Gottlieb and his scientists turned their thoughts to assassination. The only way to know this would be to have killed all those people. We'll hear more after a break, and Justin Chang will review Steve McQueen's new five-film series, "Small Axe." He was also interested in making toxins that would affect their behavior in various ways. Roselli said he would prefer something nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out-and-out ambushing. He and his Mafia partner Sam Giancana offered the CIA a counterproposal: give us poison that takes time to kill, so our assassin can escape. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb, although of course he never knew that name. [citation needed], In addition to working with subcontractors, the CIA worked with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Intelligence, though it is unclear what role Gottlieb played in these affairs other than authorization. He did not name Lumumba. 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. So Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. He had built MK-ULTRA into the most intense and structured mind control research program in history. 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. None of the plans succeeded. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. That substance was a paralytic poison, saxitoxin, extracted from infected shellfish. It's now out in paperback. Sidney Gottlieb, chemist and intelligence officer: born New York 3 August 1918; married 1942 Margaret Moore (two sons, two daughters); died Washington, Virginia 7 March 1999. For four years, U-2 drivers tucked those boxes into their flight suits. His lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited. Sidney Gottlieb Obituary (2022) - Washington, DC - The Washington Post We'll be right back after a short break. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. 2, but he did a lot of work on No. Steve Kinzer's Biography of CIA Chemist Sidney Gottlieb, Tells the Dark Leary was fascinated by this. John Gittinger, a C.I.A. 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. It had retained 94 percent of its toxicity. Gottlieb actually made a potion that was supposed to be put in a rice bowl that Zhou Enlai would eat from. [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 . In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. Glickman was an American artist living in Paris in 1952, when he joined a group of fellow Americans at a caf, among them was Sidney Gottlieb. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice. Gottlieb still was running MK-ULTRA. With him he carried a one-of-a-kind kit that he himself had designed. Bissell returned to his office, where he immediately cabled the Leopoldville station asking officers there to propose ways to carry out Eisenhowers assassination order. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. There isnt any question about this., For years, White House pressure kept Gottlieb and his bosses focused on killing Castro. KINZER: Exactly. And actually, it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended. We'll be right back. One idea was based, like the bomb plot, on Castros love of scuba diving. KINZER: I think that's largely correct. 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 was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . One of Kinzer's previous books was about the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles. He grew his own vegetables. So if you remember Q from those James Bond movies, that was Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb (1918-1999) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree So he actually wrote something describing his experience. 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. The gangsters idea for assassination by poison was timely. [5] This belief drove the CIA's early forays into mind control operations and led to justifications of countless horrific acts, often with no oversight or accountability. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. It is 27 mm long and 1 mm in diameter. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. Gottlieb announced that he was carrying tools intended for the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. 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 was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. Describe that part of his job. He believed the agency. The Castro plot rose to the top of his priority list for the same reason it rose to the top for Bissell and CIA director Dulles. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. governments darkest experiments. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. Devlin knew that the Belgian security service was as determined as the CIA to eliminate the prime minister. I wasnt there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.. It was part of his effort to test all kinds of substances, including naturally occurring ones like shrubs and trees and barks and mushrooms and fish parts and animal pieces, as possible tools for mind control. GROSS: So just so I understand this correctly - so the CIA basically set up phony philanthropic foundations which then funded university and college research, and it's through those research experiments that people like Ginsberg and Kesey and Robert Hunter got introduced to LSD. The CIA never fully abandoned the idea of killing Castro with firearms. The new nation immediately fell into violent chaos. The CIA awarded him a medal. Sidney Gottlieb (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 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. Maheu became the conduit through which the CIA passed instructions and devices to gangsters who were to assassinate Castro. For this uniquely qualified chemist, preparing a dose for Lumumba would be simple. Less than an hour after Gottlieb and Devlin met in front of the American embassy in Leopoldville, the men were sitting in Devlins living room. 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. 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. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. He obtained a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1943. So Tim Leary's interest in psychedelic drugs was sparked by an article that appeared in Life magazine in 1957. During 1961 and 1962, intermediaries working for the CIA passed several packets of Gottliebs botulinum pillscalled L-pills because they were lethalto gangsters for delivery to contacts in Cuba. After he left the C.I.A., Mr. Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper hospital for 18 months. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. They had just received an urgent cable from Larry Devlin in the Congo. 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. 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. It would have been murder . ", "John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA", "President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sidney_Gottlieb&oldid=1149377811, This page was last edited on 11 April 2023, at 21:11. If you're just joining us, my guest is Stephen Kinzer. Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary,[3] while attending CIT, and they swiftly married. It is a straight ordinary-looking pin made of white metal with a head and a sharpened point. The Technical Services Division considered planting a bomb in what would appear to be a rare mollusk where Castro liked to scuba dive. Nonetheless Bissell planned for the worst. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MKUltra. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian Our guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. He had not poisoned the leader of a foreign government, but he had shown once again that he knew how. Finally he gave his approval. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. | AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen. This plot was also aborted. 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. The cigars were so heavily contaminated that merely putting one in the mouth would do the job; the intended victim would not have to smoke it. The report names Gottlieb as a co-conspirator, although without specifying his role. Gottlieb hesitated. He had two sons and two daughters. Yet nobody looked over his shoulder. And the Nuremberg Code established that if you are conducting experiments, that the person you are experimenting on needs to give informed consent. The CIA proposed to have Donovan give Castro a tainted diving suitprecisely the kind of job for which Technical Services had been created. He not only used the drugs that you mentioned but extreme forms of stimulants and sedatives. 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. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." And actually, one of the things that is the most bizarre about the fact that we relied on Nazi doctors is that Sidney Gottlieb himself was Jewish, and his parents had emigrated from Central Europe in the early 20th century. 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. Gottlieb, 43, was a biochemist. The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIAs Base for Mind Control Experiments. In Europe and East Asia, Gottliebs victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. What barbarism!. 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.
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