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. 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. 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. Author Robert F. ONeill reconsiders three overlooked 1863 cavalry clashes. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Hurriedly they concocted a cover story: a research plane studying high-altitude weather patterns over Turkey had run into trouble, the pilot had lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen, and the plane had continued on autopilot, lamentably straying deep into Soviet airspace. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . of California Press), Framing Hitchcock (Wayne State University Press; coedited with Chris . So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful. 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. 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. In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. He did not name Lumumba. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. And patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value that's so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. No way was found to use them. A Cuban agent given firearms and explosives by the CIA was in contact with the Agency until 1965, but never carried out an attack. 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. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control. Originally broadcast Sept. 9, 2019. 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 . 's darkest secrets. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. 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. The mobster had never heard of Gottliebno one hadbut he correctly presumed that the CIA must have someone on its payroll who made poison. The principal driving force was the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. 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. He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. They agreed that Gottlieb himself should bring it to Leopoldville. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. I think it creates a much fuller and more perplexing picture of a person who lived such different sides of his life. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. An autopsy, Gottlieb assured Devlin, would show normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases., Gottlieb remained in Leopoldville. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. [citation needed] He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. He took a vial of poison to the Congo with plans to place it on Lumumba's toothbrush in the summer of 1960. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. He was even, by common account, a rather. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. 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? He meditated. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. 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.. Although CIA officers worked closely with the Congolese and Belgians who did the deed, they did not participate in or witness the execution. 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. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. And it was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies, and Gottlieb was called to testify. Grunden on Kinzer, 'Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA He grew his own vegetables. Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. 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. The CIA had made contact with gangsters who wanted Castro dead. The following was established during the investigation of the pin. It was a really tragic thing for her, and that's this guy. He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate dedicated to studying metabolisms of fungi.[4]. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence. Later, White was moved to San Francisco, where he set up one of the craziest MKUltra projects that was known inside the agency as Operation Midnight Climax. In these places, he carried out his most extreme experiments, some undoubtedly fatal. Senior officers at the CIA liked the idea. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. Working with partners at Fort Detrick, where he stored his toxins, Gottlieb began assembling his assassination kit. He forgot who was deputy was. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. 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. These bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. And in the context of the time, who would argue? It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. Olson was a scientist employed by the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) and deeply involved in one of the most secretive and controversial programs everdevised by that organization: MK-ULTRA, the CIA's effort to perfect mind control through hypnosisand hallucinogenic drugs. 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. 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. Describe that part of his job. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. Making them was no great challenge. In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Men will talk after sex. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. . The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Sidney Gottlieb | Intelligence Wiki | Fandom Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars, the report says. 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. 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. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. By 1948, his wife and two daughters were living in a remote cabin near Vienna, Virginia, that had no electricity or running water. 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. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. 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. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. They considered using a sniperhunting good here when light is right, one officer wrotebut ruled out that option because Lumumba was living in seclusion and no reliable sniper was available. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and werent telling me.. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. It was about a couple of Americans who had gone to Mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. Steve Kinzer's Biography of CIA Chemist Sidney Gottlieb, Tells the Dark So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. 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.