Ronald Hadley Stark: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain
Posted Jul 12, 2007 10 comments
The curse of doing research out here in Weirdoland is that the really fascinating people are nearly impossible to do research on. For instance, when you're covertly running the world's largest LSD manufacturing and smuggling operation for the CIA, you're not going to be doing interviews in Newsweek or publishing an autobiography. That's precisely the problem with Ronald Hadley Stark, who is one of the most insane characters in the history of LSD -- and that's really saying something, don't you think?
Take some time meditating on that photo of him, by the way -- because it's the only verified picture of him that exists at the moment. This is not an article that lends itself to illustrations.
The Super-Context
For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. There were a lot of famous and infamous names in the mix, yet curiously, very few of them ever overlap with Ronald Stark. Yesterday we discussed Al Hubbard -- but there's no evidence that he and Stark ever even crossed paths. Although, as we'll see, Stark had considerable CIA connections, there's also no evidence that Stark had any connection with, or even knowledge of, the MKULTRA program. Then again, 99% of those files were destroyed in 1973.
Where Stark did connect was a meeting in in 1969 with a hippie drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (No, not kidding.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid, baby. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career.
Jim Keith offers a paragraph of details on Stark's twilight years that I've never seen corroborated, or even mentioned, anywhere else. That could just mean he did his job better than most journalists, or it could mean he's repeating rumors and gossip -- either way, for the sake of completeness:
Stark...was seen at the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, and was also present at the student demonstrations and labor strikes in Milan in 1969. In the 1970s he lived a posh lifestyle in Italy, hobnobbing with the sicilian Mafiosi, espionage agents of various coloration, and terrorists.
Some Heavy Dudes
Researching Roland Stark, I was reminded of people like Porter Goss, Andijra Puharich, or Barry Seal: it is unreal how much this guy got around. I found him cropping up in articles I had from years ago, like Micheal E. Kreca's report on the manufacturing of the drug war. Stark shows up with some exceptionally creepy company:
Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.
It's kinda suspect how the entire dark side of the hippie years came from California, a continuous stain that kept coming for five straight years. The Process Church shows up in every assassination, occult murder, and lone weirdo event during the late 60's and early 70's. They're connected to L. Ron Hubbard, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, even the murder of Nicole Simpson, years later. Also, our favorite sociologist technocrat, William Sims Bainbridge, spent three years with them -- studying and learning. He published a book about it in 1978: Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult
It probably sounds way more lurid than it was. Bainbridge didn't exactly make it sound like a frat party in hell: "there was no violence and no indiscriminate sex, but I found a remarkably aesthetic and intelligent alternative to conventional religion." You can read more in his essay Social Construction from Within: Satan's Process.
Giorgio Floridia
Most of what's known about Ronald Stark today is through an Italian magistrate named Giorgio Floridia, who released Stark from Italian prison in 1979. Apparently, Stark had gotten himself caught in 1975, and spent the following years trying to convince anyone and everyone that he was operating with the blessings of the United States government. Four years later, he finally managed to persuade Floridia, who cited "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had given him. That series went like this:
Floridia cited Stark's frequent prison visits from Wendy M. Hansen at the US Consulate in Florence, "Dear Ron" letters from Charles C. Adams at the US Embassy in London, addressed to Stark's LSD lab in Brussels (siezed by Italian police after his arrest), and his links with Philip B. Taylor III at the US Consulate in Rome.
Floridia also claims Stark worked for the Defense Department from 1960-62, and recieved paychecks from Fort Lee, in New Jersey. It is worth considering that Stark might have exaggerated his role and connections, and even fabricated evidence, in presenting his case to the magistrate who was in a position to free him. Either way, it worked. Stark was released on parole....and disappeared days later.
In terms of Floridia's motivation, it's worth considering the fate of the guy who came before him:
In June 1978 a Bologna magistrate, Graziano Gori, was assigned to investigate Stark and his astounding web of associates. A few weeks later, Gori was killed in a car wreck.
That, of course, might be the most "impressive proof" of all.
Somehow Not the End
Stark turned up in Holland in 1982. He got deported the next year and apparently died in custody -- because when Italy requested that he be extradited on terrorism charges, the US replied with a copy of Stark's death certificate. (You guessed it -- "heart attack.")
Of course, lets keep things in perspective, here. The 1960s were an incredible explosion of pure human love and positive energy. Everyone woke up to social injustice and racial prejudice and saved the world. I don't want to pretend that the "counterculture" was some sort of big mirage teevee show to keep people distracted. FBI never ran an operation called DEADHEAD, and they certainly never wrote any documents claiming that their employee, Jerry Garcia, was a huge help in "siphoning off student dissent and re-channeling it into self-destructive hedonism."
I could do no better for an ending than this Kreca quote:
To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.
Be sure to check out the Cult of the Dead Cow's review of Acid: A New Secret History of LSD" -- full of further information on Stark.
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Filed in: Social Control
Next entry: BF Skinner's Daughter is Alive and Well
Previous Entry: Scientists on Acid: The Story Behind "Changing Images of Man"
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Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.1. Thirtyseven on Jul 13, 2007 at 7:10 PM permalink
From Acid: A New Secret History of LSD
However, [Stark] projected himself as interested in a lot more than money. He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics. He intimated, for example, that he had contacts with the Tibetan freedom fighters loyal to the Dalai Lama and with the Japanese Mafia who could help smuggle LSD into Tibet and dose the Chinese occupiers… however, the Idylwild hippies could not have possibly guessed that Ron Stark operated on four continents and compartmentalized his international activities so that those he did business with - be they American hippies, Lebanese warlords, corporate lawyers, British scientists, Japanese Mafioso or Italian train-bombers - would have little knowledge of his ‘other’ activities. He could speak ten languages fluently and had the ‘bottle’ [of LSD], cunning, charm, and knowledge to pass himself off in various situations as a businessman, chemist, doctor, art collector, drug dealer, political activist and even as a Palestinian guerilla.” (p. 20-21)
2. Chewie on Jul 14, 2007 at 2:54 PM permalink
Holy shit, that’s one hell of a way to kick off a meeting. A kilo has to be enough to dose a small country!
3. Thirtyseven on Jul 14, 2007 at 3:01 PM permalink
Actually, that’s apparently over 10 million hits—so, more like a medium country.
4. Alan Cabal on Jul 14, 2007 at 6:34 PM permalink
Schrodinger’s Acid Connection, heh. Don’t even attempt to collapse the waveform on THIS one…
5. Terry on Jul 17, 2007 at 1:00 PM permalink
I like the new look! I haven’t been here for awhile, it seems you have changed your rss feed from an internal link to a feedburner one, so I wasn’t alerted to the new posts. I was going to change my feed for my site to feedburner, but I’m not so sure now. Is there an option to set up that lets subscribers to the old feed know automatically that there’s a new url?
Anyway, great post!
I heard of this guy through the Psychedelics Encyclopedia, that mentions him only briefly, saying that he was behind the Orange Sunshine acid and had brought over 35 million hits from Europe.
I did a few searches at Google books and came across a Senate Judiciary Committee report titled “Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud: ‘The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’.” It has a few snippets about Stark in there, saying he was a chemist from New York who was worth $1,400 in April 1964 and by 1968 was worth 1.2 million; was a close associate of Nicholas Sand and was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in 1973.
One book that I have, however, goes into detail on his time in Italy - Philip P. Willan’s Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. From pp. 308-313, Willan has a lot to say on Stark. He was arrested in Bologna on drug charges in Feb. 1975, and was connected to the masterminds behind the Via Fani massacre and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. We’re talking P2 (Propaganda Due) and Gladio intrigue. While in prison he cavorted with members of the Red Brigades (Renato Curcio and Pietro Bertolazzi) and gained their friendship; told stories of his Palestinian terrorist connections (PFLP), his alias “Ali Khoury,” and that he wanted to form “an international terrorist organization free of Marxist-Leninist ideology, an ideal vehicle for acts of controlled political provocation” (Willan 310). He even supplied his Red Brigade contacts with a “cryptographic system for coded radio communications.”
Stark played both sides and seems to have been adept at dialectics. Besides the left-wing terrorists, Willan says, “documents confiscated at the time of his arrest show that he had been in touch with Silvo Lima, Andreotti’s political ally allegedly linked to the Mafia, and with Prince Gianfranco Alliata di Montereale, linked to freemasonry and the Mafia and implicated in the Borghese coup attempt. ... evidence of contact with Graziano Verzotto, an associate of Sindona’s ...A confiscated letter to Wendy Hansen [from Stark], American vice-consul in Florence, expressed the view that circumstances were not yet ripe for a military coup in Italy. Most interesting of all, though, was evidence that he had been in touch with Vito Miceli, former director of Italian military intelligence. A complex and never fully resolved tale involving Miceli leads back, by a roundabout route, to the Moro affair” (Ibid. 312).
6. anti_material on Jul 18, 2007 at 1:28 PM permalink
Very good work. After this, eye spent the rest of the day reading that Lords of acid article and researching the brotherhood of eternal love. very deep stuff.
Im thinking about starting a new chapter
7. lars on Jul 21, 2007 at 10:03 PM permalink
My grandfather was Stark’s chemist and david black doesn’t believe in “drugs”. Stark is a lying prick thief is he had anything to do with the klan (cia). eG: telling some california surfer bums, acid thieves themselves, that if they want to make it the labs were in france because he had legit (ie not klansdestine, all non cerimonial nonorthodox rye is punishible by execution hoffmann was as stupid as these kids) precursors set up for anyone who wanted to make it has nothing to do with the fact that all of it was made in the united states between 1945-7...lavender, sunshine was leftover precursors from THE production run like it was more vintage silver, its all the same thing, sponsored by aldrich, the precursor supply for all of science. now in saying that, do you now twist the word sponsored to mean that some dea klan wizard will call up aldrich asking if they know anything? the scientist who designed the legal lsd like amphetamine complex will tell you the same thing, he knew nothing about it personally and stark came much too soon for the security drugs we were cooking for the still legal world of drugs so noone would have any problems destroying their natural ketamine. fuck owsley, he ran around like he was in a legal acid videogame until he destroyed the whole earth by personally having acid made illegal. . taking our catalog of 4000 or whatever compounds and having a tickertape parade as if you were the supreme dragon himself by calling yourself klan is about the stupidest thing i have ever seen anyone do, especially since stark was just riding a wave while there was a demand. all those people looked like idiots. my dad was the head of the black panther party as we had antiracism security drugs. fuck this place called earth I don’t even have any.
425-971-6682
8. lars on Jul 21, 2007 at 10:08 PM permalink
there is grain from all over the world in that acid...the prebuddhist order of the 5 grains, grain from africa, north at least where it was found that i know of, indian buffalo grass, indian rye, dozens of american grasses such as california rainbow grain from india, the czech acid is in it, the blue green osscillating wheat yes. anyway I know the doctor who made the lavender components and some of their analogs
burmese purple, south america, 1500’s belgian geomancy aka orowheat, boston, england’s largest grain mill was involved.
i hate living in this world
9. Phillippe on Jul 24, 2007 at 4:08 PM permalink
You mentioned Barry Seal as having “got around”. Yes, he did, on the CIA’s payroll - $20 million worth of payroll, to be exact. Most of us aren’t seen as having that much potential to challenge the ruling elite, so instead of duffel bags full of $100 bills or secretive bank accounts, we get pillaged and churned through the film industry.
10. norman douglas on Jul 25, 2007 at 1:31 AM permalink
isn’t the process church of the final judgment credited with the liner notes for the original funkadelic albums, “maggot brain” and “america eats its young?” does this mean that p-funk is mind control? is george clinton [and bootsy collins and bernie worrell] on somebody’s payroll we don’t know about? have they been faking the funk?
somebody help me!
and please think about the children!
peace