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. That spring, U-2 flights were taking off from a secret CIA airfield near Peshawar, Pakistan. Army scientists complied. KINZER: This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Gottlieb story. On August 20, 1951, Dulles ordered Bluebird to be expanded and centralized, and renamed the Project Artichoke, which quickly became a power base for Gottlieb. Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. Two canisters containing nearly 11 grams of saxitoxinenough to kill 55,000 peoplewere in Gottliebs depot at Fort Detrick. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. On November 29, his enemies captured him. 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, however, later testified that he had disposed of the poison before leaving Leopoldville, destroying its viability, then dumping it into the Congo River. 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. Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. Sidney Solomon Gottlieb (1890 - 1963) - Genealogy The CIA inspector general who later investigated this plot reported that an Agency officer did contaminate a full box of fifty cigars with botulinum toxin, a virulent poison that produces a fatal illness some hours after it is ingested. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. Four possible approaches were considered: (1) something highly toxic, such as shellfish poison to be administered with a pin (which Technical Services Division head Cornelius Roosevelt said was what was supplied to Gary Powers); (2) bacterial material in liquid form; (3) bacterial treatment of a cigarette or cigar; and (4) a handkerchief treated with bacteria, stated the official summary of a later interview with Roosevelt. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. This guy had a license to kill. . GROSS: So before Sidney Gottlieb started experimenting with LSD, he ran CIA experiments with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, mescaline. ''He was the most curious man I ever knew,'' Mr. Gittinger said. 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. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR"). Maheu became the conduit through which the CIA passed instructions and devices to gangsters who were to assassinate Castro. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. MK-Ultra - HISTORY 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. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950s.It was initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts with the "Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA consultant" George Hunter White under the . This is FRESH AIR. Copyright 2020 NPR. 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 couldn't remember what part of the CIA he had worked in. 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. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. So his imagination was very fertile. The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. 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.. In the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had had agents search the world for natural poisons. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. 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. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where in 1942 he married Margaret Moore, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries who served in India, where she was born. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. Poison was the logical alternative. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence. Gottlieb administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. 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. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." So he actually wrote something describing his experience. 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. 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. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. 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. At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. He had founded the CIAs Chemical Division and become the Agencys pre-eminent expert on toxins and ways of delivering them. 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. . 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. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Why was it ended? Sidney Gottlieb - Anti-Gang Stalking Center 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. And he made an astonishing variety of covert tools from all those things you see on TV like cameras that you can fit inside a cigarette lighter or a tie clip, all the way to more bizarre things like a rubber boat, a car with a secret compartment to smuggle agents out of foreign countries, a compressor for foreign currency so you could pack a huge amount of it into a small container. Sidney Gottlieb 100th anniversary of his birth | Daily Telegraph And of course, MKUltra totally violated the Nuremberg Code, but apparently the U.S. never signed on to that, never adapted that. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. 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." He grew his own vegetables. Spitting it out, Vito realized he had grabbed his cyanide-filled ampule. Their first idea was to taint cigars that operations officers would deliver to Castro. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, managed to eject and open his parachute. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. Powers later testified that the choice of whether to use the suicide pin was left more or less up to me. He decided not to. He used all the substances that he confiscated from people. Sidney Gottlieb (Editor), Christopher Brookhouse (Editor), Charles L.P. Silet (Contributor), Christopher Morris (Contributor) 3.25 avg rating 4 ratings published 2002. 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. A couple of days earlier Devlin had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. No one knows what became of the victims. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. He forgot who was deputy was. [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. And he traveled between these two worlds of spiritual meditation and then torturous experiments. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. Together, those sources reveal Detricks central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. They're working with people who have leprosy. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. Three minutes after the prick, the heart stopped functioning and death set in. So we want you to stay with the guy after the thing is over and talk to him and try to draw him out about his work and ask him, for example, you know that plane you've been working on? So Gottlieb finally had to admit he never could find a way to control human minds. Gottlieb approached Devlin and extended his hand. He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research, including non-consensual human experiments.[8]. Sidney Gottlieb of TSD claims to remember distinctly a plot involving cigars, the report says. 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. 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. In the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, Mr. Gottlieb, always under orders from the Director of Central Intelligence or his chief spymaster, developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo. The CIA had made contact with gangsters who wanted Castro dead. I wasnt there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.. 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. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). 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. Gottlieb wanted to use Detricks assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A - NPR GROSS: Among the very, very bizarre things about Sidney Gottlieb is after leaving the CIA, he pursued a spiritual life. Making them was no great challenge. 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 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them double, triple and quadruple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. Visited in retirement by the son of his late colleague Frank Olson, he was residing in an "ecologically correct" home in Culpeper, Virginia, where he raised goats, ate yogurt and advocated peace and environmentalism. . 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. Brother of Julius Gottlieb. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. He had already compounded lethal poisons. GROSS: Stephen Kinzer's book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control," is now out in paperback. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. But once you got to see if you could transfer those fantasies from the realm of fiction to the realm of reality, they broke down. 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. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. The second option was even stranger.