[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. The CIA was running one in my lab. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. The first of these were the LSD experiments. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. So these were the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one. He married Margaret Marshal Moore on 12 September 1942, in Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Research Notes 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. Mind control, he finally came to conclude, is a myth. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. ''He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA. 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. That testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottliebs tools ever made public. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottliebs chemical base. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. 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. That left poison. How did the CIA find out about LSD? It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. How did they end up in his program? It hired a University of Wisconsin biochemist, Ira Baldwin, to run the program and asked him to find a site for a new bio-research complex. Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task, science historian Ed Regis wrote. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. One of Kinzer's previous books was about the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles. 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. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. 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. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. 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. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. 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. By now, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had a suicide tool hidden inside a hollowed silver dollar. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. Leary was fascinated by this. Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. So Gottlieb really lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde life. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, insistently demanded the CIA crush Castro. Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia, and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was; essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period? Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. [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. There were places she couldn't perform in. The Kennedys were on our back constantly, Samuel Halpern, who served at the top level of the covert action directorate at the time, said, They were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro. CIA official Richard Helms, who later headed the agency from 1966 until 1973, felt the pressure directly. My plan was to stall, to delay as long as possible in the hope that Lumumba would either fade away politically as a potential danger or that the Congolese would succeed in taking him prisoner. Devlin locked the kit in his office safe, where it would lose potency. There were no more near misses. 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. . Late on the afternoon of September 26, 1960, Devlin, who had a cover job as a consular officer at the American embassy, left work and headed toward his car. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. 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. So his imagination was very fertile. They told their friends about it. KINZER: He was trying everything. 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. 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.". The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. He later transferred to the Food and Drug Administration, where he developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body. This evolved into MK-ULTRA, a program Gottlieb headed starting in 1953. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. In a dramatic speech to the Supreme Soviet a week after the shoot-down, he revealed that large sections of the U-2 had been recovered and that Powers was alive and in custody. Army scientists complied. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon. 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. KINZER: As the chief CIA chemist, it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin. He forgot who was deputy was. Cleaving to old habits of secrecy, his wife declined to disclose the cause of Mr. Gottlieb's death. What barbarism!. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." Gottlieb chose a poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. Gottlieb was allowed to work for 10 years without anybody supervising him or even really being aware or wanting to be aware of what he was doing. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. The experiments were useless, Mr. Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired. 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. 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. 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. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. On March 9, 1943, the Army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and purchased several adjacent farms to provide extra room and privacy. He knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve anything he wanted to do, and this increased his ambitions. . 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. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. Sidney Gottlieb, chemist and intelligence officer: born New York 3 August 1918; married 1942 Margaret Moore (two sons, two daughters); died Washington, Virginia 7 March 1999. 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. 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. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. Tim Leary, who became the great guru of LSD, first came across psychedelics through Sidney Gottlieb, although like all these other people, he had never heard Gottlieb's name because Gottlieb lived in complete invisibility. During this period, Fort Detricks public profile rose uncomfortably. 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 . In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. A Cold War showdown loomed. 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. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. Looking at it more closely, we could see the body of the pin to be a sheath not fitting quite tightly against the head. That secrecy was partially shattered by the Church Committee, a committee - it was a Senate committee from the 1970s that was chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. The CIA called it suicide. . There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. . . [1], Gottlieb was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents Fanny and Louis Gottlieb in the Bronx on August 3, 1918. Gottlieb hesitated. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. 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. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Finally he gave his approval. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. In his freezers, he kept biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. Gottlieb remembers the scheme as being one that was talked about frequently but not widely, and as being concerned with killing, not merely influencing behavior.. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. After proceeding through training, he was named chief of the newly formed Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. 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. So how high does it fly, really? Gottlieb surreptitiously slipped LSD into Glickman's drink; it derailed his life. Stanley Gottlieb is an interesting individual, and according to at least one FOIA PDF on The Black Vault website, a Stanley (perhaps not Scott's father) was at one time hired as a CIA operative. 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. 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. There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedywho was after all his man, his right-hand man in these mattersto unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found, Helms later testified. As he fell, his thoughts turned to the suicide pin he was carrying. The new nation immediately fell into violent chaos. GROSS: You describe him as the poisoner in chief, and that's not just about the LSD experiments. Tell us about that. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. All rights reserved. Then he held up an enlarged photo of the poison needle. Later on he built himself one of the first solar homes in Virginia. 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. 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 were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. KINZER: This is one of the things that makes the Gottlieb story so fascinating. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. The following was established during the investigation of the pin. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. Can you give us a summary of what he said? Gottlieb and colleagues were tasked with making that substance and imagining how it could be delivered. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. 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.. We'll be right back after a short break. GROSS: Well, there's plenty more to talk about, but we have to take a short break here. 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. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. I found the revelations in it really remarkable. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. They didn't know what he had done in prisons inside the United States. Spitting it out, Vito realized he had grabbed his cyanide-filled ampule. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. 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. In 1948, he found a job at the National Research Council, where he described being "exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens." Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. He survived only because he had not bitten it. 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. 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. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. GROSS: So before Sidney Gottlieb started experimenting with LSD, he ran CIA experiments with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, mescaline. He bought land with an old log cabin outside a small Virginia town, Boston, where he practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and herding goats. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. 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. In these places, he carried out his most extreme experiments, some undoubtedly fatal. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. 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. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. 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.
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