A man rose from his chair at a caf across the street. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Dietrich in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin and was there a difference in how long it took to die if you were a small child or an infant, whether you were an elderly person or whether you were a healthy middle-aged person. I think the mentality must have been, this project is so important. 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? A similar set of experiments was going on at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. Stephen Kinzer's book, 'Poisoner in Chief,' exposes how CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies of the U.S. government. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. 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. The CIA was eager to get this kind of information. Except that he was real. Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. The plan was abandoned when the lawyer decided to present Castro with a different diving suit. These failures brought the CIA, Technical Services, and Gottlieb back to Rosellis original idea: make poison and find a way to feed it to Castro. Both wings blew off. He lived in an eco-cabin in the woods with no running water. Gottlieb hesitated. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. Gottlieb also hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. Sidney Gottlieb (born Joseph Scheider 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 '60s assassination attempts and mind control program, known as Project MKUltra. So he forgot who his boss was. In the mid-'50s, the United States set out on a project to kill Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China while he was visiting Indonesia. He operated almost completely without supervision. He was even, by common account, a rather. 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. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research. There was absolutely noN-O, nodeliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace, and there never has been, a State Department spokesman told reporters. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian 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. California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jerseys ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers by making them national. Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how the CIA worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies. If they had known anything like what's in this book, Gottlieb would have been questioned much more seriously, but the Church Committee was focused on a number of other abuses that the CIA had been accused of, like domestic spying, assassination plots in which Gottlieb had played, essentially, only the role of a pharmacist. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. GROSS: So this is just a little sidebar that I found very interesting as somebody who listens to a lot of jazz. He made a list of the ways he thought drugs could be used to affect behavior. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. Gottlieb began looking for a match: Which poison would produce a death most like the one those diseases cause? Gottlieb could provide it. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. 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. The Life Summary of Sidney When Sidney Gottlieb was born on 3 August 1918, in The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States, his father, Louis Gottlieb, was 35 and his mother, Fannie Bender, was 30. 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. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, was expecting him. A Cuban agent given firearms and explosives by the CIA was in contact with the Agency until 1965, but never carried out an attack. Evidence suggests that the agency arranged to smuggle rifles and at least one silencer into Cuba for this purpose. Today, its a cutting-edge lab. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. The following was established during the investigation of the pin. No one knew when Castro would travel, and even if he stayed at a hotel the CIA could penetrate, his security detail would probably not allow his boots to be handled by strangers. Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. . Stephen Kinzer's book, 'Poisoner in Chief,' exposes how CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against . 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. He was born in the Bronx under his real name Joseph Sch[n]eider as son of Orthodox J immigrants from Hungary. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. So Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. For this reason he was supplied with a special needle. Making poison to kill foreign leaders was no longer Gottliebs job. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. GROSS: So what did he do after the MKUltra program was ended? They're working with people who have leprosy. By 1948, his wife and two daughters were living in a remote cabin near Vienna, Virginia, that had no electricity or running water. If a plane was lost and its pilot, in Agency jargon a driver, fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. More about CIA That led him to Roselli, who along with other powerful gangsters had become rich through gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing in Cuba. 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. It was poison to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Gottlieb could not be publicly linked to the Powers episode, but it burnished his reputation within the CIA. Do you know what a self-contained, off-the-shelf operation means? one of them asked years later. In these places, he carried out his most extreme experiments, some undoubtedly fatal. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. Two years in Germany, where he had conducted extreme experiments on subjects considered expendables, had strengthened his credentials. So he actually wrote something describing his experience. So what you found in these Europe experiments was a confluence of two interests. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. 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. The Selective Service ranked him 4F, but he found work doing research at federal agencies and universities in the Washington, DC, area. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. 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. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. But, you know, also, Kurt Blome, one of the Nazi doctors who was hired by Sidney Gottlieb, was on trial in Nuremberg. What did he do to try to destroy the evidence of MKUltra? It was a really tragic thing for her, and that's this guy. The C.I.A. He was living there when he began working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. If he had known better, he would have said it was founded by the CIA and, in particular, Sidney Gottlieb. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. 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. 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. The Republic of the Congo, where he had just landed, had won independence from Belgium three months before. At least one other couple stayed for years. The gangsters wanted poison. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. Gottlieb, who experimented with LSD himself at least 200 times, lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water, milking his goats. 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. The challenge tested his peculiarly creative imagination. Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. In fact, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb had gone well beyond curare, a toxin that is found in tropical plants. 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. 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. We're talking about his new book, "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." Can you give us a summary of what he said? He studied Buddhism and wrote poetry. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. 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. They didn't know what he had done abroad. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. That secrecy was partially shattered by the Church Committee, a committee - it was a Senate committee from the 1970s that was chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church. Research Notes They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. Finding ways to kill Castro without using firearmsand, at points in the plotting, also to kill his brother Ral and guerrilla hero Ernesto Che Guevarabecame one of Gottliebs main preoccupations after his return from the Congo. To emphasize the clarity of his memory, he named the officer, then assigned to [the Western Hemisphere Division], who approached him with the scheme. 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. 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. Rosellis contacts in the Havana underworld made him an ideal partner for the CIA. I mean, we won: The Century-Long Battle Over This Confederate Flag, Revisiting the Small but Important Riots between Brandy Station and Gettysburg. He edited books written by Alfred Hitchcock as well. As he fell, his thoughts turned to the suicide pin he was carrying. An army mutiny set off riots, secession, and government collapse. Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th centuryunless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government. The people who Sidney Gottlieb hired included George Hunter White, who directed a lot of the MKUltra experiments, and he had been a narcotics agent and led the Narcotics Bureau's campaign against jazz in New York City. By crafting the lethal pin that was given to U-2 drivers, he solidified his position as poisoner in chief. . He used all the substances that he confiscated from people. He believed the agency. 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. 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. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target, an aircraft that began tumbling wildly. On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. ''He thought he was doing exactly what was needed.
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