Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

42. “not particularly suited”: Charles La Hood, letter to Verner Clapp, June 26, 1970, de Florez files, Council on Library and Information Resources.

43. Joseph Becker: Before he left the CIA in 1968, Becker won the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit; in an obituary, The New York Times wrote that he “computerized the Central Intelligence Agency’s records.” “Joseph Becker, 72, Information Expert,” The New York Times, July 27, 1995, p. D22.

44. “some of the realities”: Council on Library Resources, 1962 Annual Report, p. 9.

45. “Transceiving time”: H. G. Morehouse, Telefacsimile Services Between Libraries with the Xerox Magnavox Telecopier (Reno: University of Reno Library, December 20, 1966).

46. white rats: J. C. R. Licklider’s M.A. thesis at Washington University was “The Influence of a Severe Modification in Sleep Pattern on Growth and Learning Ability of White Rats” (1938); his experiments with sleepy rats at Harvard are described in J. C. R. Licklider and R. E. Bunch, “Effects of Enforced Wakefulness Upon the Growth and the Maze Learning Performance of White Rats,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 39 (1946). In “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology (April 1968), Licklider writes that “life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

47. Libraries of the Future: J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). Among the participants and committee members acknowledged by Licklider in his preface were Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, both cyberneticists of distinction; Caryl P. Haskins, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Gilbert King of Itek; Philip Morse, the OR pioneer; and John R. Pierce of Bell Labs, designer of Telstar 1 and coiner of the word “transistor.” For background on Licklider, SAGE, DARPA, air defense, real-time computing, and man-machine symbiosis, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

48. “special manifestations of library work”: Council on Library Resources, Fourth Annual Report (1961; introductory essay by Verner Clapp), p. 10.

49. Air Force Librarian: CIA file, Verner Warren Clapp.

50. fired or allowed to resign: See Robbins, “Library of Congress and Federal Loyalty Programs”; Robbins cites one librarian’s plaintive appeal to Clapp in October 1952: “Next month it will be one year since I received the first interrogatory, and needless to say this matter has weighed very heavily on me.” Clapp answered that he was “anxious for settlement”; her case wasn’t settled for another six months. The well-placed hints of informants could be career-destroyers, as Clapp knew, and he was careful in his deliberations; his daily journal from the early fifties reveals the extraordinarily time-consuming work he performed as part of the Library of Congress’s three-man loyalty-review board, manned by Clapp, Frederick Wagman, and Burton Adkinson. Only two employees were fired outright from the library for political disloyalty between 1947 and 1956; but, as Robbins writes, “some resigned during the investigation process; some, after charges but before a hearing,” while others weren’t hired because “the loyalty panel concluded that a full field investigation would just be too costly”; and “at least ten lost their jobs during the purge of ‘perverts.’ ” When the American Library Association (rather bravely, considering the temper of the times) passed a resolution condemning loyalty oaths, Clapp stoutly defended their necessity; to oppose their use, he wrote, “is actually to aid and abet the hysteria which the tests are designed to counteract” ( Library Journal, April 15, 1950).

51. Office of Censorship: See Steven M. Roth, The Censorship of International Civilian Mail during World War II: The History, Structure, and Operation of the United States Office of Censorship (Lake Oswego, Oreg.: La Posta Publications, 1991). Censors slit letters open neatly on the left side (so that the examiner’s resealing label wouldn’t cover the stamp); they read the contents, noted certain items (discussions of enemy troop movements, for instance); sometimes photographed the letter and placed its sender or addressee on a watch list; “condemned” some mail; and returned to sender mail that contained prohibited material — e.g., statements “indicating low morale of the United States or its allies” (p. 98).

52. Human Ecology Fund: See Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chap. 9, which mentions Keeney on p. 156n. And see Andrew Sommer and Marc Cheshire, “The Spy Who Came in from the Campus,” New Times, October 30, 1978, p. 14, in which Keeney, interviewed in retirement, admitted that he had (according to the authors) “advised the Agency on ways of setting up covert funding operations” and said that he “was told by CIA officials that MKULTRA [one of the covert drug-testing programs] was designed to counter Soviet and Chinese brainwashing techniques, developed through the use of psych-chemicals and hypnosis.” The authors mention Keeney’s work at the National Endowment for the Humanities: “When questioned as to whether the NEH was ever used to cloak CIA operations, he [Keeney] asked incredulously, ‘Do you know what would happen to an agent who used the NEH as a cover?’ After a dramatic pause he answered, ‘He would be killed.’ He would not elaborate on this peculiar assertion.”

53. Caryl Haskins: For Haskins’s work on the Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, see Susan Wright, Preventing a Biological Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 29–30.

54. Project Artichoke: “Dr. Caryl Haskins was selected to head up the Panel and endeavored, in conjunction with OSI [the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence] to enlist the services of other qualified professional personnel.” Memo to Assistant Director, Scientific Intelligence from Project Coordinator, Subject: Project Artichoke, April 26, 1952. See Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”) at rex.dis.anl.gov.

55. Haskins traveled to Canada: “The genesis for the mind-control research was worked out at a top-secret meeting June 1, 1951, at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal….an anonymous handwritten note found in the archives identifies Dr. Caryl Haskins and Commander R.J. Williams as the CIA representatives at the meeting.” David Vienneau, “Ottawa Paid for ‘50s Brainwashing Experiments, Files Show,” The Toronto Star, April 14, 1986, final edition, p. A1, Nexis. And see related articles in The Toronto Star, April 15–17, 1986, and April 20, 1986. Haskins did not return calls from the Toronto Star reporter. (Haskins didn’t answer my letter, either, but his former assistant sent a polite note saying that Haskins was “in excellent health” but that I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t answer, as “1951 was such a long time ago.”)

56. available to the CIA as a consultant: “Dr. Haskins indicated that the Panel had contributed about as much as it could for the present and until resources were built up in the agency to undertake the staff and field work necessary, the panel would hold itself ready (as individual consultants) to be of any further advisory assistance.” Memorandum to Assistant Director, April 26, 1952, Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”). Haskins was also (for over twenty years) an influential member of the executive committee of the Smithsonian Institution — and here’s the strange part: in the sixties, under director Leonard Carmichael (also a board member, like Barnaby Keeney, of the CIA’s Human Ecology Fund), the Smithsonian did germ-warfare research. After receiving a series of inoculations, Smithsonian researchers traveled to islands in the Pacific to study how birds transmit disease; avian blood samples were shipped, frozen, to the Army’s biological-weapons lab at Fort Detrick. The disease data was turned over to the CIA, whose MKULTRA program was studying “Avian Vectors in the Transmission of Disease.” The Smithsonian’s germ-warfare studies, and the CIA’s biological experiments for that period, are chronicled in two Washington Post investigations: Bill Richards, “Germ Testing by the CIA,” The Washington Post, August 11, 1977, p. A1, Nexis, and Bill Richards, “CIA Involvement at Smithsonian Called Limited,” The Washington Post, August 31, 1977, p. A12, Nexis; and Ted Gup, “The Smithsonian Secret: Why an Innocent Bird Study Went Straight to Biological Warfare Experts at Fort Detrick,” The Washington Post Magazine, May 12, 1985, Nexis. See also Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). It occurs to me that the CIA’s interest in the avian vectors of disease may possibly explain the otherwise puzzling choice of Wildlife Disease as the journal Verner Clapp published on Microcards.