Or how about the Central Intelligence Agency dosing unsuspecting United States' citizens with LSD? True, it's an old story, but it may well be a true story, and one of its longest chapters closed last week when a New York jury, in the court of U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood (You remember Kimba. Not Simba! Kimba!), ruled against the estate of artist Stanley Glickman. Until his death in 1992, Glickman insisted that a CIA agent, who for 40 years he consistently described as having a clubfoot, had slipped him a mind-bending mickey in a glass of Chartreuse liqueur at a bar in Paris in 1952, driving Glickman mad and destroying his life.

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Glickman's sad predicament, whatever brought it on, is a long and tangled story. The New York jury didn't buy his claim that the CIA played a part, but the spooksters' role in widely -- and wildly -- experimenting with LSD, even on unaware members of the public, has long been the focus of journalistic and government inquiries. In addition to newspaper and magazine articles, and sworn testimony given at the 1977 Senate hearings on CIA abuses, chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy, at least two books feature extensive, and colorful, coverage of the Company's psychoactive shenanigans -- "Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion," by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (1985) and "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream" by Jay Stevens (1987).

According to "Acid Dreams," and a Feb. 14 article in The Observer, in the 1950s the U.S. government began operating a covert drug-testing program called MK-ULTRA (Where did they get those names? "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." wasn't even on the air yet.) The Observer states that the "architect" of MK-ULTRA was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, who became head of the CIA's chemical division, and two decades later would testify at the Kennedy hearings "about spiking the drinks of unsuspecting Americans" and also "admit that MK-ULTRA tested an array of techniques and substances on dozens of unsuspecting people, and there may well have been hundreds." The U.S. government, the Observer reported, "has over the years issued various qualified denials [of such activities] in the course of seeking to have the [Sidney Glickman] case dismissed."

After Gottlieb's Senate testimony was made public, the Glickman family filed suit in 1983 -- for a period, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark was Glickman's lawyer -- and the case finally went to trial earlier this year, though the artist himself died in 1992. Oddly, on April 27, as the trial was wrapping up, Judge Dominick DiCarlo dropped dead while exercising in the federal court gym. Judge Kimba Wood presided at the remainder of the trial. (Coincidentally -- the Glickman case is full of bizarre intersections -- Wood had thrown out the suit in 1977, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals later reinstated it.)

In any event, it's all over now and it's just as well, perhaps, that Stanley Glickman wasn't around to hear what the jury thought of his story. But two Richard Kimballesque details remain: For more than four decades, Glickman's physical description of the man who dosed him never varied. And even the CIA doesn't deny that Gottlieb, whose activities didn't become public knowledge for over 20 years after Glickman drank the Chartreuse, had a clubfoot.

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