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Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian He forgot who was deputy was. There were places she couldn't perform in. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. 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. He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. KINZER: Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and werent telling me.. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. So Gottlieb was the chief CIA chemist. He was living there when he began working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. If a plane was lost and its pilot, in Agency jargon a driver, fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control. It was about a couple of Americans who had gone to Mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations. The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'. For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. 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. 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. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. So all of these original strands that came together in the '60s to produce this great countercultural revolt based around LSD can be traced back through these bogus foundations to the CIA and, ultimately, the director of MKUltra, Sidney Gottlieb. 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 later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia, and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was; essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period? He thought he was going insane. The CIA called it suicide. Brainstorming produced the outlines of a plot. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." The target would get sick and die exactly as if hed been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. 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. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. [6], Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. We were fed a lot of books and movies about the idea of mind control, that you could hypnotize someone or give someone a drug that would make them do something that otherwise they would never do. Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Tim Leary, who became the great guru of LSD, first came across psychedelics through Sidney Gottlieb, although like all these other people, he had never heard Gottlieb's name because Gottlieb lived in complete invisibility. Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. We'll be right back. 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. He chose a compound based on thallium salts. . The CIA's Secret Mind Control Experiments : Fresh Air : NPR GROSS: Well, there's plenty more to talk about, but we have to take a short break here. There was also, like, questioning and other kind of testing that went along with the administration of these high doses. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. He decided to transfer to a school that offered a legitimate agricultural biology course, and wished to attend the University of Wisconsin. . After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. 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. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. A needle is inserted in the bore. 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.. The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. 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. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target, an aircraft that began tumbling wildly. 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. Edwards chose a go-between able to approach Mafia figures without there being clear CIA ties: Former FBI agent Robert Maheu, now a private detective, worked for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. How did they end up in his program? The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Stephen Kinzer's new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D. has been teaching at Sacred Heart University since 1976. 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. Olson was a scientist employed by the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) and deeply involved in one of the most secretive and controversial programs everdevised by that organization: MK-ULTRA, the CIA's effort to perfect mind control through hypnosisand hallucinogenic drugs. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. 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 . 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 - 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 conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. He settled on botulinum, sometimes found in improperly canned food. . 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. [18], American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, "What did the C.I.A. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment. 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. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. The airman faced a burst of criticism for failing to make use of his suicide pin, but after emotions had cooled Powers was praised for his service. 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. This also contributed to the CIA rapidly expanding its experimental methods and tactics over the next two decades, in an effort to break down and rebuild the human mind to work in its favor, falsely believing that the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. Could you find a drug that would alter a personality structure in a way that would allow the operator to take control of another person's behavior? So Gottlieb really lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde life. 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.