Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. 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. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. Even so Eisenhower hesitated to approve a flight scheduled for May 1, 1960. 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. This is FRESH AIR. A heated political debate ensued and when Glickman decided to leave, he was offered a drink to soothe ill feelings. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. Gottlieb's imagination ran wild. He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. 1 was Gottlieb's desire to find the key to mind control, which the CIA considered its absolute most important priority. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. 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. Actually, he was a very gentle, compassionate humanist. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. 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. Except that he was real. 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. 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. He forgot who was deputy was. KINZER: You're right. As he fell, his thoughts turned to the suicide pin he was carrying. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. He actually created and found ways to administer poison. When CIA air controllers lost contact with Powerss plane, they presumed he was dead and that his plane had been vaporized. Finally he gave his approval. At first Gottlieb and his chemists concentrated on ways to cause Castros downfall by non-lethal means. The CIAs epically inept 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedys determination. Floating down, he later wrote, he imagined the tortures and unknown horrors that might await him in captivity. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. 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? The grail he sought eluded him. 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. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. His older brother was plant biologist David Gottlieb. Tell us about that. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." So his imagination was very fertile. Sidney Gottlieb ran a workshop dedicated to assassinationand mind control. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. 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. After trying LSD for the first time himself, Gottlieb accelerated LSD experiments at the agency, testing it on agents who agreed to be dosed under controlled environments and some who agreed to be dosed by surprise. One of Devlins agents, he said, should use the hypodermic needle to inject botulinum into something Lumumba would ingestas Gottlieb later put it, anything he could get to his mouth, whether it was food or a toothbrush. Devlin later wrote that the kit also included a pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste. 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. [16], On March 7, 1999, Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia. Together, those sources reveal Detricks central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders. Anyone can read what you share. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. 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. CIA officers in Europe and Asia were regularly capturing suspected enemy agents and wanted to develop new ways to draw prisoners in interrogation away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will. Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. Only when you get caught up in a cause like that that allows you to put aside conscience and all other moral considerations and even serious scientific considerations can you allow yourself to get caught up in a situation like this where one person is allowed, on his own whim, to go out and torture and kill people. He did testify at two rounds of hearings, one undercover - that is, under a pseudonym in a private room - another under his own name but also in a private room. On July 13, 1951, Gottlieb had his first day of work at the CIA. After a while Gottlieb broke the silence. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. No one knew the CIA was making poisons there, but its role as the countrys principal center for research into biological and anti-crop warfare became clear. [citation needed], By 1955 Project MK-ULTRA had outgrown its government funding. Three decades earlier he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that. And the people who might be supervising him really don't want to hear about it for reasons that have to do with the old CIA code, which is the code of all secret services - the less you know, the better. The gangsters wanted poison. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. He spent his childhood in the Bronx wearing leg braces. The president gave his order to Dulles and Bissell. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. While there, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech pathology. Given that summers news, though, Gottlieb could hardly have doubted who the intended target was. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. His success at ATU won him admission to the University of Wisconsin, where he was mentored by Ira Baldwin, the assistant dean of the College of Agriculture. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. The CIA awarded him a medal. He was even, by common account, a rather. Sidney Gottlieb was given the job of making the poison. Besides, the idea that Castros charisma would disappear with his beard struck some officers as far-fetched. How did the CIA find out about LSD? Among the witnesses to appear at the trial was a professor of forensic medicine who had been assigned to evaluate the deadly pin. Each driver in turn was given the silver dollar before taking off. 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. And therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements. Choosing a poison was not Gottliebs only contribution to the Castro assassination project. Stars were aligning. 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. Nonetheless, he didn't reveal anything, and he claimed, essentially, to have forgotten everything that he had spent his whole CIA career doing. The same needle was inserted under the skin of a white mouse. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. The midget submarine that would have had to be used in emplacement of the shell has too short an operating range for such an operation.. 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. So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. 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. The agent Devlin hired proved unable to penetrate the rings of security protecting Lumumba. In 1953, he arranged a safe house for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. The couple also enjoyed farming their own food in their free time. And the Senators were able to ask him some probing questions, but really, they didn't know anything about MKUltra. In the most humiliating moment of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to admit that he had authorized his spokesmen to lie about the U-2. Gottliebs entire career had prepared him for this assignment. 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. He believed the agency.