by Jon Elliston
Dossier Editor
pscpdocs@aol.com
"I have always had adequate sex that no one appreciated. I need a better grade of iron to eat, and so do the astronauts."
You have just read the opening words of a declassified document that can certainly be classified as the most unusual and hilarious report ever produced by the customarily solemn analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency. Prepare yourself for a spy story like none other.
In 1965, CIA officer David R. McLean authored a short history of the harassment the agency had endured from "Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs" (as he titled his report). McLean's ten-page account, stamped CONFIDENTIAL by the CIA, chronicles the agency's sometimes bitter and often bewildering encounters with inquisitive, eccentric, and downright crazy Americans. It's the kooks versus the spooks, and from the CIA's perspective, it's not a pretty story.
McLean's report made its way to the pages of Studies in Intelligence, an internal CIA publication that serves as a kind of professional journal for the intelligence community. It remained classified until the mid-1990s, when the CIA launched an "openness" offensive and began forking over some long-secret documents to the public.
The CIA's declassification efforts have been poky and partial, to say the least, but some of the newly released documents offer major clues on the bunker mentality that takes root in the secret sectors of government. McLean's report reminds us that it can be difficult to work as a spy official in a democracy -- there are a lot of us on the outside who insist on peering behind the curtain to see exactly which levers the CIA is pulling.
Or, as McLean put it: "Something about a secret intelligence agency attracts an endless stream of letters, cards, telegrams, phone calls, and personal visits from deranged, possibly dangerous, or merely daffy citizens who want to horn in on the cloak-and-dagger act."
McLean explained that the CIA mailroom had been bombarded with ravings, rantings, and code-like screeds from "the fringe and further out." During a single eight-month period, he reported, "1,143 letters addressed simply to CIA were identified as from cranks."
Not included in that total were crank letters addressed directly to specific CIA officials. The quote that begins the report -- the one about "adequate sex that no one appreciated" -- is excerpted from one of several bizarre letters received by CIA Director John McCone, who headed the agency from 1963 to 1965.
One of the more bizarre letters send to CIA Director John McCone:
McCone's successor, William Raborn, was sent these curious words by a Massachusetts woman who evidently fancied the work of the Beat poets: "As near as I can tell there normally is a gray cloud at the base of the psyche. When the cloud backs up you go out of focus. But after taking Alka Seltzer and sodium bicarbonate I can sing Hokus Pokus you're in focus."
Sometimes the CIA's unwelcome pen pals simply offered advice. One man wrote to Raborn: "as you may be aware, L.B.J. ain't got much Brains or he wouldn't be President. I dealt with his type for 37 years. The best way to get along with him is humor him."
Another concerned citizen counseled that "now is the time to penetrate every possible beauty parlor and Chinese restaurant... the results will amaze and constantly astound your organization." In 1964 someone sent in a proposed propaganda operation, in an envelope addressed to "Snuffy McDuffy, Top Floor, Closed Door, CIA, Washington, D.C." The post-script of the letter read: "If you don't take appropriate action I'll write to the President and tell him you're chicken."
Angrier messages came from disgruntled individuals who apparently floundered in their attempts to find work with the CIA. McLean mentions a 1965 postcard "peevishly addressed to the U.S. Lower Intelligence Agency," which declared: "O.K.! Keep me off the payroll. I'll try and sell my abilities to the Soviet Union." Another man began a relentless postal push against the CIA in 1951, after the agency in his opinion "welshed on a job offer." According to the report, "almost every day he mails a postcard with the same message: 'Take Action on CIA Agent Joe Blank!'" In 1962 alone he mailed in 332 such pleas.
And then, startlingly, there are the strange cases where outsiders proposed bizarre operations that were already under consideration in top secret CIA projects. McLean tells of a "probable James Bond fan" who wrote the CIA and seemed "obsessed with finding unusual ways of eliminating the opposition." One of the eager source's suggestions, "a lethally exploding cigar," had already been kicked around at CIA headquarters as a means of assassinating Cuban leader Fidel Castro, along with the idea of a using a poison-laced cigar for the same purpose.
In 1957, McLean reports, one of the CIA's domestic offices investigated the case of a "school superintendent of unassailable reliability" who had ventured into the esoteric realm of parapsychology. The superintendent was an amateur hypnotist, and claimed "he could induce clairvoyance in his subject, an engineering student." While under a trance, the student "described in minute technical detail a Soviet ballistic missile of a type unknown in the United States but consistent with expert private assessments of Soviet capabilities."
"The mystery remains unsolved," McLean said of the psychic spying, wrapping up the case with a line straight out of the X Files. What McLean probably didn't know was that by 1965 the CIA had established a sizable but super-secret research program on mind and behavior control methods. Several of these experiments and studies, many of them done under the infamous MKULTRA program, explored the potential of hypnosis as a spy weapon. And later both the CIA and the Defense Department would spend millions of dollars on highly classified "remote viewing" projects that sought to discover distant Soviet secrets with extraordinary (and as yet unproven) powers of the mind.
To top it all off there's the remarkably bothersome man who McLean judges to be "probably the most imaginative and persistent correspondent" to ever contact the CIA. The report does not reveal his name, but among his "more than 50 aliases" was "Old Woody," as he is called by McLean. The CIA report says that Old Woody's antics "cost the Government a great many dollars in wasted time, filing space, analyses, and precautions." It's easy to see why: Old Woody's one-man crusade to contribute to the CIA's efforts reached peculiar proportions.
Beginning his correspondence in 1952, Old Woody would eventually send "thousands of letters, postcards and telegrams" to the spy agency. Each message bore a special purpose; the report takes note of Old Woody's "infinite variety."
One of his letters to the CIA Director read: "I have allotted you a maximum life span of 94 years, not to exceed the year 1987." Another time Old Woody complained that "someone has wired my head for sight and sound." Once he sent an urgent telegram from Florida reading: "REQUEST FEDERAL TROOPS, MARTIAL LAW. MIAMI SITUATION OUT OF CONTROL." Then, from Illinois he telegraphed the message that "FIDEL CASTRO MINUS HIS BEARD ARRIVED CHICAGO THIS P.M."
Old Woody didn't just keep in touch with the CIA -- at times he also masqueraded as an employee of the agency. According to the report, Old Woody was adept at working under false identities:
"In August 1960 he made a telephone appointment with the commanding officer of an Air Force base in Nevada, conducted a 'CIA security inspection,' used the base commander's telephone to call CIA headquarters in Washington, and on departure warned the commander that some officers were out of uniform at Harold's Club. After sending MP's on a wild goose chase to the gambling club, the base commander somewhat grumpily reported the incident in an official letter to the CIA."
For all the fun to be had with the Old Woodys of the world, McLean reports that the CIA was deadly serious about petty harassment. The cranks targeting the CIA, he said, "create some delicate screening problems, waste a lot of time, and justify elaborate security precautions to protect its top officials." The angry and odd communiqués from the public, though hardly a Communist plot, constituted a genuine pain in the ass for the CIA.
Before long the CIA decided to open files on the crazies. The agency's Office of Security "keeps a watch list of nearly four thousand persons or organizations who have tried to visit, write, or phone its officials and who have been, at a minimum, a source of annoyance," McLean reported.
Nowadays, you don't have to be paranoid to harbor deep suspicions about the CIA. But in the early years of the Cold War, most Americans were still in the dark about the dangerous and illegal conduct of the intelligence establishment. Though maybe they weren't sure exactly what drove them to bug the CIA, the "cranks, nuts and screwballs" described by McLean were actually way ahead of their time.