awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. GROSS: Well, there's plenty more to talk about, but we have to take a short break here. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. US Official Poisoner Dies - CounterPunch.org Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. 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. In order to take the specialized courses he wished to have, he first attended Arkansas Tech University, where he studied botany, organic chemistry, and principles of dairying. 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 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. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? All rights reserved. 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. It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. 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. This is FRESH AIR. Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. The gangsters wanted poison. ", 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. 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. In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. 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. Leary was fascinated by this. He crossed over a lot. They're working with people who have leprosy. 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. ''We were in a World War II mode,'' Mr. Gittinger said. [1] Early years and education The details are up to you, but its got to be cleannothing that can be traced back to the U.S. government. He handed Devlin the poison kit. 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 wings blew off. Over a period of twenty years as a scientist with the agency, Sidney Gottlieb ran the largest systematic search for mind control techniques in history He presided over medical experiments and. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and werent telling me.. Drivers were given no clear instructions on how to react if shot down. 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. He had already compounded lethal poisons. Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. Obituary: Sidney Gottlieb | The Independent | The Independent The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. 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. At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. One of the techniques they tested in Europe was to sedate a person to the coma state and then feed him extreme doses of stimulants. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIAs arsenal of poisons. More about CIA [15], On October 7, 1975, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under his birth name "Joseph Schneider." Copyright 2020 NPR. 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. [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. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. KINZER: This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb story. An autopsy, Gottlieb assured Devlin, would show normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases., Gottlieb remained in Leopoldville. But this too wasnt what it seemed. 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. [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. [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. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. 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. The first was the show trial of the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty for treason in 1949. Why was it ended? 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? We'll be right back after a short break. 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. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MKUltra. Within 20 seconds after the prick, death set in from respiratory paralysis . If Castro became disoriented and incoherent during one of those speeches, he would presumably lose popular support. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. 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. Of the CIA poison kit, Devlin later wrote that after Gottlieb handed it to him, my mind was racing. 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. And the university researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the CIA. 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. GROSS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, thank you for this book. 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. Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. Yes, gangster John Handsome Johnny Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of surreptitiously administering them. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. Sidney Solomon Gottlieb: Birthdate: November 28, 1890: Birthplace: Alsenz, Germany: Death: February 1963 (72) New Mexico Immediate Family: Son of Jakob Gottlieb and Emilia Gottlieb Husband of Agnes Effie Gottlieb Father of Robert Bruce Gottlieb and Sidney Gottlieb Jr. 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. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. Men will talk after sex. Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." GROSS: You describe him as the poisoner in chief, and that's not just about the LSD experiments. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. In the mid-'50s, the United States set out on a project to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China while he was visiting Indonesia. This was entirely acceptable to Bissell.. 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. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian What Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the Second World War for doing in concentration camps. 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. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. 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. You're not implicated. Sidney Gottlieb - Anti-Gang Stalking Center [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. Sidney Gottlieb (1918-1999) FamilySearch 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? If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. KINZER: You're absolutely right. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? Who were those people? Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. 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. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. GROSS: Even Timothy Leary, who turned a lot of people onto LSD and helped guide them through trips, he found out about LSD because of Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." Since it would entail making poison and devices by which that poison could be delivered, Bissell turned to what had been the Technical Services Staff, now renamed the Technical Services Division. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. On January 17, 1961, a squad of six Congolese and two Belgian officers took Lumumba out of confinement, brought him to a jungle clearing, shot him, and dissolved his remains in acid. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. 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. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. 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. They didn't know what to ask him. 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 . He had founded the CIAs Chemical Division and become the Agencys pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. One batch could not be used because the Cuban official who was to place the pills in Castros food was transferred out of proximity to the Cuban leader. Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. And the Church Committee investigators didn't press him hard enough. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. 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. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. Eisenhower had ordered the Agency to kill Lumumba, and he had been killed. During 1961 and 1962, intermediaries working for the CIA passed several packets of Gottliebs botulinum pillscalled L-pills because they were lethalto gangsters for delivery to contacts in Cuba. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR"). April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests | WIRED The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 drivers, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. [citation needed], In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhowerand under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans Richard M. BissellGottlieb proposed spraying Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and saturating Castro's shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that countrys leader. While the chemist waited, Devlin found an agent thought to have access to Lumumba and able, as the station chief wrote in a cable to Washington, to act as inside man. Ten days after arriving, Gottlieb felt confident enough to fly home. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. 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. Thats because Detrick, still thriving today as the Armys principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIAs hidden chemical and mind control empire. Sidney Gottlieb - Wikipedia He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. KINZER: The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972 when his patron Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by Nixon. But he will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security, the man who brought LSD to the C.I.A. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the tortures and unknown horrors that might await him in captivity. On July 5, U-2 driver Carmine Vito took off at dawn from Wiesbaden. [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 called it suicide. So how high does it fly, really? 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. Gottlieb, now chief of research and development for the Technical Services Staff, had an unmatched knowledge of poisons, which made him the ideal candidate for a delicate assignment. He knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve anything he wanted to do, and this increased his ambitions. But Bluebird lacked scientific knowledge and obedience; Dulles wanted Gottlieb to get it back on course. For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control. He stuttered. Operation Midnight Climax - Wikipedia Except that he was real. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Only one was made, since all agreed that if a driver used it, disaster would have struck, and the U-2 program would be history. 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. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. "We Dissolve Minds": Sidney Gottlieb and His Horrific Experiments An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. ''The war never really ended for us. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. 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. 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. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. So how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done? Gottlieb was to provide the method. Lyndon Johnson kept using political and economic means, including sabotage and other covert work, to undermine Cubas government. So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. He had a special dislike for her because he said the way that she flaunted her furs and her big cars was offensive to him. KINZER: He was trying everything. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. Toward the end there were grooves. As he fell, his thoughts turned to the suicide pin he was carrying. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. We'll be right back. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. During this period, Fort Detricks public profile rose uncomfortably. 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. 2, but he did a lot of work on No. However, poison remained the most appealing option. Grunden on Kinzer, 'Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA One was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 20, 1956. 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. 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. He stuttered. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. And it was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies, and Gottlieb was called to testify. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Poison was the logical alternative. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. He did not name Lumumba. I found the revelations in it really remarkable. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. Sidney Gottlieb was the man for the job. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. 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. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. Thank you for talking with us. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. 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. 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. 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. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. by. He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate dedicated to studying metabolisms of fungi.[4]. He had tested such an aerosol. He stuttered, and had a limp. Gottlieb began considering which lethal or incapacitating germs he would use. Vitos taste for lemon lozenges had led other drivers to call him the Lemon Drop Kid. 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." Steve Kinzer's Biography of CIA Chemist Sidney Gottlieb, Tells the Dark 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. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. Edwards chose a go-between able to approach Mafia figures without there being clear CIA ties: Former FBI agent Robert Maheu, now a private detective, worked for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. 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. On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. So MKUltra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control. Making them was no great challenge. '', 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.
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