These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. If the assignments received by Powers had not been of a criminal nature, his masters would not have supplied him with a lethal pin, the prosecutor said in his opening statement. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. President Kennedy had assigned lawyer James Donovanportrayed by Tom Hanks in the 2015 film Bridge of Spiesto negotiate release of POWs from the Bay of Pigs. Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th centuryunless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. His use of alcohol and narcotics was legendary, but he was also a cop who did pursue jazz figures, including Billie Holiday. Few historical studies mention his name. In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them double, triple and quadruple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. On January 17, 1961, a squad of six Congolese and two Belgian officers took Lumumba out of confinement, brought him to a jungle clearing, shot him, and dissolved his remains in acid. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. Grunden on Kinzer, 'Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. This plot was also aborted. One was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 20, 1956. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit. After reading it, according to the official note taker, Eisenhower turned to Dulles and said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated., There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds, the note taker wrote, and the meeting continued.. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. Gottlieb chose a poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. [1] Early years and education How did they end up in his program? He married Margaret Marshal Moore on 12 September 1942, in Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. With the stuff thats in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated., Gottlieb coolly explained to Devlin what was in the poison kit and how to use it. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb (Editor), Christopher Brookhouse (Editor), Charles L.P. Silet (Contributor), Christopher Morris (Contributor) 3.25 avg rating 4 ratings published 2002. Im Joe from Paris, he said. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. 's assassination plots. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. Olsons family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick. By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 drivers, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. That was one of their big avenues of investigation. It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. (Originally broadcast Sept. 2019) Also, Justin Chang reviews, 'Small Axe,' Steve McQueen's new collection of five films set in London's West Indian community. He spied on musicians and entrapped them, including Billie Holiday, and Billie Holiday being busted was a turning point in her career because she couldn't get a cabaret license. Glickman was an American artist living in Paris in 1952, when he joined a group of fellow Americans at a caf, among them was Sidney Gottlieb. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains, an orange flash lit the sky one spring morning in 1960. They didn't know what he had done abroad. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. Why was it ended? If Castro became disoriented and incoherent during one of those speeches, he would presumably lose popular support. . On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. And then when the person was in the transition phase between comatose and hyperactive, they would electroshock him with very high doses, hoping that maybe this combination would be the thing that could blow away a person's mind. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a . Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. And in the context of the time, who would argue? GROSS: You describe him as the poisoner in chief, and that's not just about the LSD experiments. Sidney Gottlieb - Wikipedia [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. However, Sidney's children's names are not public on any database that I can find (other than Stephen who died in 2017). GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. That testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottliebs tools ever made public. Sidney Gottlieb Obituary (2022) - Washington, DC - The Washington Post Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. Although CIA officers worked closely with the Congolese and Belgians who did the deed, they did not participate in or witness the execution. As he fell, his thoughts turned to the suicide pin he was carrying. The first of two options grew out of Gottliebs fascination with LSD. It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. He was born in the Bronx under his real name Joseph Sch[n]eider as son of Orthodox J immigrants from Hungary. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. What Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the Second World War for doing in concentration camps. Rosellis contacts in the Havana underworld made him an ideal partner for the CIA. GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. These bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. GROSS: So just so I understand this correctly - so the CIA basically set up phony philanthropic foundations which then funded university and college research, and it's through those research experiments that people like Ginsberg and Kesey and Robert Hunter got introduced to LSD. Can you give us a summary of what he said? So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. If they had not emigrated, Sidney Gottlieb might well himself have been brought up in Central Europe, forced into a ghetto, brought to a concentration camp and become the subject of one of these grotesque Nazi medical experiments. In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. Sidney Solomon Gottlieb (1890 - 1963) - Genealogy We were fed a lot of books and movies about the idea of mind control, that you could hypnotize someone or give someone a drug that would make them do something that otherwise they would never do. So he was kind of a proto hippie. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. On Friday, 11 August, the Committee approved the release of the transcript to the Office of General Counsel for use in depositions in an ongoing . So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. Stephen Kinzer's new book book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. And he made an astonishing variety of covert tools from all those things you see on TV like cameras that you can fit inside a cigarette lighter or a tie clip, all the way to more bizarre things like a rubber boat, a car with a secret compartment to smuggle agents out of foreign countries, a compressor for foreign currency so you could pack a huge amount of it into a small container. No way was found to use them. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where in 1942 he married Margaret Moore, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries who served in India, where she was born. He had sort of a check off from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. Yes, gangster John Handsome Johnny Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. It would have been murder . Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how the CIA worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. Since July 3, 1863, there have been many calls for Confederate flags to be returned to their home states, and in particular, for the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment flag return to Virginia. Later, White was moved to San Francisco, where he set up one of the craziest MKUltra projects that was known inside the agency as Operation Midnight Climax. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. GROSS: Now, there's a much darker side to this program because a lot of people who were being experimented on, they were prisoners. Tell us about that. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. Brother of Julius Gottlieb. As he walked through the African heat and stepped into an airport taxi, Joe from Paris could not avoid reflecting on the war into which he was plunging. Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. . Nonetheless, he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. MK-Ultra - HISTORY Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. Both wings blew off. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. Gottlieb approached Devlin and extended his hand. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments. At the trial, the cardinal appeared disoriented, spoke in a monotone and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. Allen Dulles, who ran the CIAs covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the agency, considered his mind control projectfirst named Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MK-ULTRAto be of supreme importance, the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. Who were those people? Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. ''The war never really ended for us. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. He decided to transfer to a school that offered a legitimate agricultural biology course, and wished to attend the University of Wisconsin. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. Stars were aligning. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. He forgot who was deputy was. Visited in retirement by the son of his late colleague Frank Olson, he was residing in an "ecologically correct" home in Culpeper, Virginia, where he raised goats, ate yogurt and advocated peace and environmentalism. No. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Of the CIA poison kit, Devlin later wrote that after Gottlieb handed it to him, my mind was racing. One of Gottliebs aides later testified that he had ordered this operation without informing his boss. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. The CIA was running one in my lab. In 1948, he found a job at the National Research Council, where he described being "exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens." He made a list of the ways he thought drugs could be used to affect behavior. At this point Subproject 27[9] (basic research of LSD) was a funding subproject that combined previous subprojects, including payment to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals for LSD, John Mulholland's The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (subproject 15 magic support, Mulholland Supplement), and further procurement of LSD (subproject 18), but it grew to almost 150 documented subprojects, including a microwave gun and the search for alternatives to LSD, which led to later programs like Project MKCHICKWIT, most of which focused on South America. The experiments were useless, Mr. Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired. do to Eric Olson's father? This was entirely acceptable to Bissell.. CIA officers in Europe and Asia were regularly capturing suspected enemy agents and wanted to develop new ways to draw prisoners in interrogation away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will. Fortunately, Powers had a way out. During 1961 and 1962, intermediaries working for the CIA passed several packets of Gottliebs botulinum pillscalled L-pills because they were lethalto gangsters for delivery to contacts in Cuba. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Sidney Gottlieb (born Joseph Scheider August 3, 1918 March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and '60s assassination attempts and mind control program, known as Project MKUltra. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. This was an operation in which White would assemble a stable of prostitutes who would bring their men back to an apartment that the CIA hired and furnished, feed them LSD and George Hunter White would sit in an adjoining apartment sitting on a portable toilet, drinking pitchers of martinis while watching people having sex under the influence of LSD with the vague idea that this was somehow going to help the United States defeat communism. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. He bought land with an old log cabin outside a small Virginia town, Boston, where he practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and herding goats. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. Thus, as a result of the investigation it was established that the substance contained on the needle inside the pin, judging from the nature of its effect on animals, could, according to its toxic doses and physical properties, be included in the curare group, the most powerful and quickest-acting of all known poisons. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. That left poison. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. 's darkest secrets. DAVIES: Stephen Kinzer speaking with Terry Gross, recorded last year, about his book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," which is now out in paperback. His imagination was just as fertile when he was inventing spy tools for CIA officers as it had been earlier when he was trying to devise ways of finding mind control techniques. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. On August 20, 1951, Dulles ordered Bluebird to be expanded and centralized, and renamed the Project Artichoke, which quickly became a power base for Gottlieb. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal. He did not reveal much in his testimony, besides saying he had destroyed nearly all records of what he did during his time at the agency. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. [Redacted] distinctly remembers the flaps-and-seals job he had to do on the box and on each of the cigars, both to get at the cigars and to erase evidence of tampering . So how high does it fly, really? He stuttered, and had a limp. He had tested such an aerosol. What barbarism!. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. He knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve anything he wanted to do, and this increased his ambitions. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that countrys leader. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. At least one other couple stayed for years. After 5 years in California the couple moved back to Virginia to a new home in a richer, but more rural area to spent their retirement years. But he will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security, the man who brought LSD to the C.I.A. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. However, it turns out that there were some found in other places. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. Sidney Gottlieb of the Central Intelligence Agency testifies during 1977 Senate hearings on CIA abuses (AP Photo), https://www.historynet.com/unassuming-chemist-was-the-cias-poisoner-in-chief/, Jerrie Mock: Record-Breaking American Female Pilot, Why? After months of experimenting on agents and prisoners left Gottlieb unsatisfied, he sought help from the Special Operations Division at Detrick. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. Sidney Gottlieb - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia . Only one was made, since all agreed that if a driver used it, disaster would have struck, and the U-2 program would be history. Clear rating. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA Records Center and ordered the archivist to destroy boxes full of MKUltra records, and he wrote in his report that these records were destroyed over my stated objections. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government. He was 80 and had spent his later years caring for dying patients, trying to run a commune, folk dancing, consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests. 2, but he did a lot of work on No. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. Spitting it out, Vito realized he had grabbed his cyanide-filled ampule. Gottlieb was never convicted of any crimes. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. [citation needed], In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhowerand under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans Richard M. BissellGottlieb proposed spraying Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and saturating Castro's shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. [2], Gottlieb along with his wife, Margaret, moved back to the United States to Santa Cruz, California to be more involved in their young grandchildren's lives. In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The first of these were the LSD experiments. No one knows what became of the victims. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. KINZER: This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb story. [1], Gottlieb was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents Fanny and Louis Gottlieb in the Bronx on August 3, 1918. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. But Bulger was one of many prisoners across America who unwittingly were fed huge doses of LSD, and the reason for this was very simple. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? The grail he sought eluded him. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task, science historian Ed Regis wrote. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. Detrick, his indispensable base, still contains untold stories of the cruelty that began therejust 50 miles from the center of the government that has kept them sealed for decades. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. The Coldest - The Washington Post Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. And the people who might be supervising him really don't want to hear about it for reasons that have to do with the old CIA code, which is the code of all secret services - the less you know, the better. Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. TERRY GROSS: Stephen Kinzer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE, later known as the U-2 spy plane. Stephen Kinzer's book, 'Poisoner in Chief,' exposes how CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies of the U.S. government.
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