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. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. . Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. The CIA called it suicide. 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. Powers was on one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencys most secret missions. Sidney Gottlieb was the man for the job. 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. Tell us about that. [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. It's now out in paperback. 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. 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. Choosing a poison was not Gottliebs only contribution to the Castro assassination project. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. After months of experimenting on agents and prisoners left Gottlieb unsatisfied, he sought help from the Special Operations Division at Detrick. This is FRESH AIR. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. He had founded the CIAs Chemical Division and become the Agencys pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. That was one of their big avenues of investigation. But he decided we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean, and ended assassination plots. 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. 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. 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. 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. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). Dr. Sidney Gottlieb - by Dusty Roads - Substack Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. More about CIA He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. . KINZER: Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. 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. 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. The United States and the Soviet Union watched with active interest. President Dwight Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. Copyright 2020 NPR. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. 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 and stuttered. The chemists reminded Bissell how Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering had slipped a glass ampule filled with liquid potassium cyanide into his mouth, bit down on it, and died within 15 seconds, cheating the hangman at Nuremberg. I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. 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. Is there any relation between Sidney Gottlieb (MK Ultra) and Scott HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. 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. 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. That testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottliebs tools ever made public. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. The CIA had made contact with gangsters who wanted Castro dead. So MKUltra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. 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. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. As the Cold War began, however, two seemingly unrelated developments on opposite sides of the world stunned the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and gave Detrick a new mission. . The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. 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. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. Sidney Gottlieb - Anti-Gang Stalking Center 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. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. He operated almost completely without supervision. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. This idea was discarded as impractical. 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. 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. 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. 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. 1952: Stanley Glickman was another human casualty of Sidney Gottlieb's John Gittinger, a C.I.A. He forgot who was deputy was. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. 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. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. 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? Stephen Kinzer's new book book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. And of course, MKUltra totally violated the Nuremberg Code, but apparently the U.S. never signed on to that, never adapted that. A Cold War showdown loomed. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." He had sort of a check off from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. One of Devlins agents, he said, should use the hypodermic needle to inject botulinum into something Lumumba would ingestas Gottlieb later put it, anything he could get to his mouth, whether it was food or a toothbrush. Devlin later wrote that the kit also included a pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste. Research Notes 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. Well, he didn't get too far on No. 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. . An experimental dog was given a hypodermic prick with the needle extracted from the pin, in the upper third part of the left hind leg. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. In a dramatic speech to the Supreme Soviet a week after the shoot-down, he revealed that large sections of the U-2 had been recovered and that Powers was alive and in custody. It was part of his effort to test all kinds of substances, including naturally occurring ones like shrubs and trees and barks and mushrooms and fish parts and animal pieces, as possible tools for mind control. Later on he built himself one of the first solar homes in Virginia. These included, according to a Senate investigation years later, poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. ''He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. Botulinum takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two billionths of a gram can kill. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MKUltra, by Sidney Gottlieb. It was afraid that the Soviet Union would corner the market on LSD and use it as a chemical weapon or that China would perfect the black art of brainwashing, Mr. Gittinger said. That became the basis for "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." Gottlieb hesitated. He couldn't remember what part of the CIA he had worked in. 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. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. Operation Midnight Climax - Wikipedia They agreed that Gottlieb himself should bring it to Leopoldville. [11][12] He transported these "toxic biological materials" to Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, and although Devlin declined the assignment, a military coup soon overthrew and killed Lumumba. 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? Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. This is FRESH AIR. KINZER: I think that's largely correct. It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. In the years after World War II, American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology whipped the country into a nationalistic fervor to protect American cultural and political dominance from a supposed impending Soviet takeover. US Official Poisoner Dies - CounterPunch.org Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. 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 coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. 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 . The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that countrys leader. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. And the university researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the CIA. [Redacted] distinctly remembers the flaps-and-seals job he had to do on the box and on each of the cigars, both to get at the cigars and to erase evidence of tampering . 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. Thank you for talking with us. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. In 1953, he arranged a safe house for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. So how high does it fly, really? He crossed over a lot. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. 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. Gottlieb was never convicted of any crimes. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. 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. 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. I found the revelations in it really remarkable. ''He was the most curious man I ever knew,'' Mr. Gittinger said. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history.
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