations of foreign heads of state (most infamously upon Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba – the former unsuccessful, the latter successful), through a variety of poisons and explosives. It is also documented that Gottlieb himself and many top doctors he employed fried their own minds with LSD, perhaps accounting for their apparent absolute absence of consciences.
West’s Early days with MK Ultra
With this background, it is not an insignificant fact that the Poisoner in Chief considered and treated Jolly West as one of his favorite protégés. But, this fact was only relatively recently revealed. For fifty years until his death in 1999 Jolly West was able to get away with a denial of any connection whatsoever to MK Ultra, much less serving the role of the Black Sorcerer’s favorite apprentice. In the late seventies West’s name was linked to MK Ultra by a document published in the New York Times. West claimed it was a mistake; he never experimented on humans and was unaware of any CIA funding for his research (both blatant lies). Congress, the New York Times and the rest of corporate media dutifully went along for the ride. West escaped scrutiny along with most of the nuts and bolts of the MK Ultra operation.
Some say the eminently blackmailable Senator Teddy Kennedy helped engineer the continuing cover up of MK Ultra and the CIA’s broader attempts to covertly control the hearts and minds of populations, including the American public. The CIA’s strategy to weather the final Congressional hearings, headed by Teddy, was to produce only heavily redacted scraps of paper and present a barrage of perjured testimony that MK Ultra was retired because the research never amounted to anything. It was a colossal failure that produced no results. In other words, “move on people, nothing to see here.” John Marks, author of The Search For The Manchurian Candidate, dubbed it the “gang that couldn’t spray straight” strategy; a phrase taken from actual media characterizations of MK Ultra at the time (an allusion to the movie The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and the CIA’s spraying of LSD through aerosol over unsuspecting human guinea pigs). The CIA presented as, and the media dutifully reported it as, “no harm?”, then, “no foul.”
Having washed their hands of the matter, the corporate media subsequently anointed West, while serving in the respectable position of head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Department, as chief inquisitor (judge, jury, and executioner) against Scientology for the next two decades. When Scientology questioned West’s qualifications as expert on a subject seeking to restore memory and self-determinism (see The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard) – while West was a central player in decades of CIA work to produce the precise opposite – the media branded Scientology as vindictive toward the poor, blameless Dr. West.
The Truth About West Finally Revealed
It was only several years after West’s 1999 death that a particularly resourceful investigator discovered the truth. The revelations of his work were revolutionary, even if the media and government fail to pay it the respect it deserves. Journalist Tom O’Neill came across Jolly West during a several-year investigation that O’Neill never dreamed would lead him to such a character. O’Neill was looking into the infamous Charles Manson LSD cult murders of 1969 for a magazine story on the issue. He wound up writing an epic bestselling book, CHAOS: CHARLES MASON, the CIA and the SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES (Little Brown, 2019). We will report more on this in coming segments. But, for now we’ll focus on the most meaningful proof of West’s special relation with and work for the CIA’s Dr. No.
O’Neill’s investigation led him to the personal papers of West, housed in the archives at UCLA. O’Neill spent months searching the material looking for links to the story he was working on. When he hit paydirt, it not only confirmed his suspicions, not only proved Scientology was if anything downplaying the depths of West’s depravity, but more importantly, proved that the CIA had successfully hoodwinked Congress into the false belief that there was nothing more to see about MK Ultra.
The documents O’Neill discovered revealed a close, intimate relationship between Sidney Gottlieb and Jolly West. Between at least 1953 and 1956 the two were in regular communication about MK Ultra operations. The first available letter which begins midstream (indicating more earlier communications) was dated June 11, 1953, only two months after the ‘official’ christening of mind control operations under the title MK Ultra. West clearly was in on the ground floor.
West informed Gottlieb he was performing experiments to determine, “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew”…and…”techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects…or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.”
West was working at the Air Force’s Lackland Field hospital in San Antonio, Texas at the time. He lamented to Gottlieb the need to “cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account.” West’s obsession for power and his greed is on full display. He bargains with Gottlieb. In exchange for going whole hog on experimenting with human guinea pigs against their will, West demanded a military promotion and a guaranteed future as head of a major University’s Neuropsychiatric department. Gottlieb promised to take care of all of West’s concerns and confirmed his mission. “My Good Friend”, he addressed West, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real…you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.”
Gottlieb poured it on thick demonstrating an embarrassingly close relationship between the two Frankenstein doctors: “we have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.” West returned the schmalz, “It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me ‘an asset’.” West then confirmed undying loyalty to carrying on the Mengel-inspired mission: “Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”
O’Neill’s Find Eclipses Senate Committees
O’Neill’s discovery eclipsed those made by three Senate Committees in the nineteen seventies, the last effort to make any headway in plumbing the depths of CIA malfeasance. In fact, O’Neill was able to demonstrate that the “gang that couldn’t spray straight” strategy was pure fiction.
The Senate Committee document referred to earlier that mentioned West’s name, was a heavily redacted affair, disclosing next to nothing. What O’Neill discovered in the West archives was a nine-page attachment to that very document – except West’s copy was unredacted. Dated 1956 – at least three years after beginning his experiments – the report served as West’s pronouncement of “Mission Accomplished” to Gottlieb. Titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility”, the report stated:
“It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and through hypnotic suggestion, bring about conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur. West reported that it was accomplished by use of “new drugs” that helped in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.”
West requested further funding so that he could keep work going and build “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacological, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.” Documents later showed that his request was granted, evidencing continued funding through 1965 at least.
Inducing Mental Disorders
This is just the beginning of Jolly’s West’s macabre journey.
In October 1963, while the CIA continued to fund him, West announced to a group of doctors that in their researches they were “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangements in the laboratory” using LSD. West was claiming to have made good on his 1953 promise to Gottlieb to discover means “for inducing in [subjects] specific mental disorders.”
A month later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
In a just world, perhaps West’s claim would have been treated like a smoking gun.
Instead, as we will see, it wasn’t even noticed by the powers that be.
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References: CHAOS, CHARLES MANSON, the CIA and the SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES, by Tom O’Neill. Penguin 2019. This is probably the most revealing book to dive deep into MK Ultra. It is certainly the most entertaining. Many of the quotations in this post were lifted from the book and many of those were verified as accurate against original documents which I have reviewed.
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt 2019
The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. John Marks, Norton 1979
Operation Mind Control. Walter Bowart, Dell 1978, plus New Saucerian 2017 edition which apparently includes material edited out of previous editions.
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot, HarperCollins 2015.
CIA Reading Room https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/
The Black Vault Document Archive https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us; Robert Hare, Pocket Books 1995
The Sociopath Next Door. Martha Stout, Broadway Books 2005
Science of Survival. L. Ron Hubbard, L. Ron Hubbard Library 1951.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 