Looking at it more closely, we could see the body of the pin to be a sheath not fitting quite tightly against the head. They didn't know what to ask him. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Brother of Julius Gottlieb. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. Making them was no great challenge. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. Describe that part of his job. 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. KINZER: This is one of the things that makes the Gottlieb story so fascinating. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. Olson was a scientist employed by the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) and deeply involved in one of the most secretive and controversial programs everdevised by that organization: MK-ULTRA, the CIA's effort to perfect mind control through hypnosisand hallucinogenic drugs. 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. With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA. He and his wife go to India. The U-2 squadron and its missionto photograph Soviet military installationswere among Americas most classified secrets. . Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. 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. He was living there when he began working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Could you find a drug that would alter a personality structure in a way that would allow the operator to take control of another person's behavior? ", "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. 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. The first of these were the LSD experiments. Clear rating. More about CIA ''He was the most curious man I ever knew,'' Mr. Gittinger said. We'll be right back after a short break. 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. GROSS: When the men were having sex with prostitutes and were unknowingly given doses of LSD, weren't they then asked questions to see what their answers would be like under LSD? 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? That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. 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. Roselli said he would prefer something nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out-and-out ambushing. He and his Mafia partner Sam Giancana offered the CIA a counterproposal: give us poison that takes time to kill, so our assassin can escape. 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". 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. Four possible approaches were considered: (1) something highly toxic, such as shellfish poison to be administered with a pin (which Technical Services Division head Cornelius Roosevelt said was what was supplied to Gary Powers); (2) bacterial material in liquid form; (3) bacterial treatment of a cigarette or cigar; and (4) a handkerchief treated with bacteria, stated the official summary of a later interview with Roosevelt. Could you produce shock and confusion or physical disablement? Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. So he forgot who his boss was. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. [10] Gottlieb also played a role in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. 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. . . 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. 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. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. This plot was also aborted. He left the City College of New York, first for the Arkansas Polytechnic Institute, then for the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a chemistry degree in 1940. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg when the exploding missile rocked his plane. 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. 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. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. 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. I don't think he ever faced the question or answered the question of whether there are limits to the amount of evil you can do in a righteous cause before the evil begins to outweigh the righteousness. 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. So his imagination was very fertile. It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. 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. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. 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. . The CIA awarded him a medal. Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars, the report says. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. Gottlieb surreptitiously slipped LSD into Glickman's drink; it derailed his life. So MKUltra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, was expecting him. The Castro plot rose to the top of his priority list for the same reason it rose to the top for Bissell and CIA director Dulles. This also contributed to the CIA rapidly expanding its experimental methods and tactics over the next two decades, in an effort to break down and rebuild the human mind to work in its favor, falsely believing that the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. Leary was fascinated by this. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. He was to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a much-awaited summit in Berlin in two weeks and did not want to risk disrupting it. The United States and the Soviet Union watched with active interest. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. 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. KINZER: Exactly. 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. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. 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. 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. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. Inside the dollar was what appeared to be an ordinary straight pin, Francis Gary Powers later wrote. He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. No. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. . Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. Three decades earlier he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Men will talk after sex. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. 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. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. 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. In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. A couple of days earlier Devlin had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. As chief of the agency's technical services division, he served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. The CIA was running one in my lab. GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. 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. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. A similar set of experiments was going on at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. Sidney Gottlieb, who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war efforts to control the human mind and provided the agency poisons to kill Fidel Castro, died on Sunday in. Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains, an orange flash lit the sky one spring morning in 1960. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. 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 not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. How did they end up in his program? [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. 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. Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. 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. By 1948, his wife and two daughters were living in a remote cabin near Vienna, Virginia, that had no electricity or running water. Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. ''He bought that old house and the land with the idea of setting up a communal home, with several families living together,'' said Mr. Gittinger, a lifelong friend. His lawyer had arranged for him to be granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony. He stuttered. 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. He forgot who was deputy was. Given that summers news, though, Gottlieb could hardly have doubted who the intended target was. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and potassium cyanide. The lethality of Gottliebs suicide pin and the inability of a leading Russian toxicologist to identify the substance with which Gottlieb had tainted it were testimony to the American scientists talent. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. 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. The Selective Service ranked him 4F, but he found work doing research at federal agencies and universities in the Washington, DC, area. Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. 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. 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. 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 CIA called it suicide. 's assassination plots. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. 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. 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. 's darkest secrets. By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. Stars were aligning. 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. KINZER: Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s. The CIA came up with the same explanation for both: brainwashing. Today, its a cutting-edge lab. GROSS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, thank you for this book. There were no more near misses. Anyone can read what you share. He operated almost completely without supervision. Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. 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 . In 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. KINZER: As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MKUltra. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of surreptitiously administering them. He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. 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. See the article in its original context from. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. Cleaving to old habits of secrecy, his wife declined to disclose the cause of Mr. Gottlieb's death. This idea was discarded as impractical. . The research and development job he was given after his return from Europe made him one of the chief imaginers, builders, and testers of devices used by American intelligence officers. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. No one knows what became of the victims. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat.
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