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. Research Notes In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. 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. 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 . Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. The U-2 squadron and its missionto photograph Soviet military installationswere among Americas most classified secrets. Today, its a cutting-edge lab. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. 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. "We Dissolve Minds": Sidney Gottlieb and His Horrific Experiments This plot was also aborted. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. 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. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. Originally broadcast Sept. 9, 2019. Sidney Gottlieb. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. The CIA came up with the same explanation for both: brainwashing. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. Books by Sidney Gottlieb (Author of Alfred Hitchcock) - Goodreads Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. What he did not know and had no way of knowing is that that expedition to Mexico that produced the Life magazine article was paid for by Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA. 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 had tested such an aerosol. Thank you for talking with us. 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. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. He was already the CIAs master chemist. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. 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.. He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. 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. GROSS: And were there any guidelines in effect in the U.S. that would have made it illegal had people known what he was doing? 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. The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to have any problem working as a CIA officer with the doctors who conducted those experiments. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. 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. Stephen Kinzer's new book book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. This is the level of bizarre plots that he became involved with when he was hired as part of a separate aspect of his job besides MKUltra to be the person who devised toxins and psychoactive substances to be used in covert operations by CIA officers around the world. He couldn't remember what part of the CIA he had worked in. 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. MK-Ultra - HISTORY 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. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. 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. 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. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). We'll be right back after a short break. 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. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. . 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. [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. The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, managed to eject and open his parachute. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. The chemists reminded Bissell how Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering had slipped a glass ampule filled with liquid potassium cyanide into his mouth, bit down on it, and died within 15 seconds, cheating the hangman at Nuremberg. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. 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. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIAs arsenal of poisons. 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. So he actually wrote something describing his experience. LSD and Sidney Gottlieb The CIA began to experiment with LSD(lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. [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, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. Men will talk after sex. Sidney Gottlieb was the man for the job. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's TechnicalServices Division, died on March 10. How CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb - Daily Mail Online In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. But Bulger was one of many prisoners across America who unwittingly were fed huge doses of LSD, and the reason for this was very simple. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. . However, poison remained the most appealing option. 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. Steve Kinzer's Biography of CIA Chemist Sidney Gottlieb, Tells the Dark 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. 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. Obituary: Sidney Gottlieb | The Independent | The Independent On July 5, U-2 driver Carmine Vito took off at dawn from Wiesbaden. 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. 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. The following was established during the investigation of the pin. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. 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". Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. 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.. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MKUltra. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. Finding a chemical that would make a beard fall out was just the kind of challenge Gottlieb enjoyed.