FTR#1304 Albert Hofmann, The Nazis and The CIA

Trans­formed into some­thing of an icon dur­ing the “Psy­che­del­ic Era” of the 1960’s, San­doz’s Albert Hoff­man’s polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from his “Peace and Love” per­sona mint­ed dur­ing that time.

The real­i­ty of that time is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from the sur­viv­ing cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive.

This pro­gram sets forth dis­turb­ing facts about Hoff­man, his rela­tion­ship with the CIA and the San­doz fir­m’s activ­i­ties in World War II.

“. . . . In the same inter­view [Gor­don] Was­son said that Albert Hof­mann ‘worked in some way with the CIA’ and that Hoffman’s ‘dis­cov­er­ies were impart­ed in whole by San­doz to the U.S. gov­ern­ment. San­doz want­ed to be on the right side of things.’ Hofmann’s con­nec­tion to the CIA has nev­er been offi­cial­ly con­firmed by the CIA, which main­tains a pol­i­cy of not com­ment­ing on or reveal­ing infor­ma­tion on for­eign cit­i­zens who find their way into its employ­ment. For­mer agency offi­cials have com­ment­ed anony­mous­ly that sev­er­al San­doz sci­en­tists and offi­cials, includ­ing Hof­mann, main­tained a close rela­tion­ship with the CIA, but the ‘Agency nev­er ful­ly trust­ed the Swiss’ and ‘always held a dual insur­ance pol­i­cy with San­doz’ by vet­ting and plac­ing covert employ­ees with­in the firm’s lab­o­ra­to­ries and admin­is­tra­tion. . . .”

Ele­ments of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: The World War II indict­ment of San­doz for col­lab­o­rat­ing with Nazi Ger­many; Hof­man­n’s work for the CIA; the pres­ence of U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare per­son­nel in France at the time of the dis­as­trous Pont St.-Esprit ergot/LSD out­break; Hof­man­n’s pres­ence in Pont St.-Esprit in the imme­di­ate after­math of the out­break; Hof­man­n’s mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the cause of the out­break, attribut­ing it to the use of a mer­cury com­pound used to pre­serve seeds: ” . . . . ‘The mass poi­son­ing in the south­ern France city of Pont-St. Esprit in the year 1951, which many have attrib­uted to ergot-con­tain­ing bread, actu­al­ly had noth­ing to do with ergo­tism. It rather involved poi­son­ing by an organ­ic mer­cury com­pound that was uti­lized for dis­in­fect­ing seeds]’ . . . .”; Hof­man­n’s dis­cus­sion with doc­tors inves­ti­gat­ing the out­break in the imme­di­ate after­math of the event–a dis­cus­sion in which the mer­cury poi­son­ing the­o­ry was dis­missed: ” . . . .The doc­tors at the meet­ing agreed that mer­cury poi­son­ing was not evi­dent in any man­ner, spe­cial­ly because of the per­sis­tent lack of kid­ney or liv­er dam­age. . . .”; an account of the Pont St.-Esprit out­break.