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. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. Before they could go further, though, this ideas obvious weaknesses became clear. He decided to consult professionals. It's now out in paperback. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Gottlieb, who passed away in 1999 at age 81, committed these disgusting crimes with the authority he received from the highest echelons of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? 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. 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. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. 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. 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. During this period, Fort Detricks public profile rose uncomfortably. Kinzer spoke with Terry in September of last year, when "Poisoner In Chief" was released in hardback. In the long run, in the cosmic sense, I think you can say that commitment to a cause always gives you the justification for immoral acts. There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedywho was after all his man, his right-hand man in these mattersto unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found, Helms later testified. He married Margaret Marshal Moore on 12 September 1942, in Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States. Gottlieb began considering which lethal or incapacitating germs he would use. 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. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. 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. The experiments were useless, Mr. Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired. 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. Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. There was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remained. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. He was also part of an informal group of CIA chemists that became known as the health alteration committee. They had come together early in 1960 as a response to President Eisenhowers renewed conviction that the best way to deal with some unfriendly foreign leaders was to kill them. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. But he decided we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean, and ended assassination plots. His lawyer had arranged for him to be granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony. Well, he didn't get too far on No. 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. 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. Their first idea was to taint cigars that operations officers would deliver to Castro. Pulling this off, it became a thin needle, only again not an ordinary needle. he CIA and President Eisenhower presumed the episode would end there. KINZER: Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. He was 80 and had spent his later years caring for dying patients, trying to run a commune, folk dancing, consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests. Its your responsibility to carry out the operation, yours alone, he told Devlin. He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. And he spent years at the head of that operation. He is the longtime editor of two scholarly journals, the Hitchcock Annual (Columbia University Press; coedited with Richard Allen) and the George Herbert Journal.His edited books include Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Univ. [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 . He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. While the chemist waited, Devlin found an agent thought to have access to Lumumba and able, as the station chief wrote in a cable to Washington, to act as inside man. Ten days after arriving, Gottlieb felt confident enough to fly home. They told their friends about it. However, poison remained the most appealing option. 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. For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. 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. And patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes because it posits the nation as a value that's so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search For Mind Control." He himself used LSD, by his own estimate, about at least 200 times. 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. And the Nuremberg Code established that if you are conducting experiments, that the person you are experimenting on needs to give informed consent. 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. However, Sidney's children's names are not public on any database that I can find (other than Stephen who died in 2017). In 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo. He also became head of the CIA program that creates high-tech gadgets for spies to use. KINZER: As the chief CIA chemist, it was logical that Gottlieb be consulted whenever the CIA needed a poison or a toxin. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. The U-2 squadron and its missionto photograph Soviet military installationswere among Americas most classified secrets. But Bluebird lacked scientific knowledge and obedience; Dulles wanted Gottlieb to get it back on course. Khrushchev, however, had the last word. That gave Richard Bissell and his covert action directorate another murder to plan. He lived in an eco-cabin in the woods with no running water. It wasn't just a question of administering these super-high doses of LSD for very extended periods of time. The CIA awarded him a medal. That was one of their big avenues of investigation. 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. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A. 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. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. 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. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. GROSS: You know, one of the uses Gottlieb envisioned for LSD was - you could slip it to an unfriendly world leader, and their behavior would be so erratic and weird that they'd lose popularity or they'd be thrown out of office because they would appear to not be able to function normally anymore. 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. So the anonymity in which Gottlieb had lived his whole life was suddenly under threat. On March 9, 1943, the Army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and purchased several adjacent farms to provide extra room and privacy. KINZER: Exactly. Gottlieb was allowed to work for 10 years without anybody supervising him or even really being aware or wanting to be aware of what he was doing. Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. The target would get sick and die exactly as if hed been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. From Eisenhower, the chain of command was short and direct. Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Zhou Enlai would eat from. Gottlieb was the son of orthodox Jews emigrated from Hungary, and lived in the Bronx. Thus, as a result of the investigation it was established that the substance contained on the needle inside the pin, judging from the nature of its effect on animals, could, according to its toxic doses and physical properties, be included in the curare group, the most powerful and quickest-acting of all known poisons. Two years later Gottlieb compounded a dose intended to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China but not used. by. ''We were in a World War II mode,'' Mr. Gittinger said. And what skeptics had said at the beginning, which is that you cannot program a person to do something that he or she is basically and deeply and morally opposed to doing, and make them go out and do it. A needle is inserted in the bore. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. The only way to know this would be to have killed all those people. Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottliebs chemical base. An autopsy, Gottlieb assured Devlin, would show normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases., Gottlieb remained in Leopoldville. You're not implicated. 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. Detrick, his indispensable base, still contains untold stories of the cruelty that began therejust 50 miles from the center of the government that has kept them sealed for decades. Gottlieb and his team persuaded themselves that part of Castros appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hairspecifically, his beard. In mid-September Gottlieb told Bissell that the kit was ready. And the Senators were able to ask him some probing questions, but really, they didn't know anything about MKUltra. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target, an aircraft that began tumbling wildly. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. 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. . 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. Jesus H. Christ! Devlin exclaimed. KINZER: You're right. 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. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a . 's assassination plots. | AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. He had to waste unknown numbers of lives in order to reach a conclusion that should have been clear from the beginning. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. 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. In that capacity, he was also the chief poison maker, so he made the poisons to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba. GROSS: Yeah, I found that pretty hard to understand. After 5 years in California the couple moved back to Virginia to a new home in a richer, but more rural area to spent their retirement years. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. But he was smart and ambitious, with a gift for science. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of . It's now out in paperback. Can you give us a summary of what he said? At least one other couple stayed for years. Making them was no great challenge. He forgot who was deputy was. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an J-american chemist probably best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. GROSS: And he worked with some pretty high-class torturers, too, from one of the Nazi doctors and the chief poisoner from Japan during World War II. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. 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. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. 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. Stars were aligning. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. If Castro became disoriented and incoherent during one of those speeches, he would presumably lose popular support. 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. Together, those sources reveal Detricks central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders. 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. Since July 3, 1863, there have been many calls for Confederate flags to be returned to their home states, and in particular, for the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment flag return to Virginia. Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. And this became part of his work during the late 1950s and into 1960. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. Powers was exchanged for a Russian spy in 1962. So he actually wrote something describing his experience. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. 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. 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. He had tested such an aerosol. The agency and Mr. Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary. I realized that I could never assassinate Lumumba. Senior officers at the CIA liked the idea. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. 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. 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. Two canisters containing nearly 11 grams of saxitoxinenough to kill 55,000 peoplewere in Gottliebs depot at Fort Detrick.
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