His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. In 1953, he arranged a safe house for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. It was about a couple of Americans who had gone to Mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations. So all of these original strands that came together in the '60s to produce this great countercultural revolt based around LSD can be traced back through these bogus foundations to the CIA and, ultimately, the director of MKUltra, Sidney Gottlieb. He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. GROSS: So before Sidney Gottlieb started experimenting with LSD, he ran CIA experiments with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, mescaline. He forgot who was deputy was. Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. They meant to destroy Castro before he could carry out his promise to rid the country of crime and vice. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. 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. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. 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. There were places she couldn't perform in. [1] Early years and education 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. An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. Making them was no great challenge. Actually, he was a very gentle, compassionate humanist. He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate dedicated to studying metabolisms of fungi.[4]. Last week, the SSCI completed its review of the declassified transcripts of Sidney Gottlieb's testimony before the SSCI in 1975 on the MKULTRA project and other behavioral control research programs. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. 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 . HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. This plot was also aborted. What barbarism!. So how much did the committee find out about what Gottlieb had really done? 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. Sidney Gottlieb - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. Yes, gangster John Handsome Johnny Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. In order to take the specialized courses he wished to have, he first attended Arkansas Tech University, where he studied botany, organic chemistry, and principles of dairying. He believed the agency. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. That left poison. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. 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. But with his experiments on unwitting subjects, he clearly violated the Nuremburg standards -- the standards under which, after World War II, we executed Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity.''. The people who Sidney Gottlieb hired included George Hunter White, who directed a lot of the MKUltra experiments, and he had been a narcotics agent and led the Narcotics Bureau's campaign against jazz in New York City. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. 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. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. He later transferred to the Food and Drug Administration, where he developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and potassium cyanide. The lethality of Gottliebs suicide pin and the inability of a leading Russian toxicologist to identify the substance with which Gottlieb had tainted it were testimony to the American scientists talent. Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick. Detrick is today one of the worlds cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. 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. They agreed that Gottlieb himself should bring it to Leopoldville. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. One of Gottliebs aides later testified that he had ordered this operation without informing his boss. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. 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. 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. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 drivers, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief. This Unassuming Chemist Was the CIA's Poisoner in Chief So he actually wrote something describing his experience. 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. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. 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. . He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. 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. 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 details are up to you, but its got to be cleannothing that can be traced back to the U.S. government. He handed Devlin the poison kit. On July 5, U-2 driver Carmine Vito took off at dawn from Wiesbaden. In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. Sidney Gottlieb (born Joseph Scheider 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 '60s assassination attempts and mind control program, known as Project MKUltra. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them double, triple and quadruple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. 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. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. by. He was already the CIAs master chemist. Before Army technicians could remove them, two officers from the Special Operations Division packed them into the trunk of a car and drove them to the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, where the CIA maintained a small chemical warehouse. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. While the chemist waited, Devlin found an agent thought to have access to Lumumba and able, as the station chief wrote in a cable to Washington, to act as inside man. Ten days after arriving, Gottlieb felt confident enough to fly home. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. 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. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. US Official Poisoner Dies - CounterPunch.org 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. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? Baldwin chose a mostly abandoned National Guard base below Catoctin Mountain called Detrick Field. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. There was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remained. Within 90 seconds after the prick, breathing ceased entirely. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. . Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Except that he was real. 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. KINZER: Gottlieb had a long career after MKUltra ended, and he went on to become the head of the Technical Services staff, which is the - part of the CIA where they make the tools, the gizmos, the gadgets that spies use. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA. 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. The first was the show trial of the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty for treason in 1949. After reading it, according to the official note taker, Eisenhower turned to Dulles and said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated., There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds, the note taker wrote, and the meeting continued.. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. Who authorized this operation?, President Eisenhower, Gottlieb replied. [15], On October 7, 1975, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under his birth name "Joseph Schneider." Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target, an aircraft that began tumbling wildly. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. 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. 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. 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. At least one other couple stayed for years. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. 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.. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. He crossed over a lot. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. Gottlieb was never convicted of any crimes. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. The CIA achieved its objective in the Congo unexpectedly and elegantly. [7], Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. And the Church Committee investigators didn't press him hard enough. [13], Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective. 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 . 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. However, poison remained the most appealing option. (Originally broadcast Sept. 2019) Also, Justin Chang reviews, 'Small Axe,' Steve McQueen's new collection of five films set in London's West Indian community. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. 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. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and werent telling me.. Gottlieb created the MKUltra program which experimented with psychoactive drugs like LSD to see what the effects were, with the goal of learning if LSD could be weaponized as a form of mind control. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. Sidney Solomon Gottlieb: Birthdate: November 28, 1890: Birthplace: Alsenz, Germany: Death: February 1963 (72) New Mexico Immediate Family: Son of Jakob Gottlieb and Emilia Gottlieb Husband of Agnes Effie Gottlieb Father of Robert Bruce Gottlieb and Sidney Gottlieb Jr. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. | AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen. Gottlieb, who passed away in 1999 at age 81, committed these disgusting crimes with the authority he received from the highest echelons of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [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. 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. KINZER: This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb story. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search For Mind Control." After trying LSD for the first time himself, Gottlieb accelerated LSD experiments at the agency, testing it on agents who agreed to be dosed under controlled environments and some who agreed to be dosed by surprise. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. The new nation immediately fell into violent chaos. 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 Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. 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. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. He operated almost completely without supervision. As part of his work with the hallucinogen, he had planned an experiment, ultimately canceled because of weather conditions, in which an LSD-laced aerosol would be sprayed into a room of unsuspecting partygoers. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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