Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. 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 . 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 Washington, Va. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. Sidney Gottlieb (Editor), Christopher Brookhouse (Editor), Charles L.P. Silet (Contributor), Christopher Morris (Contributor) 3.25 avg rating 4 ratings published 2002. GOTTLIEB SIDNEY V. GOTTLIEB "Sid" Sid passed away after a long illness on July 11, 2022 just after his 94th birthday. This is FRESH AIR. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. At one point, he came up with the idea of using a spray can full of LSD to pollute the studio in which Fidel Castro was going to give a radio speech, and then presumably, Castro would become disoriented and, as you say, lose popularity and fall from power. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. President Dwight Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. 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. If the assignments received by Powers had not been of a criminal nature, his masters would not have supplied him with a lethal pin, the prosecutor said in his opening statement. TSD was tasked with providing case officers with technology and services to reach their goals of . [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. A needle is inserted in the bore. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped . On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni at Princeton University, referencing the new battlefield of "brain warfare" and the battle for controlling the human mind. STEPHEN KINZER: During the early period of the Cold War, in the late '40s and early 1950s, the CIA became paralyzed with a fear that communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds. Project BLUEBIRD was already under way when Gottlieb was brought on board; it experimented with "Special Interrogation" techniques on captured prisoners overseas at black sites like Camp King, Fort Clayton, and Villa Schuster, using drugs to attempt to break their ego control and elicit information. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. ''The war never really ended for us. 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. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). So how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done? One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. This Unassuming Chemist Was the CIA's Poisoner in Chief In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. KINZER: If the United States had used the Nuremberg Code domestically, Sidney Gottlieb would never have been able to do what he did; there couldn't have been MKUltra. KINZER: In the early 1950s, Gottlieb hired this guy, George Hunter White, to run a safe house for him in New York City to which people would be lured off the street and then given LSD so CIA officers could watch them from an adjoining apartment through a one-way mirror. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. Stars were aligning. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. It contained a vial of liquid botulinum; a hypodermic syringe with an ultra-thin needle; a small jar of chlorine that could be mixed with the botulinum to render it ineffective in an emergency; and accessory materials, including protective gloves and a face mask. So MKUltra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind. 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. This guy had a license to kill. Well, he didn't get too far on No. Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. 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. 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. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that countrys leader. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. 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. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." MK-ULTRA also served other CIA needs, such as making assassination weapons. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. He also became head of the CIA program that creates high-tech gadgets for spies to use. And this became part of his work during the late 1950s and into 1960. [6], Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. 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. We'll be right back after a short break. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. . Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. Gottlieb believed the key to mind control was LSD, and is credited with bringing the drug to the U.S. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. He had already compounded lethal poisons. He had tested such an aerosol. The CIA achieved its objective in the Congo unexpectedly and elegantly. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. 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 ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. It's now out in paperback. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. And in the context of the time, who would argue? It's now out in paperback. 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. At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. The Coldest - The Washington Post SelectedWorks - Sidney Gottlieb And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. After they had gotten under way, Gottlieb told Devlin, Ive come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. 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.. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. Research Notes He believed the agency. Sidney Gottlieb 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. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." Sidney Gottlieb (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 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. Brother of Julius Gottlieb. 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. 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. 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. These included, according to a Senate investigation years later, poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. Both wings blew off. Gottlieb was never convicted of any crimes. This plot was also aborted. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. The new nation immediately fell into violent chaos. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an J-american chemist probably best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. Men will talk after sex. ", 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. And it was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies, and Gottlieb was called to testify. Upon returning, he reported his brush with death. . Lumumba fled Leopoldville. 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. 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. Operation Midnight Climax - Wikipedia In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. 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. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. 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. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. Within 90 seconds after the prick, breathing ceased entirely. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. He bought land with an old log cabin outside a small Virginia town, Boston, where he practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and herding goats. 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". See the article in its original context from. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. 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. Enthralled by new chemicals, he sent promising samples to what had been upgraded to Fort Detrick. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. He was even, by common account, a rather. 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. He thought he was going insane. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. Mr. Gottlieb ''had had a real problem to find a spiritual focus, having gone away from Jewishness,'' Mr. Gittinger said, and he experimented with everything from agnosticism to Zen Buddhism all his life. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. A couple of days earlier Devlin had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian 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. 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. 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.. 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. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. 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. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. So he was kind of a proto hippie. Let's start with, what was the mission of MKUltra? I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. 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. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. 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. 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. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. Botulinum takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two billionths of a gram can kill. Gottlieb was allowed to work for 10 years without anybody supervising him or even really being aware or wanting to be aware of what he was doing. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. 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 . This idea was discarded as impractical. 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. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. He decided to consult professionals. 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. . Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. ''We were in a World War II mode,'' Mr. Gittinger said. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. 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. They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of - not just drug potions but other techniques like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation, all the meantime bombarding them with questions trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left. This cable seemed to confirm deep fears that Prime Minister Lumumba was about to deliver his spectacularly resource-rich country to the Soviets. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. He stuttered. 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. Maheu became the conduit through which the CIA passed instructions and devices to gangsters who were to assassinate Castro. Joe from Paris arrived carrying Americas secret weapon.
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