And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. It's now out in paperback. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchock Annual. [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. So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's TechnicalServices Division, died on March 10. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. . '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. President Dwight Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. The CIA came up with the same explanation for both: brainwashing. (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. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was a kind of genius, striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country, while searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Managed by: Private User He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. Fortunately, Powers had a way out. If a plane was lost and its pilot, in Agency jargon a driver, fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. And the university researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the CIA. Its officers worked closely with the Union Minire du Haut-Katanga, the mining conglomerate that was a cornerstone of Belgian political and economic power. [15], On October 7, 1975, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under his birth name "Joseph Schneider." He stuttered. He was to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a much-awaited summit in Berlin in two weeks and did not want to risk disrupting it. . 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. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. . 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. [10] Gottlieb also played a role in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped . Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Could you produce shock and confusion or physical disablement? History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. 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. Gottlieb was to provide the method. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired. The new nation immediately fell into violent chaos. Lumumba fled Leopoldville. 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. Botulinum takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two billionths of a gram can kill. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the tortures and unknown horrors that might await him in captivity. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. He grew his own vegetables. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, assured the president that the planes were practically invulnerable. Gottlieb began considering which lethal or incapacitating germs he would use. He became the only CIA officer known to have carried poison to a foreign country in order to kill that countrys leader. Owing to the sensitivity of U-2 flights over the USSR, President Eisenhower insisted on approving each one. Devlin later recalled lighting a cigarette and staring at his shoes. A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. . His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. We'll be right back. He crossed over a lot. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. 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. As director of MK-ULTRA, he had tested drugs on prisoners, drug addicts, hospital patients, suspected spies, ordinary citizens, and even his own colleagues. he CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. He did not name Lumumba. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MKUltra. 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. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. 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. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. 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. We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed. 1 - trying to find out how to destroy the mind of a human being, and that was the purpose of experiments that he carried out in prisons in the United States and at secret detention centers in Europe and East Asia. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. 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. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. 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. [citation needed], In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhowerand under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans Richard M. BissellGottlieb proposed spraying Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and saturating Castro's shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. GROSS: Now, there's a much darker side to this program because a lot of people who were being experimented on, they were prisoners. Mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power, that the idea of it disturbing a few lives or losing even a few hundred lives could not be seen as important enough to outweigh that imperative. These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. His obituaries in the New York Timesand the Washington Post tended to focus own. . Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. Finally he gave his approval. He had already compounded lethal poisons. The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. Glickman was an American artist living in Paris in 1952, when he joined a group of fellow Americans at a caf, among them was Sidney Gottlieb. 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. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. Gottlieb, now chief of research and development for the Technical Services Staff, had an unmatched knowledge of poisons, which made him the ideal candidate for a delicate assignment. To cover up the tracks of the crime, the pilot was told that he must not be taken alive by Soviet authorities, Khrushchev told his comrades. This is FRESH AIR. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. In the '50s and early '60s, Gottlieb headed the secret CIA program MKUltra, which conducted experiments to see if LSD and other drugs could be weaponized as a form of mind control. The United States and the Soviet Union watched with active interest. 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. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. 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. [13], Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective. The grail he sought eluded him. A Cold War showdown loomed. After they had gotten under way, Gottlieb told Devlin, Ive come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. These included, according to a Senate investigation years later, poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.. The only way to know this would be to have killed all those people. 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. 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. [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 . But he wasn't only involved in making poisons to kill people. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. 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. 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. Nanci Gottlieb, Susan and (son-in-law) Jeff Bernstein and adored grandsons . These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? 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. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, insistently demanded the CIA crush Castro. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. Despite the decision that a poison in liquid form would be most desirable, what was actually prepared and delivered was a solid in the form of small pills about the size of saccharine tablets.. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. Leary was fascinated by this. 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. Allen Dulles said the star-crossed pilot had performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well.. 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. 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. 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. Rosellis contacts in the Havana underworld made him an ideal partner for the CIA. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Yes, gangster John Handsome Johnny Roselli told an inquiring CIA man, he had associates in Cuba who could kill Fidel Castro. 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. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. Cleaving to old habits of secrecy, his wife declined to disclose the cause of Mr. Gottlieb's death. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. He later transferred to the Food and Drug Administration, where he developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body. 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. [7], Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. We already talked about the things that he was doing in his day job, but what was he like outside of work? . TSD was tasked with providing case officers with technology and services to reach their goals of . In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. Inside the grooves was a sticky brown substance.. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. Within 20 seconds after the prick, death set in from respiratory paralysis . Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit. So White and the people who worked with him would prep these prostitutes, and they would say, we want to find out under what circumstances - under what combination of sex and drugs men would be most likely to reveal secrets. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. We'll be right back after a short break. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task, science historian Ed Regis wrote. This is FRESH AIR. Gottlieb chose a poison, and a Special Operations Division officer at Fort Detrick made the ampules. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." Brother of Julius Gottlieb. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. 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. All rights reserved. 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. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. Their first idea was to taint cigars that operations officers would deliver to Castro. 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. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. 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.

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