Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. And patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value that's so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. On July 13, 1951, Gottlieb had his first day of work at the CIA. It contained a vial of liquid botulinum; a hypodermic syringe with an ultra-thin needle; a small jar of chlorine that could be mixed with the botulinum to render it ineffective in an emergency; and accessory materials, including protective gloves and a face mask. Second, CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or otherwise, what they called expendable. Clear rating. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. ", 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. It was part of his effort to test all kinds of substances, including naturally occurring ones like shrubs and trees and barks and mushrooms and fish parts and animal pieces, as possible tools for mind control. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. 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. And the people who were observing these experiments, like George Hunter White, had no background in psychology or anything that would allow them to assess these situations in a clinical way. 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. Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Zhou Enlai would eat from. On November 29, his enemies captured him. 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. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. He obtained a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1943. 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. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if captured. Within one minute after the prick the dog fell on his side, and a sharp slackening of the respiratory movements of the chest was observed, a cyanosis of the tongue and visible mucous membranes was noted. He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research, including non-consensual human experiments.[8]. 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. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. Soviet military commanders, frustrated by their inability to stop U-2 overflights, had been steadily improving their air defenses in ways the CIA had not detected. by. 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. A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master's degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA. As chief of the agency's technical services division, he served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. Mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power, that the idea of it disturbing a few lives or losing even a few hundred lives could not be seen as important enough to outweigh that imperative. With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. KINZER: After all the experiments that led to deaths in unknown numbers around Europe and Asia and led to unknown torments across the United States, Gottlieb, who was, in the end, a scientist, was forced to reach the conclusion that he had failed. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. [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 . Well, he didn't get too far on No. He had two sons and two daughters. 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. KINZER: This is one of the things that makes the Gottlieb story so fascinating. None of the plans succeeded. We'll be right back after a short break. KINZER: Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. Why was it ended? 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. Vitos taste for lemon lozenges had led other drivers to call him the Lemon Drop Kid. he CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. 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. Eisenhower had ordered the Agency to kill Lumumba, and he had been killed. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government, Devlin wrote. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." This evolved into MK-ULTRA, a program Gottlieb headed starting in 1953. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 but anti-Castro plotting went on. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. 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. Sidney Gottlieb (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 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. 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. 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. He used all the substances that he confiscated from people. So Gottlieb was the chief CIA chemist. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. GROSS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, thank you for this book. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. 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? He had tested such an aerosol. He believed the agency. KINZER: As the chief CIA chemist, it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin. But Bluebird lacked scientific knowledge and obedience; Dulles wanted Gottlieb to get it back on course. It's now out in paperback. He had already compounded lethal poisons. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. Research Notes 's darkest secrets. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. The CIA awarded him a medal. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. STEPHEN KINZER: During the early period of the Cold War, in the late '40s and early 1950s, the CIA became paralyzed with a fear that communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And the idea was to try to draw out information and to see whether drugs could make people talk, and of course, they found out things that are very obvious - that people will talk. That left poison. Inside the grooves was a sticky brown substance.. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. 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. Gottlieb could provide it. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. Making poison to kill foreign leaders was no longer Gottliebs job. Roselli said he would prefer something nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out-and-out ambushing. He and his Mafia partner Sam Giancana offered the CIA a counterproposal: give us poison that takes time to kill, so our assassin can escape. Gottlieb surreptitiously slipped LSD into Glickman's drink; it derailed his life. . He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. Maheu became the conduit through which the CIA passed instructions and devices to gangsters who were to assassinate Castro. So Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments. Gottlieb administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. So he was kind of a proto hippie. Project BLUEBIRD was already under way when Gottlieb was brought on board; it experimented with "Special Interrogation" techniques on captured prisoners overseas at black sites like Camp King, Fort Clayton, and Villa Schuster, using drugs to attempt to break their ego control and elicit information. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. 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. 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.. He grew his own vegetables. . His use of alcohol and narcotics was legendary, but he was also a cop who did pursue jazz figures, including Billie Holiday. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. KINZER: I think that's largely correct. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. They agreed that Gottlieb himself should bring it to Leopoldville. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. TERRY GROSS: Stephen Kinzer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. The toxins were designed to kill not immediately, but after a few hours. psychologist who vetted Mr. Gottlieb -- ''one of the most brilliant men I've ever known'' -- and worked with him for 22 years, said the agency began the tests because it was gripped by ''a great fear'' in the cold war. 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. He stuttered. Tell us about that. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. Making them was no great challenge. Nonetheless Gottlieb returned to Washington with a new credential. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. In the years after World War II, American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology whipped the country into a nationalistic fervor to protect American cultural and political dominance from a supposed impending Soviet takeover. Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. By now, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had a suicide tool hidden inside a hollowed silver dollar. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. 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. 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.. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt.
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