It's now out in paperback. They meant to destroy Castro before he could carry out his promise to rid the country of crime and vice. Lyndon Johnson kept using political and economic means, including sabotage and other covert work, to undermine Cubas government. It was fed by fantasies from fiction that these people had imbibed at a young age. . Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. Although there may well have been such a plot, the officer Gottlieb named was then assigned in India and has never worked in WH Division nor had anything to do with Cuba operations. Gottlieb graduated magna cum laude in 1940. It might now be sprayed in the radio studio from which Castro made live broadcasts that reached millions of Cubans. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. TERRY GROSS: Stephen Kinzer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So how high does it fly, really? The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 but anti-Castro plotting went on. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. This assassination had been ordered by the president of the United States. 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. 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. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. . On the sharpened point of the needle are deep oblique furrows completely covered with a layer of thick, sticky, brownish mass. Toward the end there were grooves. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. 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. 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. He was acquitted, but he was one of the Nazi doctors who was tried. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. 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. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. Sidney Gottlieb 100th anniversary of his birth | Daily Telegraph In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. 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.. The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. Stars were aligning. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni at Princeton University, referencing the new battlefield of "brain warfare" and the battle for controlling the human mind. One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. [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. A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. KINZER: One of the most remarkable discoveries that I made in the research for this book is that the CIA mind control project, MKUltra, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. This evolved into MK-ULTRA, a program Gottlieb headed starting in 1953. Except that he was real. Sidney Gottlieb - Anti-Gang Stalking Center That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. Fortunately, Powers had a way out. I guess those didn't work as mind control drugs. Tell us about that. KINZER: I think that's largely correct. 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. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. However, it turns out that there were some found in other places. It's now out in paperback. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, saxitoxin can kill within seconds. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. . The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. An experimental dog was given a hypodermic prick with the needle extracted from the pin, in the upper third part of the left hind leg. A Cuban agent given firearms and explosives by the CIA was in contact with the Agency until 1965, but never carried out an attack. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. 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. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. Under the arrangements provisions, according to a later report, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. 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 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. He survived only because he had not bitten it. Well, he didn't get too far on No. GROSS: So before Sidney Gottlieb started experimenting with LSD, he ran CIA experiments with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, mescaline. So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. 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 studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. Gottlieb and colleagues were tasked with making that substance and imagining how it could be delivered. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. 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 coin was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends. Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. So he forgot who his boss was. An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. The CIA had made contact with gangsters who wanted Castro dead. 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 . Sidney Gottlieb had a new assignment. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. At this point Subproject 27[9] (basic research of LSD) was a funding subproject that combined previous subprojects, including payment to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals for LSD, John Mulholland's The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (subproject 15 magic support, Mulholland Supplement), and further procurement of LSD (subproject 18), but it grew to almost 150 documented subprojects, including a microwave gun and the search for alternatives to LSD, which led to later programs like Project MKCHICKWIT, most of which focused on South America. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, was expecting him. All rights reserved. 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. 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. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. See the article in its original context from. This idea was discarded as impractical. . A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. STEPHEN KINZER: During the early period of the Cold War, in the late '40s and early 1950s, the CIA became paralyzed with a fear that communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds. 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. 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. The needle is extracted when tightly pulling the pin head. 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. 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. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. KINZER: After all the experiments that led to deaths in unknown numbers around Europe and Asia and led to unknown torments across the United States, Gottlieb, who was, in the end, a scientist, was forced to reach the conclusion that he had failed. [2], Gottlieb along with his wife, Margaret, moved back to the United States to Santa Cruz, California to be more involved in their young grandchildren's lives. What he did not know and had no way of knowing is that that expedition to Mexico that produced the Life magazine article was paid for by Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA. The U-2 squadron and its missionto photograph Soviet military installationswere among Americas most classified secrets. By now, Gottlieb and his partners at Fort Detrick had a suicide tool hidden inside a hollowed silver dollar. Within 20 seconds after the prick, death set in from respiratory paralysis . MK-Ultra - HISTORY There were places she couldn't perform in. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful. KINZER: As the chief CIA chemist, it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin. If the assignments received by Powers had not been of a criminal nature, his masters would not have supplied him with a lethal pin, the prosecutor said in his opening statement. They're working with people who have leprosy. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. ''He bought that old house and the land with the idea of setting up a communal home, with several families living together,'' said Mr. Gittinger, a lifelong friend. 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. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Hired by the CIA in 1951, Gottlieb had worked on Special Operations Division projects at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. 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. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? 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. Since it would entail making poison and devices by which that poison could be delivered, Bissell turned to what had been the Technical Services Staff, now renamed the Technical Services Division. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. Later on, when the CIA became obsessed at the order of the White House in killing Fidel Castro, it was Sidney Gottlieb who made all the poison pills, the poison potions, even the poison wet suit that was supposed to be given to Castro. He couldn't remember what part of the CIA he had worked in. And the university researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the CIA. Stephen Kinzer's new book book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Three decades earlier he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that. After proceeding through training, he was named chief of the newly formed Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. As chief of the agency's technical services division, he served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A. 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. The first of these were the LSD experiments. A similar set of experiments was going on at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. 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. 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. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. Poison was the logical alternative. 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. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. 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. Second, CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or otherwise, what they called expendable. Kinzer spoke with Terry in September of last year, when "Poisoner In Chief" was released in hardback. Everything was very slapdash and haphazard, so not surprisingly, no serious results ever came out of this, except the fact that we can now sit here and talk about the fact that our tax dollars were used to pay for a bordello run by the CIA in San Francisco to which unwitting men were brought, fed LSD and used as experiments in Sidney Gottlieb's campaign to try to figure out how to penetrate the human mind so it could be controlled in the interests of the United States government and its covert projects around the world. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. ''He was willing to try anything to discover something.''. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. A needle is inserted in the bore. 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. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. You may have heard stories about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD, through which '60s counterculture luminaries like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were first introduced to the drug. He forgot who was deputy was. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. '', John Marks, author of the definitive book on the experiments, ''The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate' '' (Times Books, 1979) said Mr. Gottlieb was ''unquestionably a patriot, a man of great ingenuity. Then he held up an enlarged photo of the poison needle. 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. Men will talk after sex. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Coming up, Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." Sidney Gottlieb (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 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb - by Dusty Roads - Substack So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. He decided to consult professionals. He thought he was going insane. Sidney Gottlieb. So his imagination was very fertile. 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. Inside the dollar was what appeared to be an ordinary straight pin, Francis Gary Powers later wrote. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. Joe from Paris was Sidney Gottlieb. A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master's degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA. He and his wife go to India. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. He operated almost completely without supervision. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. 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. 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. That left poison. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. His lawyer had arranged for him to be granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment. He is survived by his wife and four children, Penny Gottlieb Chesluk, Rachel Gottlieb Samoff, Peter Gottlieb and Steven Gottlieb. TSD bought a diving suit, dusted it inside with a fungus which would produce Madura foot, a chronic skin disease, and contaminated the breathing apparatus with a tubercle bacillus, a CIA officer wrote years later. This guy had a license to kill. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. 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. [13], Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective. 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. [6], Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. ", https://digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A287129?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=98a815ee66a7e4801535&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=306&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=13#page/1/mode/1up, "Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. 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. [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. LSD was just one of the mind-altering drugs that were used in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. 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. Sidney Gottlieb Obituary (2022) - Washington, DC - The Washington Post Vitos taste for lemon lozenges had led other drivers to call him the Lemon Drop Kid. Originally broadcast Sept. 9, 2019. 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. 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. In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Author Robert F. ONeill reconsiders three overlooked 1863 cavalry clashes. His shops main mission was developing mind control toolsone study focused on adapting the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25LSDfor that use. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. One was handed to the pilot of the first U-2 mission as he prepared to take off from an American base at Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 20, 1956. As the Cold War began, however, two seemingly unrelated developments on opposite sides of the world stunned the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and gave Detrick a new mission. Mr. Gottlieb spent his last years in Washington, Va., a pretty village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, working in a hospice, tending to the dying. 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. And it was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies, and Gottlieb was called to testify. That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. (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.
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