CIA: What Really Happened in the quiet French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit http://www.voltairenet.org/article164447.html

A U.S. journalist, who was investigating the Cold War mind-control experiments conducted by the CIA, came across some documents relating to an obscure episode in France that was never elucidated. He alleges that in 1951 the CIA was testing for a secret weapon: the aerosol spraying of LSD. The experiment was reportedly carried out in a French village, whose inhabitants and authorities were kept completely in the dark. But it went wrong and caused the death of 7 people.

Lastly, in the chain of evidence was an undated White House document that appeared to be part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford to investigate to CIA abuses. The document contained the names of two French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA, and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident” linking a former CIA biological warfare expert and the chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. This document, along with one other, in my view, comprised the smoking gun. In 2005, a reporter with the /Baltimore Sun/ newspaper, Scott Shane, who now writes for the New York Times, wrote, “The [U.S.] Army has no records on MK/NAOMI or on the [Fort Detrick] Special Operations Division.” When Scott, and then this writer, asked the Army for records on both, the Army replied that it “could find none.”

In 1973, the CIA destroyed all of its records on MKNAOMI and its work with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. One of the stated reasons for this destruction, explained the CIA, was that “people would not understand or misconstrue the reasons for many of the projects the Agency carried out.” When reporter Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations Division officer to speak about the divisions past projects, Andrew M. Cowan Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”