2, but he did a lot of work on No. 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. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. . Why was it ended? (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). 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. He is survived by his wife and four children, Penny Gottlieb Chesluk, Rachel Gottlieb Samoff, Peter Gottlieb and Steven Gottlieb. 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. So the records of MKUltra were destroyed as Gottlieb was leaving office. Mind control, he finally came to conclude, is a myth. Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. [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. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. They tried to work with the poor. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. 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. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. Finally he gave his approval. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. He believed the agency. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. He was 80 and had spent his later years caring for dying patients, trying to run a commune, folk dancing, consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. But he decided we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean, and ended assassination plots. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains, an orange flash lit the sky one spring morning in 1960. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. 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. Describe that part of his job. Choosing a poison was not Gottliebs only contribution to the Castro assassination project. The CIA was running one in my lab. Who were those people? 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 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. 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. He had tested such an aerosol. The first of these were the LSD experiments. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. Research Notes 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 and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. Mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power, that the idea of it disturbing a few lives or losing even a few hundred lives could not be seen as important enough to outweigh that imperative. 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 mobster had never heard of Gottliebno one hadbut he correctly presumed that the CIA must have someone on its payroll who made poison. Lumumba fled Leopoldville. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. A clubfoot kept him from military service in World War II, and he was always bitter that he missed the war, Mr. Gittinger said. There was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remained. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. 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. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? Stars were aligning. He grew his own vegetables. On May 13, 1960, just days after the U-2 fiasco, President Eisenhower ordered Castro sawed off. He did not use what CIA security director Sheffield Edwards later called bad words, but everyone present understood this as a presidential directive to remove Castro from power by any means including assassination. 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. He operated almost completely without supervision. Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts. Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government, Devlin wrote. Glickman was an American artist living in Paris in 1952, when he joined a group of fellow Americans at a caf, among them was Sidney Gottlieb. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Few historical studies mention his name. He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. 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 was never convicted of any crimes. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. We're talking about his new book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." And what skeptics had said at the beginning, which is that you cannot program a person to do something that he or she is basically and deeply and morally opposed to doing, and make them go out and do it. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. Bissell turned to the redoubtable Sheffield Edwards, who as head of the Office of Security kept the CIAs deepest secrets. Thank you for talking with us. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. This guy had a license to kill. 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. His imagination was just as fertile when he was inventing spy tools for CIA officers as it had been earlier when he was trying to devise ways of finding mind control techniques. Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg when the exploding missile rocked his plane. They were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. GROSS: Among the very, very bizarre things about Sidney Gottlieb is after leaving the CIA, he pursued a spiritual life. On March 9, 1943, the Army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and purchased several adjacent farms to provide extra room and privacy. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. 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". Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. He forgot who was deputy was. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. Of the CIA poison kit, Devlin later wrote that after Gottlieb handed it to him, my mind was racing. of California Press), Framing Hitchcock (Wayne State University Press; coedited with Chris . Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. That left poison. Let's start with, what was the mission of MKUltra? Actually, he was a very gentle, compassionate humanist. 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. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Later on, when the CIA became obsessed at the order of the White House in killing Fidel Castro, it was Sidney Gottlieb who made all the poison pills, the poison potions, even the poison wet suit that was supposed to be given to Castro. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. By 1948, his wife and two daughters were living in a remote cabin near Vienna, Virginia, that had no electricity or running water. 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. 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. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? Stephen Kinzer's new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. | AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search For Mind Control." 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. Two canisters containing nearly 11 grams of saxitoxinenough to kill 55,000 peoplewere in Gottliebs depot at Fort Detrick. He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate dedicated to studying metabolisms of fungi.[4]. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. [2], Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School[citation needed] in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC. That became the basis for "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." 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. One was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 20, 1956. See the article in its original context from. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. KINZER: I think that's largely correct. But he will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security, the man who brought LSD to the C.I.A. The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. Now, that doctor later died a natural death, so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. The squadron commander ordered the ampules packed inside small boxes. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. None of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed amount of explosive, a CIA report stated. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 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. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. Aloft, he reached for a lozenge that felt unusually smooth in his mouth and had no taste. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. 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. The decision, to the best of his recollection, was that bacteria in liquid form was the best means [because] Castro frequently drank tea, coffee, or bouillon, for which liquid poison would be particularly well suited . Copyright 2020 NPR. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. 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. This was an operation in which White would assemble a stable of prostitutes who would bring their men back to an apartment that the CIA hired and furnished, feed them LSD and George Hunter White would sit in an adjoining apartment sitting on a portable toilet, drinking pitchers of martinis while watching people having sex under the influence of LSD with the vague idea that this was somehow going to help the United States defeat communism. After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. How did they end up in his program? . 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? He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. It's now out in paperback. No. Take this, Gottlieb said. And the Senators were able to ask him some probing questions, but really, they didn't know anything about MKUltra. 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. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. 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. [7], Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottliebs chemical base. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. By the time Gottlieb landed in the Congo, he could look back on almost a full decade at the CIA. On July 5, U-2 driver Carmine Vito took off at dawn from Wiesbaden. Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. The toxins were designed to kill not immediately, but after a few hours. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. Men will talk after sex. If they had not emigrated, Sidney Gottlieb might well himself have been brought up in Central Europe, forced into a ghetto, brought to a concentration camp and become the subject of one of these grotesque Nazi medical experiments. Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Zhou Enlai would eat from. There were no more near misses. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. 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. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. However, poison remained the most appealing option. There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedywho was after all his man, his right-hand man in these mattersto unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found, Helms later testified. Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. But once you got to see if you could transfer those fantasies from the realm of fiction to the realm of reality, they broke down. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot.
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