Columbia University

Columbia University is a private research university in New York City. It was founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of King George II, took the name Columbia in 1784, and moved to its Morningside Heights campus in 1897.¹ Its laboratories, institutes, clinicians and graduates recur in the documented record of the Manhattan Project, CIA-sponsored behavioral research, Army-contracted drug testing, Cold War area studies, parapsychology and the analysis staff of the wartime Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.

The Manhattan Project at Columbia

Niels Bohr carried news of uranium fission to the United States in January 1939, and from Princeton University it spread to neighboring physicists including Enrico Fermi at Columbia. Fermi, John R. Dunning and George B. Pegram began a search at Columbia for the ionization pulses expected from fission fragments.² Pegram made the first contact between the physicists and the government in March 1939, by telephoning the Navy Department.³ The first contract of the National Defense Research Committee was let to Columbia on November 8, 1940, for $40,000, and Harold Urey began work on isotope separation by the centrifuge method under a Navy contract in the fall of 1940.⁴ In February 1940 concentrated samples of uranium 234, 235 and 238 prepared by Alfred Nier were turned over to E. T. Booth, A. von Grosse and Dunning for investigation with the Columbia cyclotron, and the group showed that uranium 235 was the isotope fissionable by thermal neutrons.⁵

In January 1942 Arthur Compton concentrated the work for which he was responsible at the University of Chicago, and the Columbia group under Fermi moved there in the spring. Diffusion research and heavy-water production stayed at Columbia under Urey, and the Columbia centrifuge work went to the Standard Oil Development Company.⁶ The diffusion work was carried on at Columbia under the Office of Scientific Research and Development until May 1, 1943, when the Manhattan District took it over. Urey directed the Columbia part until February 1945, and on March 1, 1945 the laboratory passed from the university to the Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corporation. The Columbia laboratories had by then been named the SAM Laboratories.⁷ Columbia's own history records that atomic research by I. I. Rabi, Fermi and Polykarp Kusch brought the Department of Physics to international prominence in the 1940s, and that Pupin Hall was designated a national historic landmark in 1966 for atomic research undertaken there from 1925.¹ A student-newspaper account of the university's later CIA contacts states that Rabi worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia.⁸

Eisenhower and the American Assembly

Dwight D. Eisenhower became president of Columbia in 1948, after retiring as Army chief of staff.⁹ Grayson Kirk served as provost from 1949 to 1951 and as president from 1953 to 1968. His oral history for the Eisenhower Library covers Eisenhower's adjustment to the presidency, the operation and goals of the American Assembly, Eisenhower's involvement with the Institute for War and Peace, and the donation of the Arden House estate to the university by Averell Harriman.¹⁰ The economist Eli Ginzberg, who knew Eisenhower at Columbia, discussed in his interviews Eisenhower's appointment of Kirk as provost, the American Assembly and Eisenhower's interest in it, and his views on Richard Nixon and Allen Dulles.¹¹ The Columbia Libraries describe the American Assembly as founded in 1950 by Eisenhower during his Columbia presidency.¹²

The Russian Institute

Columbia founded its School of International Affairs in 1946.¹ The Rockefeller Foundation 1949 annual report lists among its appropriations to Columbia University the "development of the Russian Institute" (grant RF 45034) and "special fellowships in the Russian Institute" (grant RF 47045).¹³ A Columbia Daily Spectator article of April 1978, which draws on material released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, states that the institute's founder, Geroid Tanquary Robinson, had served in the Office of Strategic Services as chief of its USSR division, and that in 1950 he invited 50 CIA, foreign service and armed forces officers to study at the institute. The article places Philip Mosely as director of the institute from 1951 to 1954, and as a consultant to the War Documentation Project, a study of captured documents on Soviet psychological warfare that Columbia operated in Virginia from 1954 to 1955.⁸

On December 17, 1954 the executive director of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote to Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence, that Mosely, "Professor of International Relations at Columbia, Director of its Russian Institute," had agreed to become the Council's Director of Studies from July 1, 1955. The letter reports that a Ford Foundation grant and a Carnegie Corporation grant of $500,000 had put the Council in a position to plan its study program.¹⁴ A White House memorandum to Dulles, sent in connection with a visit by Dulles and Richard Bissell to an evening session of the Quantico Panel on June 9, attaches a list of panel members because "Mr. Rockefeller felt you would find [it] useful." The list gives "Dr. Philip Mosely, Director, Russian Institute, Columbia University" among the participants (see Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel).¹⁵

The Bureau of Applied Social Research

Paul Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia is one of at least six postwar communication research centers that Christopher Simpson writes grew up as de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs. Simpson reports that government money, frequently without public acknowledgment, made up more than 75 percent of the annual budget of the bureau for years.¹⁶ He also reports that about half of the bureau's budget from 1941 to 1946 came from commercial work such as readership studies for Time and Life, with the remainder drawn from a Rockefeller Foundation grant and, to a much lesser degree, from Columbia; by 1949 the bureau was deeply in debt to the university.¹⁷ In 1951 Stanley Bigman of the bureau prepared a confidential manual on survey research, Are We Hitting the Target?, for the State Department's International Information and Educational Exchange Program, the predecessor of the United States Information Agency.¹⁸

The Rockefeller Foundation's records show a Columbia grant of $25,000 in 1947 for a program of study by German broadcasters, and two grants totaling $50,000 in 1949 for Japanese and Korean broadcasters, planned by the bureau at the request of the occupying authorities. A further $25,000 in 1949 went to the American Press Institute at Columbia for a program for twelve Japanese journalists, and the bureau received $23,000 for a study of social conditions affecting productivity in the Ruhr area.¹⁹

CIA contacts with the faculty

In April 1978 the Columbia Daily Spectator published an account, based on thousands of pages released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, of the agency's relations with Columbia faculty "over more than thirty years." It describes a recruiter from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service who visited the university in March, met two department chairmen about candidates for foreign-language positions, and received the names of three possible recruits. The article identifies the chairmen only through deleted phrases in the CIA documents, and reports that the university's president, William McGill, said the visit "does sound like a traditional CIA recruiting practice." It states that through the 1950s and into the 1960s professors "sought and directed CIA-financed research" without disclosing the sponsorship to colleagues, students or the public. Its examples are a Teachers College study of scientific breakthroughs proposed and directed by Professor Frederick Fitzpatrick, a Naval Reserve commander; studies of personality at the Neuropsychiatric Institute; the War Documentation Project; a Russian-English technical dictionary, whose steering committee included Rabi and Schuyler Wallace, director of the School of International Affairs; and a proposal to bring CIA and military officers to the Russian Institute. The article also reports that when McGill asked Admiral Stansfield Turner in 1977 to confirm that no covert relationships with faculty existed, Turner replied that this was "not a conclusion that I am prepared to either affirm or deny."⁸

LSD, the Psychiatric Institute and Mount Sinai

A CIA memorandum of December 2, 1953, from the chief of the agency's SSD to Colonel Edwards, describes Harold Abramson as a physician who was "educated at Columbia University, receiving his M.D. in 1923," and records that he was "Assistant Professor of Physiology at Columbia University since 1935." The memorandum, filed among the Project MKUltra records, adds that Abramson was associate physician and chief of the allergy clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, and that "Subject is a physician but not known as a psychiatrist."²⁰ The Senate's 1977 joint hearing on MKUltra describes Abramson as an allergist and immunologist practicing in New York who held no degree in psychiatry but "was associated with research projects supported indirectly by the CIA," and whose work Sidney Gottlieb and Dr. Robert Lashbrook followed closely in the early 1950s. In November 1953 Lashbrook took Frank Olson to New York for two days of consultations with Abramson. At about 2:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 28, Olson fell to his death from the tenth-floor window of a room in the Statler Hotel.²¹

Across the East River, the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), which Kenneth Wapnick's account describes as part of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, was the site of the Army experiment in which Harold Blauer died.²² The Second Circuit's opinion in the suit brought by Blauer's estate recounts that Blauer, 42 years old, was admitted voluntarily to NYSPI in December 1952 for depression, and that on January 8, 1953 NYSPI personnel injected him with a synthetic mescaline derivative furnished by the Army Chemical Corps. The opinion names Paul Hoch as the NYSPI medical official in charge of administering the compound.²³

The same opinion sets out the estate's account of what followed. According to records relied on by the estate, a conference of federal counsel and medical personnel in early July 1954 discussed claims of malpractice that might be anticipated, and Hoch was to testify as an expert if the source of the compound had to be revealed. The court records that Hoch testified Blauer's death was caused by the injection and that the administration of the drug "was not in accordance with generally accepted medical practice." The estate alleged that Hoch then testified falsely before the New York Court of Claims that the drug had been used for diagnosis, and that he was well aware the compound was an experiment for chemical warfare purposes. The opinion attributes these allegations to the estate. It records that the estate was never made aware of the Army's involvement, and that the estate signed a release in exchange for $18,000.²³

Thetford, Schucman and the Human Ecology funding

William Thetford became an associate professor of medical psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in February 1958, after working at the Cornell University Medical Center under Harold Wolff. Helen Schucman joined the department as an assistant professor and was later promoted to associate professor, according to Kenneth Wapnick, who knew both. Wapnick writes that Thetford was recruited to head the psychology department of Presbyterian Hospital and a pre-doctoral training program in clinical psychology.²⁴ Schucman and Thetford later became consultants to an interdisciplinary research project at the Cornell medical center; Wapnick describes its weekly meetings as the setting from which the scribing of A Course in Miracles began in 1965.²⁵

The Spectator's 1978 account states that Thetford, by then a retired professor of medical psychiatry, worked from 1960 to 1966 on studies of human personality funded by CIA front organizations. In a letter to President McGill of October 1977, as the Spectator reports it, Thetford wrote that he "knew throughout that time the real source of the funding," which he had learned from Wolff, a former colleague at Cornell "who founded one of the front organizations with the CIA's aid." The article adds that Thetford wrote that he later regretted "not dissociating myself from the sources of funding," and that he believed at the time he was serving the country.⁸ At the 1977 joint hearing, the CIA psychologist John Gittinger told Senator Edward Kennedy that the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was established to fund psychological, sociological and anthropological research, that "the Agency in effect provided the money," and that many recipients "had no knowledge that they were getting CIA money."²⁶ The hearing record also states that the Society, later the Human Ecology Fund, was an outgrowth of QKHILLTOP, a 1954 project on Chinese Communist brainwashing whose early studies were believed to have been conducted by the Cornell University Medical School Human Ecology Study Programs.²⁷

A December 1987 review of the Personality Assessment System by Nevin Lantz of SRI International, prepared for the CIA's contracting officer's representative, lists among continuing research on the test the work of "Saunders (MARS Measurements Associates), and Thetford and Schucman (Columbia University)." Its bibliography cites a 1962 convention paper by Schucman, D. R. Saunders and Thetford applying syndrome analysis to subjects with ulcerative colitis, and a 1970 article by Schucman and Thetford in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.²⁸ A book review in the Star Gate files lists "Helen Cohn Schucman of A Course in Miracles" among modern channelers.²⁹

The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service

In October 1941 Harold N. Graves Jr. announced that Goodwin Watson, "eminent social psychologist of Columbia University," would accept a P-6 grade and head the Analysis Section of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.³⁰ Watson accepted the post in a letter of October 22, 1941 and entered on duty November 17, 1941.³¹

In 1943 a House appropriations subcommittee moved against Watson and two other federal employees, William E. Dodd Jr. and Robert Morss Lovett. The rider that followed, Section 304 of the appropriations act, cut off their pay. In United States v. Lovett, decided in 1946, the Supreme Court held that Section 304 operated as a bill of attainder against the three respondents.³²

Intelligence officers and diplomats

Thomas Karamessines, the CIA's deputy director for plans from 1967 to 1973, graduated from Columbia in 1938 and from its law school two years later, and served with Thomas E. Dewey as deputy assistant district attorney for New York County in 1941 and 1942, according to his 1978 obituary in the Washington Post. The obituary records that he then joined the Army, was selected for the Office of Strategic Services, served in London and Cairo, and remained in Greece until 1947.³³ Lawrence Walsh, who was deputy assistant district attorney in New York County from 1938 to 1941 and counsel to Governor Dewey from 1943 to 1951, took his A.B. at Columbia in 1932 and his LL.B. at Columbia Law School in 1935; his papers, 1919 to 2008, are held at Columbia.³⁴ Walt Rostow taught as an instructor in economics at Columbia for the year after his Yale doctorate in 1940, before joining the Office of Strategic Services.³⁵ Claiborne Pell took a master's degree at Columbia in 1946, and his Senate papers include a Columbia University speech of May 3, 1961.³⁶ John R. Everett, later president of the New School for Social Research, took an M.A. in economics at Columbia in 1943 and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1945, and taught philosophy there from 1943 to 1945.³⁷

Garrison Rapmund, a retired Army major general, took his M.D. at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1953. A Columbia Medicine memorial states that he trained in pediatrics at Babies Hospital, became an assistant surgeon general for research and development, and was a scientific adviser to the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Energy.³⁸ The Defense Intelligence Agency's 1991 plan for Project Star Gate carries a biography of Rapmund giving the same degree, and a Star Gate roster lists him as an observer on the Scientific Oversight Committee.³⁹

Lawyers, financiers and political figures

Roy Cohn's FBI file records, in a New York office report on his application for appointment to the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, that he received an A.B. from Columbia College in 1945 and an LL.B. in 1947.⁴⁰ Adolf Berle served as associate professor and then professor of corporation law at Columbia from 1927 to 1963 and as professor emeritus from 1963, according to the finding aid of his papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, which also lists a Columbia University series for 1946 to 1971. The same finding aid records that as assistant secretary of state from 1938 to 1944 his duties included coordinating United States and foreign intelligence activities, that he was a trustee of the Free Europe Committee from 1948 to 1963, and that in the 1950s and 1960s he assisted the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Committee on Human Ecology.⁴¹ José A. Cabranes, later a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, took his A.B. at Columbia in 1961.⁴² Jay Lefkowitz, named Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in 2002, earned both his history degree and his law degree at Columbia.⁴³ Alvin Johnson earned a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia in 1902 and taught there. In 1919 he joined a group of New Republic colleagues and Columbia professors, among them Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson and John Dewey, who founded the New School for Social Research; the New School's history dates the school's origin to Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler's dismissal in 1917 of Henry Dana and James McKeen Cattell for opposing the war.⁴⁴

The Rockefeller family and Columbia were tied by land and by schooling. John D. Rockefeller Jr. made a commitment on October 1, 1928 to lease from Columbia the three blocks between 48th and 51st Streets on which Rockefeller Center was built; the contract was signed on December 31, 1928 at an annual rent of approximately $3.5 million for 1928 to 1952, with options for three 21-year renewals. The city's landmark designation report describes the property as the "Upper Estate," conveyed to Columbia College in 1814 under an aid-to-education act, and records that bronze plaques in Rockefeller Plaza identified it as the property of Columbia University until the later sale to Rockefeller Center, Inc.⁴⁵ The Lincoln School of Teachers College, established in 1917 with the General Education Board funding of John D. Rockefeller, was owned and operated by Teachers College, Columbia University.⁴⁶

Scientists and psi researchers

Gerald Feinberg, a physicist in Columbia's Department of Physics, worked on Tachyon theory, the hypothesis of particles that travel faster than light. In February 1970 Scientific American published his article "Particles That Go Faster Than Light." The article describes a search for tachyons by a group at Columbia that examined bubble-chamber photographs for indirect evidence of neutral tachyons.⁴⁷

Feinberg's work was carried into the parapsychology contracts of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). A technical proposal dated October 1, 1973 for a "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques" program, prepared by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, named Feinberg of Columbia and Charles Tart of the University of California as professors who "may be called upon to act as consultants."⁴⁸ Later SRI research documents on remote viewing attribute an "extradimensional hypothesis" to "Targ, Puthoff, and May (SRI), G. Feinberg (Columbia University), and E. Rauscher (University of California Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)."⁴⁹ A December 1979 report of the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, chaired by Manfred Gale, reproduces the same passage.⁵⁰ In 1974 Feinberg presented a paper, "Precognition: A Memory of Things Future?", at the twenty-third annual conference of the Parapsychology Foundation in Geneva. The paper suggested that precognition might be knowledge of a future state of the percipient's mind rather than of an objective state of the physical world.⁵¹ In April 1977 Targ, Puthoff and E. C. May listed a paper on the state of the art in remote viewing studies at SRI for a New York special session on psychic research held April 19 to 21 of that year.⁵²

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) listed Columbia among the "universities involved in courses, research, or degrees in parapsychology" in an August 7, 1984 report on psychoenergetics research. The exhibit places Columbia University beside Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Chicago.⁵³ The Star Gate Scientific Oversight Committee roster lists Melvin Schwartz, with a biography giving a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1958 (physics).⁵⁴

Irving Langmuir's colloquium on "pathological science," given at the Knolls Research Laboratory on December 18, 1953, was transcribed and edited for the CIA. The transcript records that on April 23, 1920 "Professor Bergen Davis from Columbia University" gave a colloquium in Langmuir's laboratory, and that Langmuir never published his own investigation of the Davis-Barnes effect.⁵⁵ The psychologist Arthur Jensen received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1956.⁵⁶

The 1968 disturbances and the Institute for Defense Analyses

The fact-finding commission appointed to investigate the April and May 1968 disturbances at Columbia was chaired by Archibald Cox of Harvard. Its report states that Columbia became an institutional member of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a body created to give the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff access to university research on weapons systems and warfare, and that Kirk and the Columbia trustee William A. M. Burden served on the IDA board of trustees.⁵⁷ The report records that in January 1968 Kirk appointed a faculty committee under Professor Louis Henkin to study Columbia's external relations, that in early April the trustees approved ending formal institutional sponsorship of IDA while having IDA appoint one member of the university community as an individual trustee, and that critics took this as an attempt to claim severance while keeping the relationship. It reports that the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society cultivated the IDA issue, and that six students faced discipline for the March 27 IDA demonstration.⁵⁸ The commission treats the planned gymnasium in Morningside Park as a second source of the protest.⁵⁹