Our guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. 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. 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. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. 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. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. 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. Lumumba fled Leopoldville. Can you give us a summary of what he said? The first of two options grew out of Gottliebs fascination with LSD. I wasnt there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.. A needle is inserted in the bore. '', 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. 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. However, Sidney's children's names are not public on any database that I can find (other than Stephen who died in 2017). For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. 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. CIA officers in Europe and Asia were regularly capturing suspected enemy agents and wanted to develop new ways to draw prisoners in interrogation away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. [7], Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR"). Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. And seized by this myth, the CIA not only believed that communists had approached or reached this Holy Grail, but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it. Three decades earlier he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. 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. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. 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. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. Around his neck, like a good luck charm, hung a silver dollar he had been given. It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. The CIA was running one in my lab. 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. ''He was the most curious man I ever knew,'' Mr. Gittinger said. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. You're not implicated. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. Clear rating. . The second option was even stranger. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the tortures and unknown horrors that might await him in captivity. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. ''The war never really ended for us. On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. 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. . His planned summit with Khrushchev collapsed. So Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. At least one other couple stayed for years. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. KINZER: He was trying everything. So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. [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. So these were the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one. Cleaving to old habits of secrecy, his wife declined to disclose the cause of Mr. Gottlieb's death. 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. That left poison. Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. 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. After trying LSD for the first time himself, Gottlieb accelerated LSD experiments at the agency, testing it on agents who agreed to be dosed under controlled environments and some who agreed to be dosed by surprise. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. 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. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. 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. 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. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. It's now out in paperback. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. This is FRESH AIR. We're talking about his new book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." 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. ''We were in a World War II mode,'' Mr. Gittinger said. 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. 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. He decided to consult professionals. And of course, MKUltra totally violated the Nuremberg Code, but apparently the U.S. never signed on to that, never adapted that. The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. So he was kind of a proto hippie. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. So Gottlieb was the chief CIA chemist. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. There was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remained. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. 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 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. And actually, one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish, and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And then when the person was in the transition phase between comatose and hyperactive, they would electroshock him with very high doses, hoping that maybe this combination would be the thing that could blow away a person's mind. 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. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. He thought he was going insane. If a plane was lost and its pilot, in Agency jargon a driver, fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. 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. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. 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. Could you produce shock and confusion or physical disablement? So how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done? Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. The gangsters idea for assassination by poison was timely. He hatched a new idea that consumed Artichoke and gave him authority over all CIA research into mind control, including the ability to test drugs on witting and unwitting Americans, which was not being done under Artichoke. 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? 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. 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. Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. . Describe that part of his job. Gottlieb began considering which lethal or incapacitating germs he would use. He was born Joseph Scheider or Schneider (later changing his name to Sidney Gottlieb) on August 3, 1918, to Louis, a tailor, and his wife Fanny, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Hungary, in the . So he actually wrote something describing his experience. 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. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. They didn't know what he had done abroad. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information. Leary was fascinated by this. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. . During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? 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. Botulinum takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two billionths of a gram can kill. [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. Now, that doctor later died a natural death, so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. They meant to destroy Castro before he could carry out his promise to rid the country of crime and vice.