No. So MKUltra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts. Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. Later on he built himself one of the first solar homes in Virginia. Olsons family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. The plan was abandoned when the lawyer decided to present Castro with a different diving suit. These failures brought the CIA, Technical Services, and Gottlieb back to Rosellis original idea: make poison and find a way to feed it to Castro. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Stephen Kinzer about his book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." 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. By 1948, his wife and two daughters were living in a remote cabin near Vienna, Virginia, that had no electricity or running water. California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jerseys ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers by making them national. Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment. 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. On May 13, 1960, just days after the U-2 fiasco, President Eisenhower ordered Castro sawed off. He did not use what CIA security director Sheffield Edwards later called bad words, but everyone present understood this as a presidential directive to remove Castro from power by any means including assassination. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. 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. Upon returning, he reported his brush with death. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick. The principal driving force was the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. That left poison. These included, according to a Senate investigation years later, poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. Vitos taste for lemon lozenges had led other drivers to call him the Lemon Drop Kid. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. 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. 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. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. At one point, he came up with the idea of using a spray can full of LSD to pollute the studio in which Fidel Castro was going to give a radio speech, and then presumably, Castro would become disoriented and, as you say, lose popularity and fall from power. They didn't know what to ask him. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? Bissell told Gottlieb that, pursuant to an order from the highest authority, he was to prepare an incapacitating or fatal potion that could be fed to an African leader. 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. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. 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. The airman faced a burst of criticism for failing to make use of his suicide pin, but after emotions had cooled Powers was praised for his service. In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. He is the longtime editor of two scholarly journals, the Hitchcock Annual (Columbia University Press; coedited with Richard Allen) and the George Herbert Journal.His edited books include Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Univ. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. 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.. After months of experimenting on agents and prisoners left Gottlieb unsatisfied, he sought help from the Special Operations Division at Detrick. So he forgot who his boss was. Pills from another batch were to have been slipped into Castros food or drink at a restaurant he frequented, but he stopped eating there. By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. KINZER: This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb story. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. . Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. He was born in the Bronx under his real name Joseph Sch[n]eider as son of Orthodox J immigrants from Hungary. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). Well, he didn't get too far on No. 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. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? He obtained a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1943. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. The midget submarine that would have had to be used in emplacement of the shell has too short an operating range for such an operation.. They didn't know what he had done in prisons inside the United States. And actually, it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended. 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. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. The CIA was running one in my lab. 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. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. . So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb, although of course he never knew that name. Bissell ordered six such ampules. Gottlieb could provide it. 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. In the '50s and early '60s, Gottlieb headed the secret CIA program MKUltra, which conducted experiments to see if LSD and other drugs could be weaponized as a form of mind control. [10] Gottlieb also played a role in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. 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. 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. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. 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. Less than five months after the downing of Powerss U-2, Gottlieb had flown to the Congo on one of the 20th centurys most extraordinary courier missions. They considered using a sniperhunting good here when light is right, one officer wrotebut ruled out that option because Lumumba was living in seclusion and no reliable sniper was available. Tell us about that. 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. Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MKUltra, by Sidney Gottlieb. 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. If they had known anything like what's in this book, Gottlieb would have been questioned much more seriously, but the Church Committee was focused on a number of other abuses that the CIA had been accused of, like domestic spying, assassination plots in which Gottlieb had played, essentially, only the role of a pharmacist. 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. He stuttered. Less than an hour after Gottlieb and Devlin met in front of the American embassy in Leopoldville, the men were sitting in Devlins living room. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments. On November 29, his enemies captured him. do to Eric Olson's father? So Gottlieb was the chief CIA chemist. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. [15], On October 7, 1975, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under his birth name "Joseph Schneider." [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. Aloft, he reached for a lozenge that felt unusually smooth in his mouth and had no taste. This was entirely acceptable to Bissell.. Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars, the report says. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. 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. Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg when the exploding missile rocked his plane. The Bay of Pigs was a part of this effort, and after the Bay of Pigs failed, there was even a greater push to try to get rid of this Communist influence 90 miles from United States shores . The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. 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. 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. In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. 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. 1 - trying to find out how to destroy the mind of a human being, and that was the purpose of experiments that he carried out in prisons in the United States and at secret detention centers in Europe and East Asia. The idea was that Zhou would be back in China, and the poison wouldn't be able to be traced back to the CIA. KINZER: This is one of the things that makes the Gottlieb story so fascinating. Managed by: Private User From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. The CIA achieved its objective in the Congo unexpectedly and elegantly. One of those prisoners was the famous gangster Whitey Bulger, who was serving time then for hijacking a truck, and he was in the Atlanta Penitentiary. Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. [7], Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. 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. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Leary was fascinated by this. They're working with people who have leprosy. He made a list of the ways he thought drugs could be used to affect behavior. [14] He and his wife spent two years traveling Australia, Africa and India before settling down for several months to run a leper hospital in India. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. 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. They tried to work with the poor. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. Mr. Gottlieb spent his last years in Washington, Va., a pretty village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, working in a hospice, tending to the dying. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. Im Joe from Paris, he said. ", "John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA", "President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sidney_Gottlieb&oldid=1149377811, This page was last edited on 11 April 2023, at 21:11. The attack that blew Powers out of the air came so suddenly that he did not have time to hit the button that would destroy the planes fuselage. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Inside the grooves was a sticky brown substance.. 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. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. They told their friends about it. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. 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 there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. Kinzer spoke with Terry in September of last year, when "Poisoner In Chief" was released in hardback. [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 . By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 drivers, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief. [5] This belief drove the CIA's early forays into mind control operations and led to justifications of countless horrific acts, often with no oversight or accountability. His lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. He was even, by common account, a rather. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. Anyone can read what you share. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an J-american chemist probably best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. 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. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. 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. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. In these places, he carried out his most extreme experiments, some undoubtedly fatal. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. But this too wasnt what it seemed. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. 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. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. . Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? 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. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, insistently demanded the CIA crush Castro. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. A Cold War showdown loomed. Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. He was already the CIAs master chemist. At least one other couple stayed for years. 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. Detrick is today one of the worlds cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. 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. 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. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. So Sidney Gottlieb's MKUltra program was ended in the early 1960s. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. [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. . Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. The decision, to the best of his recollection, was that bacteria in liquid form was the best means [because] Castro frequently drank tea, coffee, or bouillon, for which liquid poison would be particularly well suited . Today, its a cutting-edge lab. His planned summit with Khrushchev collapsed. 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. He decided to consult professionals. And the Senators were able to ask him some probing questions, but really, they didn't know anything about MKUltra. Devlin later recalled lighting a cigarette and staring at his shoes. Author Robert F. ONeill reconsiders three overlooked 1863 cavalry clashes. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. Poison was the logical alternative.
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