He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. Before Army technicians could remove them, two officers from the Special Operations Division packed them into the trunk of a car and drove them to the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, where the CIA maintained a small chemical warehouse. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. '', John Marks, author of the definitive book on the experiments, ''The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate' '' (Times Books, 1979) said Mr. Gottlieb was ''unquestionably a patriot, a man of great ingenuity. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. TSD bought a diving suit, dusted it inside with a fungus which would produce Madura foot, a chronic skin disease, and contaminated the breathing apparatus with a tubercle bacillus, a CIA officer wrote years later. . Inside the dollar was what appeared to be an ordinary straight pin, Francis Gary Powers later wrote. And what skeptics had said at the beginning, which is that you cannot program a person to do something that he or she is basically and deeply and morally opposed to doing, and make them go out and do it. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Gottlieb surreptitiously slipped LSD into Glickman's drink; it derailed his life. GROSS: When the men were having sex with prostitutes and were unknowingly given doses of LSD, weren't they then asked questions to see what their answers would be like under LSD? Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. So these were the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. KINZER: Gottlieb was living in India, working in a hospital for leprosy victims when he got a note from the CIA saying, somebody has figured out who you are, and that somebody is the Church Committee that's investigating the CIA, and they want to talk to you. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. So all of these original strands that came together in the '60s to produce this great countercultural revolt based around LSD can be traced back through these bogus foundations to the CIA and, ultimately, the director of MKUltra, Sidney Gottlieb. 's assassination plots. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. [11][12] He transported these "toxic biological materials" to Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, and although Devlin declined the assignment, a military coup soon overthrew and killed Lumumba. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. [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. He stuttered. The next time Castro traveled outside Cuba, thallium would be sprinkled into the boots he left outside his hotel room to be shined; his beard would fall out, leaving him open to ridicule and overthrow. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. 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. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. The Castro plot rose to the top of his priority list for the same reason it rose to the top for Bissell and CIA director Dulles. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of surreptitiously administering them. 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. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. Despite the decision that a poison in liquid form would be most desirable, what was actually prepared and delivered was a solid in the form of small pills about the size of saccharine tablets.. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. There was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remained. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. KINZER: In the early 1950s, Gottlieb hired this guy, George Hunter White, to run a safe house for him in New York City to which people would be lured off the street and then given LSD so CIA officers could watch them from an adjoining apartment through a one-way mirror. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. . Well, he didn't get too far on No. | AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. Few historical studies mention his name. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. In 1942, alarmed by reports that Japanese forces were waging germ warfare in China, the Army decided to launch a secret program to develop biological weapons. ''We were in a World War II mode,'' Mr. Gittinger said. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? Choosing a poison was not Gottliebs only contribution to the Castro assassination project. 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. 's darkest secrets. He had tested such an aerosol. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and unusual ways of surreptitiously administering them should they be needed to kill enemies, including world leaders, and he headed the program that created high-tech gadgets for spies. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. Managed by: Private User As part of his work with the hallucinogen, he had planned an experiment, ultimately canceled because of weather conditions, in which an LSD-laced aerosol would be sprayed into a room of unsuspecting partygoers. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. On November 29, his enemies captured him. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. So how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done? From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. This guy had a license to kill. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. At the trial, the cardinal appeared disoriented, spoke in a monotone and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. He hatched a new idea that consumed Artichoke and gave him authority over all CIA research into mind control, including the ability to test drugs on witting and unwitting Americans, which was not being done under Artichoke. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a . It is so hard to reconcile the different parts of Sydney Gottlieb's personality - an Orthodox Jew who works with Nazi doctors on the CIA drug experiments, somebody who has, like, ruined lives, who's created poisons and done these, like, really horrible experiments on people but feels like he himself is a very spiritual person. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. KINZER: Gottlieb had a long career after MKUltra ended, and he went on to become the head of the Technical Services staff, which is the - part of the CIA where they make the tools, the gizmos, the gadgets that spies use. They didn't know what to ask him. One of the techniques they tested in Europe was to sedate a person to the coma state and then feed him extreme doses of stimulants. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. 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.. Gottlieb was to provide the method. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. [6], Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. Stars were aligning. Copyright 2020 NPR. It would have been murder . He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. He did testify at two rounds of hearings, one undercover - that is, under a pseudonym in a private room - another under his own name but also in a private room. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. Stephen Kinzer's new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA. Fortunately, Powers had a way out. 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. . KINZER: As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MKUltra. Nanci Gottlieb, Susan and (son-in-law) Jeff Bernstein and adored grandsons . The Life Summary of Sidney When Sidney Gottlieb was born on 3 August 1918, in The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States, his father, Louis Gottlieb, was 35 and his mother, Fannie Bender, was 30. Could you find a drug that would alter a personality structure in a way that would allow the operator to take control of another person's behavior? With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. Together, those sources reveal Detricks central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders. KINZER: He was trying everything. One batch could not be used because the Cuban official who was to place the pills in Castros food was transferred out of proximity to the Cuban leader. There were places she couldn't perform in. The second option was even stranger. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. [citation needed] He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. As the Cold War began, however, two seemingly unrelated developments on opposite sides of the world stunned the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and gave Detrick a new mission. A heated political debate ensued and when Glickman decided to leave, he was offered a drink to soothe ill feelings. He was to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a much-awaited summit in Berlin in two weeks and did not want to risk disrupting it. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. 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. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, insistently demanded the CIA crush Castro. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. 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. So the records of MKUltra were destroyed as Gottlieb was leaving office. 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. The mobster had never heard of Gottliebno one hadbut he correctly presumed that the CIA must have someone on its payroll who made poison. He did not name Lumumba. Leary was fascinated by this. In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. 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. Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Mr. Gottlieb ''had had a real problem to find a spiritual focus, having gone away from Jewishness,'' Mr. Gittinger said, and he experimented with everything from agnosticism to Zen Buddhism all his life. So George Hunter White, as you say, was a narcotics agent in New York, but he was the kind of narcotics agent who not only lived at the edge of the law. No one knew when Castro would travel, and even if he stayed at a hotel the CIA could penetrate, his security detail would probably not allow his boots to be handled by strangers. Several proved to be deadly. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. But once you got to see if you could transfer those fantasies from the realm of fiction to the realm of reality, they broke down. KINZER: George Hunter White was one of the key operatives of MKUltra, and he stands out even in this extremely bizarre MKUltra cast of Nazi doctors and torturers and obsessed chemists. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. Making them was no great challenge. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. These bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence. Sidney Gottlieb (Editor), Christopher Brookhouse (Editor), Charles L.P. Silet (Contributor), Christopher Morris (Contributor) 3.25 avg rating 4 ratings published 2002. [citation needed], In addition to working with subcontractors, the CIA worked with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Intelligence, though it is unclear what role Gottlieb played in these affairs other than authorization. So White and the people who worked with him would prep these prostitutes, and they would say, we want to find out under what circumstances - under what combination of sex and drugs men would be most likely to reveal secrets. The cigars were so heavily contaminated that merely putting one in the mouth would do the job; the intended victim would not have to smoke it. The report names Gottlieb as a co-conspirator, although without specifying his role. Hurriedly they concocted a cover story: a research plane studying high-altitude weather patterns over Turkey had run into trouble, the pilot had lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen, and the plane had continued on autopilot, lamentably straying deep into Soviet airspace. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. I don't think he ever faced the question or answered the question of whether there are limits to the amount of evil you can do in a righteous cause before the evil begins to outweigh the righteousness. Last week, the SSCI completed its review of the declassified transcripts of Sidney Gottlieb's testimony before the SSCI in 1975 on the MKULTRA project and other behavioral control research programs. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. Im Joe from Paris, he said. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. KINZER: Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. by. His success at ATU won him admission to the University of Wisconsin, where he was mentored by Ira Baldwin, the assistant dean of the College of Agriculture. An experimental dog was given a hypodermic prick with the needle extracted from the pin, in the upper third part of the left hind leg. Gottlieb, who passed away in 1999 at age 81, committed these disgusting crimes with the authority he received from the highest echelons of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control. On July 5, U-2 driver Carmine Vito took off at dawn from Wiesbaden. Originally broadcast Sept. 9, 2019. An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. 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. KINZER: This is one of the things that makes the Gottlieb story so fascinating. Later on, when the CIA became obsessed at the order of the White House in killing Fidel Castro, it was Sidney Gottlieb who made all the poison pills, the poison potions, even the poison wet suit that was supposed to be given to Castro. After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. 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. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. ", https://digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A287129?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=98a815ee66a7e4801535&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=306&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=13#page/1/mode/1up, "Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. Later on he built himself one of the first solar homes in Virginia. Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. He operated almost completely without supervision. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. Gottlieb, now chief of research and development for the Technical Services Staff, had an unmatched knowledge of poisons, which made him the ideal candidate for a delicate assignment. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and potassium cyanide. The lethality of Gottliebs suicide pin and the inability of a leading Russian toxicologist to identify the substance with which Gottlieb had tainted it were testimony to the American scientists talent. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (Sid) was a scientist and chemist working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran the Technical Services Division (TSD) and before that position he ran the Chemical Division within TSD.. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. More about CIA ''He was willing to try anything to discover something.''. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. One of Devlins agents, he said, should use the hypodermic needle to inject botulinum into something Lumumba would ingestas Gottlieb later put it, anything he could get to his mouth, whether it was food or a toothbrush. Devlin later wrote that the kit also included a pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste. It was afraid that the Soviet Union would corner the market on LSD and use it as a chemical weapon or that China would perfect the black art of brainwashing, Mr. Gittinger said. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. 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. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the tortures and unknown horrors that might await him in captivity. Gottlieb and colleagues were tasked with making that substance and imagining how it could be delivered. None of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed amount of explosive, a CIA report stated. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick. He took a vial of poison to the Congo with plans to place it on Lumumba's toothbrush in the summer of 1960. Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950s.It was initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts with the "Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA consultant" George Hunter White under the . Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. Our guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. 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. KINZER: The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972 when his patron Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by Nixon. While the chemist waited, Devlin found an agent thought to have access to Lumumba and able, as the station chief wrote in a cable to Washington, to act as inside man. Ten days after arriving, Gottlieb felt confident enough to fly home. In the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, Mr. Gottlieb, always under orders from the Director of Central Intelligence or his chief spymaster, developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo. No one knew the CIA was making poisons there, but its role as the countrys principal center for research into biological and anti-crop warfare became clear. Sidney Gottlieb. A needle is inserted in the bore.
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