At least one other couple stayed for years. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MKUltra. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. Toward the end there were grooves. This Unassuming Chemist Was the CIA's Poisoner in Chief Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. A clubfoot kept him from military service in World War II, and he was always bitter that he missed the war, Mr. Gittinger said. 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. ''He was the most curious man I ever knew,'' Mr. Gittinger said. Aloft, he reached for a lozenge that felt unusually smooth in his mouth and had no taste. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Zhou Enlai would eat from. The people who Sidney Gottlieb hired included George Hunter White, who directed a lot of the MKUltra experiments, and he had been a narcotics agent and led the Narcotics Bureau's campaign against jazz in New York City. Although there may well have been such a plot, the officer Gottlieb named was then assigned in India and has never worked in WH Division nor had anything to do with Cuba operations. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. Now, that doctor later died a natural death, so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish. Tell us about that. CIA deputy director for plans Richard Bissell, who ran the U-2 project, believed that since his planes would fly at improbably high altitudes, Soviet air defense systems would not be able to shoot them down or even track them by radar. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. No one knows what became of the victims. 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. 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. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. 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. GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. This is FRESH AIR. 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.. 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. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency. 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. Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's TechnicalServices Division, died on March 10. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. How CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb - Daily Mail Online Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A - NPR They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIAs highly secretive program to develop ways to control mindsa program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. Bissell ordered six such ampules. He had founded the CIAs Chemical Division and become the Agencys pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. 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. You may have heard stories about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD, through which '60s counterculture luminaries like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were first introduced to the drug. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, insistently demanded the CIA crush Castro. [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. 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. In 1953, he arranged a safe house for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. 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. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. [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. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. [1] Early years and education So the records of MKUltra were destroyed as Gottlieb was leaving office. GROSS: Now, there's a much darker side to this program because a lot of people who were being experimented on, they were prisoners. Nanci Gottlieb, Susan and (son-in-law) Jeff Bernstein and adored grandsons . After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. [2], Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School[citation needed] in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC. 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. 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. 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. He was also part of an informal group of CIA chemists that became known as the health alteration committee. They had come together early in 1960 as a response to President Eisenhowers renewed conviction that the best way to deal with some unfriendly foreign leaders was to kill them. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. GROSS: You know, one of the uses Gottlieb envisioned for LSD was - you could slip it to an unfriendly world leader, and their behavior would be so erratic and weird that they'd lose popularity or they'd be thrown out of office because they would appear to not be able to function normally anymore. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. The CIA inspector general who later investigated this plot reported that an Agency officer did contaminate a full box of fifty cigars with botulinum toxin, a virulent poison that produces a fatal illness some hours after it is ingested. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. Poison was the logical alternative. On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni at Princeton University, referencing the new battlefield of "brain warfare" and the battle for controlling the human mind. Given that summers news, though, Gottlieb could hardly have doubted who the intended target was. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. 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. 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. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. See the article in its original context from. Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was a kind of genius, striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country, while searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life. The squadron commander ordered the ampules packed inside small boxes. Finding ways to kill Castro without using firearmsand, at points in the plotting, also to kill his brother Ral and guerrilla hero Ernesto Che Guevarabecame one of Gottliebs main preoccupations after his return from the Congo. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. Drivers were given no clear instructions on how to react if shot down. Sidney Gottlieb 100th anniversary of his birth | Daily Telegraph However, it turns out that there were some found in other places. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research, including non-consensual human experiments.[8]. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. We'll be right back. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. First-hand testimony, fragmentary Government documents and court records show that at least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project, known as MK Ultra. ", 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. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. Upon returning, he reported his brush with death. 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. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. 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. Under the arrangements provisions, according to a later report, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.. 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. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Senior officers at the CIA liked the idea. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. The U-2 squadron and its missionto photograph Soviet military installationswere among Americas most classified secrets. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. This also contributed to the CIA rapidly expanding its experimental methods and tactics over the next two decades, in an effort to break down and rebuild the human mind to work in its favor, falsely believing that the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. Gottlieb approached Devlin and extended his hand. 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. Gottlieb created the MKUltra program, which experimented with psychoactive drugs like LSD to see what the effects were, with the goal of learning if LSD could be weaponized as a form of mind control. Gottlieb could provide it. He obtained a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1943. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. And he spent years at the head of that operation. 's assassination plots. In the most humiliating moment of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to admit that he had authorized his spokesmen to lie about the U-2. 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. He was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion. He also became head of the CIA program that creates high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. Four possible approaches were considered: (1) something highly toxic, such as shellfish poison to be administered with a pin (which Technical Services Division head Cornelius Roosevelt said was what was supplied to Gary Powers); (2) bacterial material in liquid form; (3) bacterial treatment of a cigarette or cigar; and (4) a handkerchief treated with bacteria, stated the official summary of a later interview with Roosevelt. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. Stars were aligning. The grail he sought eluded him. He stuttered. ''He bought that old house and the land with the idea of setting up a communal home, with several families living together,'' said Mr. Gittinger, a lifelong friend. A CIA report describes the first as a pencil designed as a concealment device for delivering the pills. More elaborate was what the report calls a ballpoint pen which had a hypodermic needle inside, that when you pushed the lever, the needle came out and poison could be injected into someone. According to another description, the needle was designed to be so fine that the target (Castro) would not sense its insertion and the agent would have time to escape before the effects were noticed. A CIA officer in Paris handed this pen to a Cuban CIA asset on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated. And actually, one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish, and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left. This cable seemed to confirm deep fears that Prime Minister Lumumba was about to deliver his spectacularly resource-rich country to the Soviets. He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. [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. 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. His accomplishments at the university, paired with a glowing recommendation from Baldwin, won him admission to the California Institute of Technology, where he received his Doctorate in Biochemistry in June 1943, writing his thesis on "Studies of Ascorbic Acid in Cowpeas.". 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. So we want you to stay with the guy after the thing is over and talk to him and try to draw him out about his work and ask him, for example, you know that plane you've been working on? He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. . After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIAs arsenal of poisons. 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. 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. So he was kind of a proto hippie. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon. They also wanted a "truth serum", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS but never fully realized. What Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the Second World War for doing in concentration camps. 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 had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. GROSS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, thank you for this book. Anyone can read what you share. And seized by this myth, the CIA not only believed that communists had approached or reached this Holy Grail, but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it. Copyright 2020 NPR. The principal driving force was the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if captured. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. It would have been murder . Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. '', 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. I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. 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. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. Only when you get caught up in a cause like that that allows you to put aside conscience and all other moral considerations and even serious scientific considerations can you allow yourself to get caught up in a situation like this where one person is allowed, on his own whim, to go out and torture and kill people. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. of California Press), Framing Hitchcock (Wayne State University Press; coedited with Chris . Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. 's darkest secrets. 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. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment.