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.. He did not name Lumumba. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency. In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. 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. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. 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. [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 . 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. 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. The Castro plot rose to the top of his priority list for the same reason it rose to the top for Bissell and CIA director Dulles. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. Finally he gave his approval. 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. And of course, MKUltra totally violated the Nuremberg Code, but apparently the U.S. never signed on to that, never adapted that. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. He is survived by his wife and four children, Penny Gottlieb Chesluk, Rachel Gottlieb Samoff, Peter Gottlieb and Steven Gottlieb. 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. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. 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. At the trial, the cardinal appeared disoriented, spoke in a monotone and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. 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. he CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. One of Gottliebs aides later testified that he had ordered this operation without informing his boss. Mind control, he finally came to conclude, is a myth. 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. 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. The C.I.A. It was a really tragic thing for her, and that's this guy. 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. A clubfoot kept him from military service in World War II, and he was always bitter that he missed the war, Mr. Gittinger said. [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. 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. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. The United States and the Soviet Union watched with active interest. Gottlieb could provide it. He believed the agency. 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. CIA deputy director for plans Richard Bissell, who ran the U-2 project, believed that since his planes would fly at improbably high altitudes, Soviet air defense systems would not be able to shoot them down or even track them by radar. 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. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. He had a special dislike for her because he said the way that she flaunted her furs and her big cars was offensive to him. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. 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. ", "John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA", "President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sidney_Gottlieb&oldid=1149377811, This page was last edited on 11 April 2023, at 21:11. 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. Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Stephen Kinzer about his book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." GROSS: So before Sidney Gottlieb started experimenting with LSD, he ran CIA experiments with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, mescaline. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. Take this, Gottlieb said. . 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. We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. He was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion. Why was it ended? 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. They also wanted a "truth serum", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS but never fully realized. One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. ''He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. At least one other couple stayed for years. Toward the end there were grooves. 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.. Actually, he was a very gentle, compassionate humanist. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence. [1] Early years and education The research and development job he was given after his return from Europe made him one of the chief imaginers, builders, and testers of devices used by American intelligence officers. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. It is urgent you should see [him] soonest possible after he phones you. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? The midget submarine that would have had to be used in emplacement of the shell has too short an operating range for such an operation.. 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. 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 . He was even, by common account, a rather. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. . https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. He decided to transfer to a school that offered a legitimate agricultural biology course, and wished to attend the University of Wisconsin. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. How did the CIA find out about LSD? Baldwin chose a mostly abandoned National Guard base below Catoctin Mountain called Detrick Field. So the CIA, and Gottlieb in particular, were limited only by their own imagination. Managed by: Private User He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? Gottlieb chose a poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. They were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. And the Church Committee investigators didn't press him hard enough. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. 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. We're talking about his new book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." 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. KINZER: As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MKUltra. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. By now, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had a suicide tool hidden inside a hollowed silver dollar. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. 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. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. 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. Gottlieb was to provide the method. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. 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. Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th centuryunless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government. 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. Clear rating. The poisoned cigarsCohibas, Castros preferred brandwere passed to a CIA officer. And this became part of his work during the late 1950s and into 1960. Pills from another batch were to have been slipped into Castros food or drink at a restaurant he frequented, but he stopped eating there. Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg when the exploding missile rocked his plane. Bissell told Gottlieb that, pursuant to an order from the highest authority, he was to prepare an incapacitating or fatal potion that could be fed to an African leader. 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. 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. We'll be right back. He had founded the CIAs Chemical Division and become the Agencys pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. 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. President Kennedy had assigned lawyer James Donovanportrayed by Tom Hanks in the 2015 film Bridge of Spiesto negotiate release of POWs from the Bay of Pigs. Finding ways to kill Castro without using firearmsand, at points in the plotting, also to kill his brother Ral and guerrilla hero Ernesto Che Guevarabecame one of Gottliebs main preoccupations after his return from the Congo. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information. 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. 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. Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt. With the stuff thats in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated., Gottlieb coolly explained to Devlin what was in the poison kit and how to use it. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. 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. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 but anti-Castro plotting went on. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. 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. 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. If Castro became disoriented and incoherent during one of those speeches, he would presumably lose popular support. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. 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. Together, those sources reveal Detricks central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders. He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. Over a period of twenty years as a scientist with the agency, Sidney Gottlieb ran the largest systematic search for mind control techniques in history He presided over medical experiments and. In these places, he carried out his most extreme experiments, some undoubtedly fatal. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Well, he didn't get too far on No. Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government, Devlin wrote. 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. 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.

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