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. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. Tell us about that. 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. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? 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. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. 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. On November 29, his enemies captured him. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jerseys ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers by making them national. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." 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. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. He lived in an eco-cabin in the woods with no running water. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. No one knew when Castro would travel, and even if he stayed at a hotel the CIA could penetrate, his security detail would probably not allow his boots to be handled by strangers. 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. By now, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had a suicide tool hidden inside a hollowed silver dollar. It was a really tragic thing for her, and that's this guy. Thats because Detrick, still thriving today as the Armys principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIAs hidden chemical and mind control empire. 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. A needle is inserted in the bore. 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. 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. The CIA was running one in my lab. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (Sid) was a scientist and chemist working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran the Technical Services Division (TSD) and before that position he ran the Chemical Division within TSD.. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottliebs chemical base. Gottlieb was to provide the method. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of . Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. 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. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. No way was found to use them. 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 CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. In 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. Research Notes 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired. Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. 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. 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. His lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited. He survived only because he had not bitten it. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. In the most humiliating moment of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to admit that he had authorized his spokesmen to lie about the U-2. Eisenhower had ordered the Agency to kill Lumumba, and he had been killed. 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. Stars were aligning. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? Managed by: Private User 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? I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. He made a list of the ways he thought drugs could be used to affect behavior. He did not reveal much in his testimony, besides saying he had destroyed nearly all records of what he did during his time at the agency. 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. 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. 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. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. If the beard fell away, they thought, so might Castros power. He actually created and found ways to administer poison. So MKUltra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. 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. The CIA called it suicide. So he actually wrote something describing his experience. 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. Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE, later known as the U-2 spy plane. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. 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. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. Im Joe from Paris, he said. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. None of the plans succeeded. 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. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. 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. KINZER: As the chief CIA chemist, it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin. He stuttered. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. The CIA awarded him a medal. He did testify at two rounds of hearings, one undercover - that is, under a pseudonym in a private room - another under his own name but also in a private room. 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. Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. 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 . The second option was even stranger. Senior officers at the CIA liked the idea. 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. 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. For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. It is so hard to reconcile the different parts of Sydney Gottlieb's personality - an Orthodox Jew who works with Nazi doctors on the CIA drug experiments, somebody who has, like, ruined lives, who's created poisons and done these, like, really horrible experiments on people but feels like he himself is a very spiritual person. Choosing a poison was not Gottliebs only contribution to the Castro assassination project. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. 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. Gottlieb hesitated. 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. 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. So he forgot who his boss was. GROSS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, thank you for this book. 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. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. Working with partners at Fort Detrick, where he stored his toxins, Gottlieb began assembling his assassination kit. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. Several proved to be deadly. Although CIA officers worked closely with the Congolese and Belgians who did the deed, they did not participate in or witness the execution. President Dwight Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. He operated almost completely without supervision. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. In the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, Mr. Gottlieb, always under orders from the Director of Central Intelligence or his chief spymaster, developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo. Everything was very slapdash and haphazard, so not surprisingly, no serious results ever came out of this, except the fact that we can now sit here and talk about the fact that our tax dollars were used to pay for a bordello run by the CIA in San Francisco to which unwitting men were brought, fed LSD and used as experiments in Sidney Gottlieb's campaign to try to figure out how to penetrate the human mind so it could be controlled in the interests of the United States government and its covert projects around the world. 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. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. 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". He had already compounded lethal poisons. 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. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. After 5 years in California the couple moved back to Virginia to a new home in a richer, but more rural area to spent their retirement years. Within 90 seconds after the prick, breathing ceased entirely. . Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. One of Kinzer's previous books was about the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. The gangsters idea for assassination by poison was timely. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. In 1953, he arranged a safe house for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. Gottlieb began considering which lethal or incapacitating germs he would use. GOTTLIEB SIDNEY V. GOTTLIEB "Sid" Sid passed away after a long illness on July 11, 2022 just after his 94th birthday. Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how the CIA worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies. It would have been murder . He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. 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. Clear rating. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. . After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. At mid-morning on August 18, 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles and deputy director for plans Richard Bissell made an unscheduled visit to the White House. 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.. Well, he didn't get too far on No. 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. Under the arrangements provisions, according to a later report, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.. It's now out in paperback. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. First-hand testimony, fragmentary Government documents and court records show that at least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project, known as MK Ultra. This guy had a license to kill. 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 J-american chemist probably best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. At least one other couple stayed for years. 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. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. KINZER: Gottlieb was living in India, working in a hospital for leprosy victims when he got a note from the CIA saying, somebody has figured out who you are, and that somebody is the Church Committee that's investigating the CIA, and they want to talk to you. He is survived by his wife and four children, Penny Gottlieb Chesluk, Rachel Gottlieb Samoff, Peter Gottlieb and Steven Gottlieb. This idea was discarded as impractical. Looking at it more closely, we could see the body of the pin to be a sheath not fitting quite tightly against the head. Our guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information. 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. 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 enemies of the U.S. government. He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. Gottlieb was never convicted of any crimes. Stephen Kinzer's new book book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . Army scientists complied. 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. One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. Devlin later recalled lighting a cigarette and staring at his shoes. The idea was that Zhou would be back in China, and the poison wouldn't be able to be traced back to the CIA. 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. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. 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. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. [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. The first of two options grew out of Gottliebs fascination with LSD. 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. 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. [14] He and his wife spent two years traveling Australia, Africa and India before settling down for several months to run a leper hospital in India. They were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. That testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottliebs tools ever made public. 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. The first was the show trial of the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty for treason in 1949. Stanley Gottlieb is an interesting individual, and according to at least one FOIA PDF on The Black Vault website, a Stanley (perhaps not Scott's father) was at one time hired as a CIA operative. During this period, Fort Detricks public profile rose uncomfortably. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. [1] Early years and education 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. He spied on musicians and entrapped them, including Billie Holiday, and Billie Holiday being busted was a turning point in her career because she couldn't get a cabaret license. All rights reserved. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master's degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA.