Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and potassium cyanide. The lethality of Gottliebs suicide pin and the inability of a leading Russian toxicologist to identify the substance with which Gottlieb had tainted it were testimony to the American scientists talent. The shooter would almost certainly be killed or captured. But this too wasnt what it seemed. John F. Kennedy proved equally bent on eliminating Castro. 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. 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. You're not implicated. Devlin invited the visitor into his car. And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. And actually, this poison was only going to work after a day or two. They didn't know what to ask him. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Pills from another batch were to have been slipped into Castros food or drink at a restaurant he frequented, but he stopped eating there. 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. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. Project BLUEBIRD was already under way when Gottlieb was brought on board; it experimented with "Special Interrogation" techniques on captured prisoners overseas at black sites like Camp King, Fort Clayton, and Villa Schuster, using drugs to attempt to break their ego control and elicit information. 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. The CIA was running one in my lab. Making them was no great challenge. Gottlieb remembers the scheme as being one that was talked about frequently but not widely, and as being concerned with killing, not merely influencing behavior.. None of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed amount of explosive, a CIA report stated. In the years after World War II, American paranoia about the infiltration of Communist ideology whipped the country into a nationalistic fervor to protect American cultural and political dominance from a supposed impending Soviet takeover. A son of immigrant Jews, he had been born with club feet. His lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited. Over a period of twenty years as a scientist with the agency, Sidney Gottlieb ran the largest systematic search for mind control techniques in history He presided over medical experiments and. 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. The CIA achieved its objective in the Congo unexpectedly and elegantly. Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government, Devlin wrote. 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". It was afraid that the Soviet Union would corner the market on LSD and use it as a chemical weapon or that China would perfect the black art of brainwashing, Mr. Gittinger said. Let's start with, what was the mission of MKUltra? In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In his freezers, he kept biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html. So it's not surprising that later on in life Tim Leary said the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. His first step was to determine which diseases most commonly caused unexpected death in the Congo: anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis, and three animal-borne plagues. It was about a couple of Americans who had gone to Mexico and found the magic mushroom that produces hallucinations. He will fully identify himself and explain his assignment to you.. 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. And seized by this myth, the CIA not only believed that communists had approached or reached this Holy Grail, but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it. He crossed over a lot. 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. His new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search For Mind Control." . And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation. The pin is of an intricate structure: there is a bore inside it extending its entire length except for the sharpened point. The experiments were useless, Mr. Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired. The research and development job he was given after his return from Europe made him one of the chief imaginers, builders, and testers of devices used by American intelligence officers. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. Bulger wrote afterword about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. The conclusion from all these activities, he admitted afterward, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.. Both volunteered with Gottlieb using his new degree to help in middle schools, high schools, and occasionally hospice care facilities as a speech pathologist. Within 20 seconds after the prick, death set in from respiratory paralysis . HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. He had, according to one of his colleagues, prepared poison that a compromised CIA officer, James Kronthal, used to commit suicide in 1953. This also contributed to the CIA rapidly expanding its experimental methods and tactics over the next two decades, in an effort to break down and rebuild the human mind to work in its favor, falsely believing that the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. He wrote, I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me. Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MKUltra, by Sidney Gottlieb. '', ''Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,'' Mr. Marks said. It would have been murder . He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. GROSS: So Sidney Gottlieb worked in secrecy. 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. He was flying the U-2, a plane that almost no one knew existed. Both wings blew off. Men will talk after sex. They also wanted a "truth serum", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS but never fully realized. 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. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. So essentially, although his anonymity was briefly shattered, he was able to emerge from that experience without anybody reaching the heart of his mystery. Gottliebs scientists procured thallium and began testing it on animals. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles. 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. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR"). 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. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. And in the context of the time, who would argue? And under the conditions of his employment, he was allowed to pursue any form of experimentation that he could imagine. Aloft, he reached for a lozenge that felt unusually smooth in his mouth and had no taste. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. . We were fed a lot of books and movies about the idea of mind control, that you could hypnotize someone or give someone a drug that would make them do something that otherwise they would never do. 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.. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. Gottlieb had to come back to the United States. After seven years in a CIA safe, one was removed for testing. Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. 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. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. Gottlieb, the son of Hungarian Powers was put on trial in Moscow.
