Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how the CIA worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies. The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, was expecting him. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. TSD bought a diving suit, dusted it inside with a fungus which would produce Madura foot, a chronic skin disease, and contaminated the breathing apparatus with a tubercle bacillus, a CIA officer wrote years later. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. 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. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. This is FRESH AIR. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. Bissell ordered six such ampules. 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. How did the CIA find out about LSD? Everything was very slapdash and haphazard, so not surprisingly, no serious results ever came out of this, except the fact that we can now sit here and talk about the fact that our tax dollars were used to pay for a bordello run by the CIA in San Francisco to which unwitting men were brought, fed LSD and used as experiments in Sidney Gottlieb's campaign to try to figure out how to penetrate the human mind so it could be controlled in the interests of the United States government and its covert projects around the world. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. by. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. And this became part of his work during the late 1950s and into 1960. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. They told their friends about it. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. [6], Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt. Inside the grooves was a sticky brown substance.. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. He had tested such an aerosol. 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. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, managed to eject and open his parachute. 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. 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. Anyone can read what you share. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. Gottlieb, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. . He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 but anti-Castro plotting went on. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. Few historical studies mention his name. 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. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. He was even, by common account, a rather. 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. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Gottlieb surreptitiously slipped LSD into Glickman's drink; it derailed his life. 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. 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. It was about a couple of Americans who had gone to Mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if captured. We'll be right back after a short break. You're not implicated. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. A couple of days earlier Devlin had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. 's darkest secrets. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. Joe from Paris was Sidney Gottlieb. It would have been murder . No rationalization of defense can justify the evil of mass destruction and disease, they wrote in a statement. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick. Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. He meditated. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. Cleaving to old habits of secrecy, his wife declined to disclose the cause of Mr. Gottlieb's death. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. ''He was willing to try anything to discover something.''. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They're working with people who have leprosy. The toxins were designed to kill not immediately, but after a few hours. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. 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. A needle is inserted in the bore. He was living there when he began working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He stuttered, and had a limp. Hurriedly they concocted a cover story: a research plane studying high-altitude weather patterns over Turkey had run into trouble, the pilot had lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen, and the plane had continued on autopilot, lamentably straying deep into Soviet airspace. That was one of their big avenues of investigation. KINZER: One of the most remarkable discoveries that I made in the research for this book is that the CIA mind control project, MKUltra, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Vitos taste for lemon lozenges had led other drivers to call him the Lemon Drop Kid. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. His older brother was plant biologist David Gottlieb. ", 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. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. 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. So the records of MKUltra were destroyed as Gottlieb was leaving office. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. [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. 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. We're talking about his new book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." This idea was discarded as impractical. Upon returning, he reported his brush with death. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. 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. Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. LSD was just one of the mind-altering drugs that were used in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. Gottlieb and colleagues were tasked with making that substance and imagining how it could be delivered. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a . LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. A Cold War showdown loomed. Except that he was real. 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. The target would get sick and die exactly as if hed been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. So these were the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. You may have heard stories about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD, through which '60s counterculture luminaries like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were first introduced to the drug. Visited in retirement by the son of his late colleague Frank Olson, he was residing in an "ecologically correct" home in Culpeper, Virginia, where he raised goats, ate yogurt and advocated peace and environmentalism. 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: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? . At this point Subproject 27[9] (basic research of LSD) was a funding subproject that combined previous subprojects, including payment to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals for LSD, John Mulholland's The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (subproject 15 magic support, Mulholland Supplement), and further procurement of LSD (subproject 18), but it grew to almost 150 documented subprojects, including a microwave gun and the search for alternatives to LSD, which led to later programs like Project MKCHICKWIT, most of which focused on South America. He grew his own vegetables. 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 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. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. Can you give us a summary of what he said? His success at ATU won him admission to the University of Wisconsin, where he was mentored by Ira Baldwin, the assistant dean of the College of Agriculture. Powers later testified that the choice of whether to use the suicide pin was left more or less up to me. He decided not to. He operated almost completely without supervision. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. 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. The Selective Service ranked him 4F, but he found work doing research at federal agencies and universities in the Washington, DC, area. [10] Gottlieb also played a role in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. 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. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. 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. GROSS: And he worked with some pretty high-class torturers, too, from one of the Nazi doctors and the chief poisoner from Japan during World War II. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. 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. However, Sidney's children's names are not public on any database that I can find (other than Stephen who died in 2017). Around his neck, like a good luck charm, hung a silver dollar he had been given. 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. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). Then, after the Korean War ended, it was revealed many American prisoners had signed statements criticizing the United States and, in some cases, confessing to war crimes. Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. But with his experiments on unwitting subjects, he clearly violated the Nuremburg standards -- the standards under which, after World War II, we executed Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity.''. As he walked through the African heat and stepped into an airport taxi, Joe from Paris could not avoid reflecting on the war into which he was plunging. 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. He stuttered. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. 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. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. Making them was no great challenge. He knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve anything he wanted to do, and this increased his ambitions. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. These included, according to a Senate investigation years later, poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.. '', 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. No way was found to use them. [2], Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School[citation needed] in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC. 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? 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.
