Let's start with, what was the mission of MKUltra? 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. The gangsters wanted poison. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIAs highly secretive program to develop ways to control mindsa program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR"). He had two sons and two daughters. 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. One of Gottliebs aides later testified that he had ordered this operation without informing his boss. He is the longtime editor of two scholarly journals, the Hitchcock Annual (Columbia University Press; coedited with Richard Allen) and the George Herbert Journal.His edited books include Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Univ. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. 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. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy. I wasnt there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.. He decided to transfer to a school that offered a legitimate agricultural biology course, and wished to attend the University of Wisconsin. 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. Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He was already the CIAs master chemist. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. 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.. 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. Stars were aligning. 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. But he decided we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean, and ended assassination plots. With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. Lyndon Johnson kept using political and economic means, including sabotage and other covert work, to undermine Cubas government. In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. The second option was even stranger. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . GROSS: Gottlieb tried to destroy evidence of programs that he headed. . He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist, whom I had known for some time, Devlin wrote later. 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. Since July 3, 1863, there have been many calls for Confederate flags to be returned to their home states, and in particular, for the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment flag return to Virginia. Bissell ordered six such ampules. So Gottlieb was the chief CIA chemist. Gottlieb also hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. MK-ULTRA also served other CIA needs, such as making assassination weapons. 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. 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. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. His older brother was plant biologist David Gottlieb. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. He later went to Mexico, and before he ever tried LSD, he was using those magic mushrooms. 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 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 . I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. He was also part of an informal group of CIA chemists that became known as the health alteration committee. They had come together early in 1960 as a response to President Eisenhowers renewed conviction that the best way to deal with some unfriendly foreign leaders was to kill them. he CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. 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 lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. 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 . [citation needed], In addition to working with subcontractors, the CIA worked with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Intelligence, though it is unclear what role Gottlieb played in these affairs other than authorization. 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. Why was it ended? He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. 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. 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. Finding a chemical that would make a beard fall out was just the kind of challenge Gottlieb enjoyed. This idea was discarded as impractical. Describe that part of his job. 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. 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.. [1], Gottlieb was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents Fanny and Louis Gottlieb in the Bronx on August 3, 1918. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. 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. Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison. Tell us about that. The coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. So the records of MKUltra were destroyed as Gottlieb was leaving office. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and werent telling me.. 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. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Dietrich in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin and was there a difference in how long it took to die if you were a small child or an infant, whether you were an elderly person or whether you were a healthy middle-aged person. 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. 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. Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. He left behind, according to a cable from Devlin, certain items of continuing usefulness.. Managed by: Private User [15], On October 7, 1975, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under his birth name "Joseph Schneider." 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. 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. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. DAVIES: Stephen Kinzer speaking with Terry Gross, recorded last year, about his book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," which is now out in paperback. 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. You're not implicated. He also became head of the CIA program that creates high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Yes, gangster John Handsome Johnny Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. TSD was tasked with providing case officers with technology and services to reach their goals of . He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. 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. 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 actually, one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish, and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century. Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars, the report says. Gottlieb hesitated. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. 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. 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. The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. Actually, he was a very gentle, compassionate humanist. 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. None of the plans succeeded. And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. He actually created and found ways to administer poison. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. This is FRESH AIR. They were invisible, untraceable and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. They didn't know what he had done in prisons inside the United States. At first Gottlieb and his chemists concentrated on ways to cause Castros downfall by non-lethal means. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. 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. One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. It's now out in paperback. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA Records Center and ordered the archivist to destroy boxes full of MKUltra records, and he wrote in his report that these records were destroyed over my stated objections. These bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and unusual ways of surreptitiously administering them should they be needed to kill enemies, including world leaders, and he headed the program that created high-tech gadgets for spies.

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