Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. With scientists at Fort Detrick, he conceived of ways to kill Castro. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate dedicated to studying metabolisms of fungi.[4]. He decided to consult professionals. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN"). 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. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. 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. President Dwight Eisenhower authorized several more flights in the weeks that followed. [2], Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School[citation needed] in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. A lifelong stutterer, he pursued a master's degree in speech therapy. He believed the agency. 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 . The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. 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. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. On May 13, 1960, just days after the U-2 fiasco, President Eisenhower ordered Castro sawed off. He did not use what CIA security director Sheffield Edwards later called bad words, but everyone present understood this as a presidential directive to remove Castro from power by any means including assassination. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. And the people who were observing these experiments, like George Hunter White, had no background in psychology or anything that would allow them to assess these situations in a clinical way. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. 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". They considered using a sniperhunting good here when light is right, one officer wrotebut ruled out that option because Lumumba was living in seclusion and no reliable sniper was available. And it was tasked with investigating abuses committed by intelligence agencies, and Gottlieb was called to testify. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. The squadron commander ordered the ampules packed inside small boxes. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired. He wasn't part of one of the experiments, but what's the connection? This guy had a license to kill. Each pilot carried one of Gottliebs ampules. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. These bumbling attempts hardly satisfied Bissell. It hired a University of Wisconsin biochemist, Ira Baldwin, to run the program and asked him to find a site for a new bio-research complex. Powers was flying over what is now the Russian city of Yekaterinburg when the exploding missile rocked his plane. Less than five months after the downing of Powerss U-2, Gottlieb had flown to the Congo on one of the 20th centurys most extraordinary courier missions. The men paused, absorbing the weight of the moment. 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. GROSS: So LSD was created in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. 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. A couple of days earlier Devlin had received a cable from Washington telling him that a visitor would soon appear. I mean, they had no idea what they were being given. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. Sidney Gottlieb. Powers was put on trial in Moscow. There were places she couldn't perform in. Thank you for talking with us. 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. 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. However, Sidney's children's names are not public on any database that I can find (other than Stephen who died in 2017). Will announce himself as Joe from Paris, the cable said. Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left. This cable seemed to confirm deep fears that Prime Minister Lumumba was about to deliver his spectacularly resource-rich country to the Soviets. No, Roselli didnt like the idea of trying to gun Castro down gangland-style or using a sniper. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. . 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. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. His lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited. Botulinum takes several hours to work but is so potent that a concentrated dose of just two billionths of a gram can kill. [17] He was reported to have a history of heart problems,[17] but his wife declined to give the cause of death. He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. So these were the kind of people that naturally gravitate to a project like this one. 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. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. The gangsters wanted poison. Spitting it out, Vito realized he had grabbed his cyanide-filled ampule. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. After months of experimenting on agents and prisoners left Gottlieb unsatisfied, he sought help from the Special Operations Division at Detrick. None of the plans succeeded. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. They tried to work with the poor. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. We'll be right back. 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. This was an operation in which White would assemble a stable of prostitutes who would bring their men back to an apartment that the CIA hired and furnished, feed them LSD and George Hunter White would sit in an adjoining apartment sitting on a portable toilet, drinking pitchers of martinis while watching people having sex under the influence of LSD with the vague idea that this was somehow going to help the United States defeat communism. 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. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. So Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. . The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. 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. Given that summers news, though, Gottlieb could hardly have doubted who the intended target was. Nanci Gottlieb, Susan and (son-in-law) Jeff Bernstein and adored grandsons . It's now out in paperback. So Sidney Gottlieb's MKUltra program was ended in the early 1960s. Rosellis contacts in the Havana underworld made him an ideal partner for the CIA. Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. With the stuff thats in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated., Gottlieb coolly explained to Devlin what was in the poison kit and how to use it. Inside the dollar was what appeared to be an ordinary straight pin, Francis Gary Powers later wrote. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if captured. [1] Early years and education This idea was discarded as impractical. Now, that doctor later died a natural death, so Bulger didn't get to carry out his wish. He bought land with an old log cabin outside a small Virginia town, Boston, where he practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and herding goats. He lived in a log cabin with his wife and their four children on 15 wooded acres near Vienna, Virginia. 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. Looking at it more closely, we could see the body of the pin to be a sheath not fitting quite tightly against the head. 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. KINZER: You're absolutely right. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. 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. Gottlieb and colleagues were tasked with making that substance and imagining how it could be delivered. An autopsy, Gottlieb assured Devlin, would show normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases., Gottlieb remained in Leopoldville. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. 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. He was to have pricked himself with the poisoned needle, with a result of instantaneous death. If they had not emigrated, Sidney Gottlieb might well himself have been brought up in Central Europe, forced into a ghetto, brought to a concentration camp and become the subject of one of these grotesque Nazi medical experiments. 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 meditated. Their first idea was to taint cigars that operations officers would deliver to Castro. He and his staff also produced two devices for delivering it. Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. Sidney Gottlieb (Editor), Christopher Brookhouse (Editor), Charles L.P. Silet (Contributor), Christopher Morris (Contributor) 3.25 avg rating 4 ratings published 2002. Thats because Detrick, still thriving today as the Armys principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIAs hidden chemical and mind control empire. Research Notes 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. The second option was even stranger. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. He stuttered. He crossed over a lot. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. 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. The only way to know this would be to have killed all those people. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Then he held up an enlarged photo of the poison needle. Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? It is so hard to reconcile the different parts of Sydney Gottlieb's personality - an Orthodox Jew who works with Nazi doctors on the CIA drug experiments, somebody who has, like, ruined lives, who's created poisons and done these, like, really horrible experiments on people but feels like he himself is a very spiritual person. (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. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIAs arsenal of poisons. 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. Managed by: Private User In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. One of Kinzer's previous books was about the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles. Soviet military commanders, frustrated by their inability to stop U-2 overflights, had been steadily improving their air defenses in ways the CIA had not detected. That testimony constitutes the most detailed analysis of one of Gottliebs tools ever made public.
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