Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, die CIA und das LSD – wie der amerikanische Geheimdienst versuchte, das Bewusstsein zu kontrollieren

by Stephen Kinzer

The bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and ’60s.

The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.

Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb’s reckless experiments on “expendable” human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats.

During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy. Only since his death has it become possible to piece together his astonishing career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action. Poisoner in Chief reveals him as a clandestine conjurer on an epic scale.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Biography, Science, Psychology, True Crime

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 10, 2019

About the author

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him "among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling." (source)

Reviews

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my fourth book by Stephen Kinzer. Like the others it is excellent. My notes follow.

As far as the U.S. intelligence service, the OSS, was concerned, war didn’t end with the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945. Just the enemy changed. Now it was Communism and the Soviet Union. Germany and Japan had scientific and intelligence resources the U.S. needed. Just as German rocket scientists were recruited so were German chemists and doctors who had studied poisons and conducted medical experiments on prisoners. The Japanese had also conducted medical, poison and psychological experiments on captives and their experience would be tapped as well. The OSS set up “safe houses” in Germany where more experiments could be conducted on “expendables” without the constraint of U.S. laws.

During WWII the U.S. army had set up a biological warfare center at Camp Detrick near Frederick, Maryland. Biological agents were developed there including anthrax, mosquitoes bred to spread yellow fever and much more. After the war Fort Detrick would also be used to study and develop psychoactive drugs and toxins such as botulism that could be used for assassinations. Many of these would be tested on people in safe houses around the word. In 1948 the CIA succeeded the OSS and continued operations. A strong advocate of this research was Allen Dulles. The former OSS chief and future CIA Director joined the CIA in 1951 to take charge of covert operations. He immediately focused on project Bluebird assigning future CIA Director Richard Helms to help manage it. An official memo said Bluebird called for “investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques”. Since drugs and torture would be applied, Dulles noted these interrogations would have to be conducted overseas. German prisons were ready and Japanese ones were made available. Convinced the Soviets were rapidly developing mind control techniques, the CIA quest for mind control ramped up quickly.

Dulles and Helms needed a top flight chemist to take charge of Bluebird. They wasted no time. In 1951 they hired Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles immediately expanded and intensified Bluebird and renamed it Artichoke. Three days later Dulles rose to second in command at the CIA. He would give Gottlieb everything he needed and Gottlieb would deliver what Dulles wanted. Memos directing the Artichoke team called for “the investigation of drug effects on ego control and volitional activities”. Interrogations began in a safe house in the Canal Zone, but months of torture including electric shock, extreme temperatures and sounds didn’t produce the desired results. Convinced the Soviets already could “brain wash” people, Dulles doubled down. Artichoke teams were set up in South Korea, Germany, France and Japan followed by more. A memo requesting expendables sent to the South Korea facility in 1952 stated ”Desire…to test important new technique. Desire minimum ten subjects…Technique does not, not require disposal problems after application.” In experiments in West Germany the Artichoke team used “Benzedrine and Pentathol-Natrium on Russian captives, under a research protocol specifying that ‘disposal of the body is not a problem.’”

Six months into the job, Gottlieb decided to try LSD on himself. While many thought it unreliable, Gottlieb felt it had promise. In 1952 Dulles took Gottlieb to the Munich safe house. In a series of mind control experiments expendables were given large doses of drugs, others electric shocks. “Each experiment failed. The ‘expendables’ were killed and their bodies burned.” Unimpressed Gottlieb returned to Camp Detrick and enlisted the cooperation of the Army’s Special Operations Division which had elaborate chemical capabilities. With Eisenhower’s election victory in 1952, Gottlieb would be able to pursue any avenue he wanted. Eisenhower made Allen Dulles CIA Director and his brother John Foster Dulles Secretary of State. Richard Helms, now chief of operations for the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, together with Gottlieb proposed a new more powerful initiative called MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb now could expand his focus on mind control. He also picked up responsibility for developing poisons for assassinations.

Gottlieb set up a safe house in Greenwich Village where unsuspecting people were dosed with LSD. Gottlieb selected George Hunter White, a no holds barred narcotics detective, to run it and record his observations. Since White still worked for the Bureau of Narcotics he gave the CIA deniability. White was a heavy drinker and drug user who enjoyed being bound and whipped by prostitutes. He knew all the street people who would make subjects that wouldn’t complain. Movie cameras were set up in two adjoining apartments. White began operations in 1953. Gottlieb had already been dosing unwitting people with LSD but the results he wanted were elusive. Now in addition to the new U.S. based safe house he would contract with hospitals and medical schools to perform experiments, many would not realize they were working for the CIA. Dulles, Helms and Gottlieb were convinced that MK-ULTRA was crucially important. They believed that the Soviet Union was ahead of them in mind control and actively experimenting with LSD. They along with many Americans believed American prisoners just released in Korea had been “brain washed”.

While Gottlieb also conducted experiments with other drugs, hypnosis and other techniques, he still thought LSD had the most promise. He found Harris Isbell the research director at the Addiction Research Center, a hospital co-administered by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Lexington, Kentucky. Isbell was more than willing to conduct intensive LSD experiments on his ready supply of mostly African American “patients”. Isbell rewarded the addict volunteers with heroin after their trips. Some were given daily heavy doses of LSD for over forty days to see if their minds would dissolve. The chairman of the pharmacology department at Emory University was contracted to test LSD on prisoners at the Atlanta federal prison and a juvenile detention center in New Jersey. The infamous gangster Whitey Bulger was one of twenty inmates given LSD almost daily for fifteen months in the Atlanta prison. He was told they were trying to find a cure for schizophrenia. Gottlieb contracted many other doctors and researchers to conduct similar experiments at hospitals and universities across the country. Often done through intermediaries to hide the CIA as the source of funds, many prestigious institutions were involved. Some “volunteers” would become permanently mentally unstable and some commit suicide. Experiments with LSD and other drugs continued in safe houses overseas.

The Thursday before Thanksgiving in 1953 Gottlieb hosted a retreat at a rental cabin in the Maryland woods. Such retreats were regular events bringing together Army and CIA scientists working on MK-ULTRA. At this one Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert Lashbrook, spiked the drinks with LSD. Only after they drank did he tell them. The meeting devolved into boisterous laughter and nonsense. But it affected one scientist deeply, Frank Olson. He was never the same, always afraid he had made some serious mistake and someone was out to get him. He was very confused and didn’t know what to do. Five days later Gottlieb decided Olson should be treated by a physician associated with MK-ULTRA, Harold Abramson, in New York. Olsen agreed thinking psychiatric treatment might help, but Abramson was not a psychiatrist. Lashbrook took Olson to New York where Abramson convinced him that he should ask for voluntary commitment to a Maryland sanatorium. Afterwards Lashbrook and Olsen returned to their New York hotel room on the tenth floor. At 2:25 AM Olsen “fell or jumped” to his death going through a closed window. Lashbrook claims he was awakened when he heard the glass break. The CIA covered all its tracks avoiding public acknowledgement of its involvement. But interest in the case would come up years later time and again as some thought Olson was murdered because he might divulge secrets.

In 1955 Dulles sent the neurologist Harold Wolff to Gottlieb. Gottlieb authorized Wolff to test drugs for mind control research. Wolff conducted his experiments at Cornell Medical Center telling patients the drugs were necessary to treat them. Wolff also combined drugs with isolation and sensory deprivation. Wolff’s scope was expanded to a phony foundation that offered fellowships to unsuspecting individuals across the globe who were then experimented on. Another Gottlieb authorization went to Ewen Cameron, chairman of the Department of Psychology at McGill University and director of the associated psychiatric hospital who conducted extreme sensory deprivation, electroshock, LSD and other drug experiments on unwitting patients. He found he was able to destroy the mind but not reconstitute it. The money was funneled through another “foundation” and Cameron like many others may not have realized his money came from the CIA. Later in 1955 at Gottlieb’s request Dulles went to the White House to get approval to fund a wing at Georgetown University Hospital. The CIA source of the funds was hidden. One sixth of the wing would be dedicated to MK-ULTRA projects. No records of what went on have been found.

In 1955 the Bureau of Narcotics transferred George Hunter White from New York to San Francisco. Gottlieb turned it into an opportunity to open another safe house there. This time LSD would be combined with sex in a new project called Operation Midnight Climax. White would pay prostitutes to bring targeted clients to the house where they would be dosed and have sex. Afterwards the prostitute’s job was to stay with the client and get him to divulge secrets. Say the target worked in an aircraft factory, the prostitute might ask about that new plane you are working on. White would observe through an adjacent room. Sometimes targets were invited to parties at the safe house where drug induced mayhem prevailed. Other times White invited his friends and other agents to party at the “national security whorehouse.” White kept a diary, revealed by his wife after his death, and in it noted that Gottlieb and his CIA associates often visited and took advantage of the benefits. White’s wife was also loose and wild and Gottlieb often had sex with her as well as other women White supplied.

In 1957 Gottlieb left his position at Fort Detrick and became a CIA case officer in Germany. Having made many visits to safe houses there he had many contacts and spoke German. Two years later he returned to Camp now Fort Detrick as chief of research and development for the Technical Service Division. He was now the poison master for the CIA. When Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 over the Soviet Union in 1960 he carried a silver dollar that hid a pin with a deadly toxin. He was given the choice to use it if captured. He didn’t and the Soviets tested it finding it very potent. This was Gottlieb’s creation. He was now more focused on creating poison for assassination. When Eisenhower ordered Patrice Lumumba’s death, Gottlieb prepared the poison and a delivery kit. He took it personally to the Congo to give to the CIA station chief. The CIA was unable to penetrate Lumumba’s security. The Belgian’s shot him after his capture by local enemies. Also in 1960, Eisenhower ordered Castro’s demise. The first idea was to use poisoned cigars, but the CIA couldn’t get them to Castro. They enlisted the mafia to no avail. Gottlieb offered a diverse set of poison delivery systems which the mafia could deploy. When JFK took over, he and his brother Robert were just as determined to eliminate Castro. When Johnson became president he stopped all assassination plots saying “we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

Gottlieb ultimately concluded that LSD was not useful as a mind control drug. However, now its use was spreading. First New York high society went for it. No less than Harold Abramson who had sought to “treat” Olsen began holding LSD parties as early as 1955. Everyone wanted an invitation. Claire Boothe Luce who had an affair with Dulles somehow got hers from a government psychiatrist. Sidney Lumet, Esther Williams, Cary Grant were early users. Many young people enjoyed their LSD experiences in government experiments and the word spread. One study at Boston University was overwhelmed by volunteers based on feedback. Academic researchers often loosely controlled their supply and some took it home for recreation. Ken Kesey first took LSD as part of a CIA sponsored experiment at a VA hospital. He then got a job with the hospital and access to its supply turning his home into a nonstop party. Robert Hunter who wrote the lyrics for some of the Grateful Dead’s most popular songs took his first LSD courtesy of the CIA. Allen Ginsburg got his first dose of LSD in MK-ULTRA experiment. Timothy Leary at the height of his popularity said “I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.”

The MK-ULTRA program finally ended in 1963. Helms became CIA Director in 1966. Prior to his departure in in 1973 he ordered all MK-ULTRA records destroyed. Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1972. The Technical Services Division had made false identity papers and espionage gear for Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy involved in the Watergate break-in, making it a good time for Gottlieb to go. Later Congressional committees would hold hearings where Helms, Gottlieb and others would have to testify about the work of MK-ULTRA. The Olson children would also persist trying to uncover the facts surrounding their father’s death continuing to draw attention to the CIA‘s experiments. Kinzer devotes chapters to the hearings and the Olson family. He also covers much more of Gottlieb’s personal life than I have here. After the CIA Gottlieb returned to the simple life he had always enjoyed in the country, a life so very different form his CIA career. He was an enigmatic character. He was a yogurt eating scientist who regularly practiced meditation. He was a dedicated employee who believed his work was vital to the country’s security. Yet he had an alter ego. Just before George Hunter White died, he wrote a letter to Gottlieb telling him “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!”

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!" - Thank you note from an MK-Ultra contractor to Sidney Gottlieb, CIA

************

Sidney Gottlieb was nice Jewish kid who grew up in the Bronx, a son of Hungarian immigrants. Normal in most regards he was born with clubfeet and a stutter. He excelled in science, studying at City College, a masters in agricultural biology in Wisconsin and a doctorate at CalTech in 1943. Trying to enlist in the war effort he was rejected due to his disability. He married a fellow graduate from a missionary family in India who now questioned her faith. Nearby to Washington DC they lived on a farm with chickens and goats. He was a research chemist for the Dept of Agriculture and Academy of Sciences. Together they had four children.

As the US Army occupied Germany a special unit was tasked with finding top level Nazis. In Munich they arrested Dr. Kurt Blome who had been the director of research in biological warfare and a virulent Nazi. Investigating, they learned that he had conducted experiments on prison camp inmates with nerve gas, psychoactive drugs, infected insects, anthrax, cholera and produced poison gas killing 35,000 people in Poland. Germany and Japan had embarked on programs to develop bacteriological bombs. At an Army base in Maryland there was an epiphany. Instead of hanging him why not hire him? The Secretary of War and FDR agreed.

Roosevelt authorized the first US bio-warfare agency and appointed the pharmaceutical company president Merck as director. Bio weapons had been banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925 yet Merck concluded there was no choice but to join the race. Ira Baldwin, a mentor of Gottlieb from Wisconsin, was tasked with making a bacteria bomb in late 1942 for use by Britain at Churchill's request. At an air base in Maryland no expense was spared creating state of the art laboratories and chemical plants, with tens of thousands of rats, rabbits, birds and monkeys. In Blome's Nurenburg trial he was granted an acquittal and welcomed into the fold.

After the Japanese surrender Army operatives located Shiro Ishii a medical doctor and general who had run a four square mile complex in Manchuria with 3,000 scientists and 12,000 victims of human experiments. In exchange for his files on electroshocking, flamethrowing, poisoning, infection and vivisection General MacArthur obtained his immunity. He was set up in east Asia to continue research on prisoners that was illegal in the US. In 1947 Truman created the CIA for conventional espionage and sabotage but soon they were dabbling in psychoactive drugs and mind control. A Sandoz scientist researching bread fungus had stumbled upon LSD.

In Germany the CIA opened a safe house in a former Jewish mansion operated by Walter Schreiber, an ex-Nazi surgeon general who directed Dachau and Auschwitz experiments. In the cellar there were stone cells where captives awaited to be interrogated. A network of extraterritorial prisons arose in Europe and Asia. Study focused on stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens and hypnosis. Schreiber was given a visa and ticket to America but fled to Argentina under public outrage. Blome took over his role. Allen Dulles, deputy director of the CIA, determined they needed a scientific expert to help lead the program. In 1951 Sidney Gottlieb reported to work.

'Project Artichoke' marshalled reserves of the Maryland facility, Camp Detrick, where Gottlieb's mentor Baldwin had led the Chemical Corps. As the Korean war went on Senator McCarthy warned the State Dept was rife with communists. Dulles, who also had a clubfoot, believed that the future of America was dependent on mind control. Brainwashing was the popular byword repeated in the press. Marijuana, heroin and cocaine were tried but found to be useless. Gottlieb was intrigued by LSD, which he personally sampled. Dozens of Germans and Japanese were dosed and given other types of chemicals, then simply shot and their bodies burned up.

Gottlieb progressed to drugging and poisoning ordinary citizens, code named MK-Ultra. In 1953 apartments in NYC's Greenwich Village were leased and people lured off the street dosed. It was a time of intense paranoia, of Soviet spies and dominos falling, and served to rationalize the most extreme behavior. The CIA had covert operations worldwide deposing leaders and fomenting uprisings. 7000 American POWs were released from Korean prison, many with statements praising communism and pilots claiming they had dropped biological bombs. Average Americans believed brainwashing involved and cold warriors felt the country's existence threatened.

Another tactic employed by Gottlieb was to experiment with addicts committed to treatment institutions. In exchange for high grade heroin rewards volunteers were given massive LSD doses to see what could be withstood. His office staff spiked each others food and tripped for days at a time. At home Gottlieb went on vision quests with his wife. Search for mind control drugs expanded into truth serums and amnesia potions. Staff learned sleight of hand tricks to dose victims with toxins and developed gadgets to deliver poison. Gottlieb considered leaving the CIA. A colleague who had tried to quit either jumped or was thrown out a window.

After Eli Lilly replicated the formula for LSD gallons were sold and shipped to hospitals in the US for studies funded by the CIA. Foundations were opened to disguise experiments in sensory and sleep deprivation and torture techniques. Many psychiatrists went willingly along with the research, some who were sadists. Institutions from McGill University to Cornell Medical Center participated. The CIA set up a San Francisco brothel to test how sex and drugs could loosen lips. The tough guy who ran the pad also worked for the FBI narcotics bureau and brought g-men to try out the girls and dope. Gottlieb himself took full advantage of the facility.

In 1956 Congress convened a committee to oversee the CIA. Reports came in about plots to assassinate the Chinese foreign minister, overthrow governments in Guatemala and Iran and fund ex-Nazis in Germany. Eisenhower interceded and the bill was quashed as Gottlieb searched for magic mushrooms in Mexico. Fiction from du Maurier to 'The Manchurian Candidate' convinced Americans mind control was real. The movie was released as the MK-Ultra scientists realized the program wasn't viable. In spite of unsuccessful attempts on Zhou Enlai, Congo PM Lumumba, Castro and a U-2 pilot Gottlieb was regarded as the poisoner in chief.

After Nixon's resignation the 1975 Rockefeller Commission and following investigations focused on the CIA and in particular the clandestine operations of Gottlieb. The New York Times had reported on activities of MK-Ultra, mail and telephone surveillance of US citizens who protested the war. Gottlieb retired in 1973, later lamenting his work had not been useful. He and his wife had sold the farm and traveled by ship to Australia and India, where they volunteered at a hospital for leprosy for a year and a half. And then came an unwelcome message that the US Congress knew about him and he had been subpoenaed to testify before the Senate.

It is disturbing the US colluded with German nazis, Japanese imperialists and American ideologues to contravene Geneva conventions, hippocratic oaths and human decency. War and fear make strange bedfellows. Stephen Kinzer has done an excellent job researching the events, some well known and others less so. 'Wormwood' (2017) is good documentary about Frank Olson, the scientist unwittingly dosed with LSD who plunged from a NYC hotel window in 1953, by Academy award winner Errol Morris. He was the director of 'The Fog of War' (2003) and 'The Unknown Known' (2013), about defense secretaries Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld.

[David Wineberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the (many) problems with the CIA is who knows what. The less you know, the less you have to lie about and potentially get caught on. Or catch the agency on, which is worse. The result is illegal actions at will, from torture to drug experiments on the unwitting to assassinations of political leaders around the world. The extreme case, we can only hope, is the story of Sidney Gottlieb, the star of Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief.

The title is the actual nickname Gottlieb had at the agency. He had an incredibly broad mandate to find drugs that would be useful in the field, and fashion them into weapons in order to inject victims directly, or poison their food or their clothing. In order to test them, he routinely tortured unwitting victims both in the USA and around the world. International norms, treaties and laws were of no concern. The CIA reported to no one, dreamed up its own projects and acted on its own missions. All in the name of truth, justice and the American way, of course. Budgets could be unlimited, and scope was a wide as the imagination.

In addition to all the torture, Kinzer gives the example Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who was about to be poisoned when the CIA’s Deputy Director Lucian Truscott Jr. found out about it. He dressed down his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles until he relented and canceled the operation. Otherwise we could have had a(nother) major war and distrust lasting decades.

This was the world Sidney Gottlieb stepped into. It subsumed him. He went farther faster than anyone, relying on things like science fiction and paranoid news items to inspire his work. They led him to believe “the Communists” had mind control as a weapon. So the USA had to have it too. And better.

The lengths he went to are astounding. He set up brothels in New York and San Francisco to test johns on the effects of LSD with sex. He dosed total strangers with LSD depending on what agents said were their weaknesses, from physical disabilities to depression. He got hospitals in Canada and the US to overdose patients with LSD to see if it would erase their memories. Same with prison inmates, who were lied to that it was a test of a schizophrenia drug cure. The results of all these things were all too often completely ruined lives, people who were admitted to get better and left mentally crippled. Thousands of people, all over the world. All so Gottlieb could find his holy grail, a drug weapon that could make a victim into an assassin, a traitor or an informant against his own will.

Gottlieb used his MK-ULTRA project to fund all kinds of outside projects he did not personally lead. Neurologist Harold Wolff at Cornell Medical was given a million dollars (in 1950s money) to study “changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissue.” The patients in the study did not know they were in the study, what they were taking or why, which was typical. They were, in the CIA’s classification, “expendables”.

“Expendables” were subjected to baking, freezing, constant light, constant dark, starvation, sleep deprivation, unbearable sounds and unbearable silence. They were sourced all over the world – prisoners, derelicts, hospital patients – anyone the country could do without, for cash. The CIA disposed of the bodies, guaranteed. It was all very reminiscent of the Nazis. In fact, the CIA secured the services of Nazi concentration camp doctors to learn from. If Joseph Mengele hadn’t escaped, he would have been offered a contract and moved into comfort for life in the USA courtesy of the CIA. Several others laundered their lives this way.

Gottlieb also played Q to the CIA agents. He developed poisons no one in the world could identify. He invented pens and cameras and all the other accoutrements that spy pulp fiction wrote about. He even developed a hollow silver dollar chain. It contained a straight pin, the grooved tip of which had a poison so strong it would kill in seconds just rubbing it on the skin. Agents, including Francis Gary Powers, the CIA U-2 spy plane pilot, wore them around their necks in case of capture.

With no limitations, Gottlieb’s organization just kept growing in all directions. He got cocky and secretly spiked a bottle of Cointreau so his own staff drank LSD at a retreat. One of them died as result, either jumping or being pushed from a 13th story hotel room window in Manhattan. As usual, fixers covered it up.

And after all this, the result was nothing. “As of 1960 no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodisiac, recruitment pill was known to exist…Years of MK-ULTRA experiments had failed,” Kinzer says. This marked the beginning of Gottlieb’s acknowledgement that his search had been in vain, though it cost thousands of lives interrupted or terminated.

Incredibly, Gottlieb was a spiritual, positive family man, into solar and sustainable living decades before anyone had heard of them. He studied, practiced and taught folk dancing. Everyone thought the world of him, not knowing what he did for a living. When he retired, he and his wife sold everything, travelled the world and volunteered everywhere they went, in places like leper colonies. Then one day a subpoena caught up to him. He spent pretty much the rest of his life testifying before Congress and in court cases. He demanded and received immunity from Congress. But as private cases started to name him personally, he did his duty as a good spook one last time, and is assumed to have committed suicide rather than risk exposing or even denigrating his life’s work at the CIA. He was 80.

It’s an awful story, told fast and well by Stephen Kinzer. Using numerous other biographies and public reporting, Kinzer has put together a revolting look at the champions of freedom in the USA.

David Wineberg

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I read Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War and David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government (both highly recommended), I thought no story about the dark side of the CIA can surprise me anymore. I thought wrong.
It all began on February 3, 1949, when the Roman Catholic prelate of Hungary, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, appeared at a show trial and confessed to extravagant charges of attempting to overthrow the government, directing black market currency schemes, and seeking to steal the royal crown as part of a plot to re-establish the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Leaders of Western countries were indignant; Pope Pius XII called it “a serious outrage which inflicts a deep wound,” and excommunicated all Catholics involved. The CIA reacted differently. They studied the way Mindszenty had behaved during trial: he appeared disoriented, spoke in a flat, monotone voice, and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. It was obvious that he had been coerced. But how?
A major problem was that for the CIA World War II had never actually ended; all that had changed was the enemy — the role once played by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was assumed by the Soviet Union and, after 1949, “Red China.” That's why the answer was terrifyingly clear for the intelligence agency: the Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques that could make people say things they did not believe. (In fact, no evidence of this was ever found. The prelate had been coerced with traditional means such as extended isolation, beatings, and repetitive interrogation.) However, at the news that the Communists had somehow obtained a potent psychoactive tool, all hell broke loose in the CIA.
As early as the spring of 1949 a secret team, the Special Operations Division, whose scientists would conduct research into ways that chemicals could be used as weapons of covert action, was created in Camp Detrick – the ultra secret wartime biological warfare laboratory directed by bacteriologist Ira Baldwin. Since the coercive use of drugs was a new field, Special Operations scientists had to decide how to begin their research. CIA officers in Europe were looking for interrogation techniques that would allow them to draw captured Soviet agents away from their identities, make them reveal secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will. The Mindszenty trial fed their fear that Soviet scientists had already perfected these techniques. That stirred the CIA to urgent action, and it all went downhill from there.
In the other books about the CIA I have read, it was uniformly Allen Dulles who emerged as the lead character — ubiquitous, always in the whirl of the action. This time, however, he yields his place to another man – Sydney Gottlieb. Any nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psyche, Dulles believed, could rule the world, and he hired Gottlieb to lead the CIA’s search for that grail. Gottlieb was "a psychic voyager." His home was an eco-lodge in the woods with outdoor toilets and a vegetable garden. He meditated, wrote poetry, and raised goats. His unusual way of life distanced him from the Ivy-League CIA men. Yet, he and Dulles had a a strong but never mentioned bond between them because of their shared handicap: they had both been born with a clubfoot. "Over the next decade they would stumble together through undiscovered frontiers," writes Kinzer.
As the head of the Special Operations Division, Gottlieb became omnipotent. The CIA, obsessed with discovering a magical drug that did not exist, provided him with everything he needed. And what Gottlieb needed the most was human guinea pigs.
By the time Sydney had reported for his first day of work in the intelligence agency, the CIA had already been testing drugs on human beings. Located "[i]n a sleepy German town called Oberursel, tucked into rolling hills north of Frankfurt," Camp King had been a Nazi transit camp for captured British and American soldiers. After the U.S Army took over it in 1946, it became something much more sinister. With the coming of the Cold War, a peculiar sort of prisoners began arriving at the camp — Eastern Europeans, some of which were Soviet agents, most simply refugees. For the CIA, they were all "expendables"; this mean that if they disappeared, no one would inquire too closely. On them, doctors and scientists conducted the most extreme experiments with psychoactive drugs ever conducted by U.S officials, guided by the knowledge Nazi scientists had obtained from experiments in concentration camps. (No copy of the Nuremberg Code seems to have hung in Camp King.)
For Gottlieb this was not enough. He spread his research to include willing, but mostly unwilling, U.S citizens also. The fact that LSD experiments were not producing results whatsoever did not stop him. He started drugging prisoners, mental-asylum patients, people frequenting bars, and other CIA agents. The most well-known case is the "suicide" of CIA agent Frank Olson — which was not a suicide at all. After Gottlieb drugged him and other agents with LSD without their knowledge, Olson realized the brutality of what MK-ULTRA (that was the name of the mind-control program) and decided to quit. One who has been privy to Gottlieb's world could not be allowed to quit in peace, though. Olson's jumping out of the window was not a suicide, it was a framed murder. The same year, 1953, Gottlieb wrote an unsigned manual, “A Study of Assassination." Some of its advice on ways to kill eerily fits the Olson case: "... [t]he most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface ... It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death ... A rock or heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried, or subsequently disposed of. Blows should be directed to the temple.”
After a decade of research, Sydney Gottlieb found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them. However, he oversaw medical experiments and “special interrogation” projects in which hundreds of people were killed, tormented and many minds were permanently shattered. No one had ever plunged into this kind of work with more ambition or enthusiasm, and what is even more scary: he justified it all in the name of science and patriotism.
In his book, Stephen Kinzer covers other important topics and raises many questions. One of them, in my opinion, is the danger of masterful propaganda. In the early 1950s, as Americans were being warned that Communists were infiltrating their government (McCarthyism), they were also told that those same Communists had found ways of controlling people’s minds. On September 20, 1950, Edward Hunter, an imaginative propagandist, published an article in the Miami News headlined “BRAIN-WASHING TACTICS FORCE CHINESE INTO RANKS OF COMMUNIST PARTY." While few scientists took Hunter’s rants seriously, popular imagination seized on the concept. The Soviets had successfully tested their first nuclear weapon, after all. The threat of “brainwashing” seemed even more horrific because it was so unfathomable. But the most significant consequence of this propaganda campaign was that Allen Dulles and other senior officers were seized by the fear that they were losing a decisive race. Ironically, as the CIA promoted the belief that Communists had mastered “brainwashing” techniques, the Agency fell under the spell of its own propaganda. That led them not only to justify extreme drug experiments, but to convince themselves that America’s national security demanded them. "There was deep concern over the issue of brainwashing,” Richard Helms explained years later. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as LSD and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior.” Dosing unwilling patients with potent drugs, however, qualifies as medical torture.
Another important and disturbing topic is how trends are created in our society. The popularity of LSD during the counterculture times was, Kinzer reveals, artificially created. Novelist Ken Kesey (One Fly Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, the enthusiastic LSD volunteers, who were all responsible for turning the drug into a symbol of youth culture, free love, hippie rebellion, and opposition to the Vietnam War, would be shocked to realize, when the existence of MK-ULTRA was revealed in the 1970s, that the CIA had been behind the drug research in which they had participated. The trend had not emerged by itself. It had not been a expression of youthful non-conformity. "It was being done to make people insane,” Kesey said, “to weaken people and try to put them under the control of interrogators.” There are lessons to be learned from this.

Overall, Stephen Kinzer exceeded all my expectations yet again. His compelling style, the astonishing number of details, the meticulousness of the research all bring Sydney Gottlieb, the perfect fictional mad scientist who happened to really exist, and the rest of the CIA archvillains to life. PRISONER IN CHIEF is a highly disturbing read, but it is also eye-opening and instructive. Highly recommended.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book began as research for a novel I'm writing, but then it evolved so far beyond that into one of the most interesting books I have ever read about the CIA. Mind-control research in the 1960s? LSD? Ken Kesey? Attempted assassinations of foreign leaders? Agents falling ten stories to their deaths from NYC hotels? This terrific account of the CIA's "poisoner-in-chief" has it all. Big props to Stephen Kinzer as a journalist and storyteller.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer demonstrates his research skills by reconstructing MK-ULTRA and Sidney Gottlieb’s deep involvement. Good reviews of this book can be found through most media sources, so I will only comment on Kinzer’s portrayal of Gottleib and two points that deserve follow up for this story and others.

The bulk of the book is on Gottlieb’s work. He is portrayed as the consummate bureaucrat. The last chapters have information on him as a person.

Gottlieb had a well honed (or was it real?) image of a family man. His lifestyle (farm, yoga, folk dancing, yoghurt, use of solar energy in the 1990’s, community service in retirement) is that associated with a liberal… a bleeding heart one. How is it that he not just allowed these life threatening tests, but led them?

How did Gottlieb feel about giving dangerous and unknown drugs, electric shocks and sensory deprivation confinements to prisoners, patients who trusted their doctors and unwitting people who crossed his path? As his staff and CIA operators administered these “procedures” there was terrible suffering. Some patients died; others were permanently damaged. This went on for 10 years and in reduced forms, for another 10. By all accounts Gottlieb kept good records (which he later destroyed) so only he would know the scale of what he authorized and seemingly designed.

KInzer poses a theory that Gottlieb could have been a patriot, inspired by the trauma of WWII and the spread of communism. Sometimes little things betray. Advising Eric Olson that he might try therapy to deal with his father’s suicide, when he had to know his father was murdered (and Gottlieb may have authorized the murder) reeks of cynicism. There is one domestic scene from a childhood friend of one of Gottlieb’s children, suggesting that the guilt of his work spilled into his home and that his 4 children were conditioned at an early age not to speak about their father. In one part of the book, Kinzer says Gottleb’s 4 kids do not speak to him; but later on they are portrayed as a happy family.

There are two items mentioned that beg follow up. These are not central to Gottlieb, but are worthy of exploration beyond and including the mind control programs.

On p. 71 Allen Dulles confessed to CIA agent James Kronthal that he was caught on tape in an act of pedophilia and that this “personal compulsion” had been known by both the Nazis and Soviets who then used him as a double agent. Kronthal died at home that night where a vial of poison (presumably made by Gottlieb) was found.

There are several references to Eisenhower’s approval of the CIA’s assassination programs. The original plan for the murder of Patrice Lumumba was to use one of Gottlieb’s poisons. Kennedy, suspicious of the CIA, who fired Dulles, presumably would have done something about it if he knew and if he could. Lyndon Johnson is said to end the CIA assassination programs, noting that “we have been operating a goddam Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”. What, if anything, did these presidents know about the “mind control” programs and how they were administered?

This is probably the only assemblage of this material to date. It demonstrates Kinzer’s research skills. At times it reads like a reference book. Unlike the 2 other Kinzer books I've read, the info is incomplete and the portrait of Gottlieb is hazy. This may not be the fault of the author. The portrait of Sydney Gottlieb and his research may be all that can be gleaned for now.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief revisits one of the CIA's most bizarre Cold War projects: MK-ULTRA, the effort to mold human behavior using psychotropic drugs. At center of the narrative is Sidney Gottlieb, the mild-mannered, Bronx-born chemist who became head of the project; his fascination with the farther shores of medical research dovetailed nicely with fears of the early Cold War that the Soviet Union and its allies perfected "brainwashing" techniques against their enemies. Thus, the Central Intelligence Agency (building off the research both of American researchers and Nazi scientists) plunged into a deeply-hidden, horrendously unethical project of unauthorized experimentation using a variety of psychotropic drugs, most famously LSD. Few of the horror stories Kinzer relates are new, though they aren't any less terrifying in the retelling. From the fate of Frank Olson, an Army researcher who either committed suicide or was murdered over his disillusionment with the project, to the madness of Operation Midnight Climax (where patrons of a San Francisco brothel were drugged with LSD) or the nightmarish "sleep room" experiments of Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, it's clear that MK-ULTRA victimized hundreds of people directly. A few tidbits, like Gottlieb's plan to poison Zhou Enlai, were news to me and show that his goal was in no way, shape or form benign. Hopes of developing "mind control" were quickly dashed, but Gottlieb allowed the experiments to continue, partly in hopes of developing "enhanced interrogation" techniques against enemy spies and partly out of sheer fascination with the work he was doing. Gottlieb was fired from the Agency in 1973, becoming a spiritual hermit who disassociated himself from his previous work, despite the efforts of reporters and congressional committees to hold him accountable. Without overreaching into grandiose conspiracy theories (no speculation about CIA-brainwashed assassins killing the Kennedys or the like), Kinzer shows the bare facts of MK-ULTRA are sordid and horrifying enough on their own.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 4 and 4.5; full post here:
http://www.nonfictionrealstuff.com/20...

As the reviewer of this book for The San Francisco Review of Books wrote, Poisoner in Chief is an "awful story, told fast and well." I couldn't have said it better myself.

According to author Stephen Kinzer, the early years of the 1950s were a "fearful time for Americans," citing among other things the "ugly stalemate" of the Korean War and Senator McCarthy's warnings that "Communists had infiltrated the State Department." The success of the Soviets' first nuclear weapons test led to the fear of being "attacked at any moment," and we also learned that the Communists "had found ways of controlling people's minds." Indeed, the term "brain-washing" was introduced to Americans in 1950; Americans were urged to "prepare for psychological warfare" against "psychic attacks" from the Chinese.

There was no real evidence that any of this was actually true; nevertheless Allen Dulles along with "other senior officers" of the CIA feared that "they were losing a decisive race." As Richard Helms would put it many years afterward, they believed that they couldn't afford to "lag behind the Russians or the Chinese" in this area. The CIA became convinced that

"there is a way to control the human mind, and if it can be found, the prize will be nothing less than global mastery."

In a memo written in 1951, CIA officers posed a list of several questions along the lines of "Can we 'alter' a person's personality?" or "How can [drugs] be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item..." , the answers to which, they decided, would be "of incredible value to this agency." Realizing that their current Project Bluebird needed "an infusion of expertise and vision" from outside of the agency, Dulles and his officers decided to bring in a chemist

"with the drive to pursue forbidden knowledge, a character steely enough to direct experiments that might challenge the conscience of other scientists, and a willingness to ignore legal niceties in the service of of national security."

Enter Sidney Gottlieb.

Poisoner in Chief is not at all easy to read on a human level -- it's shocking, it's graphic, and even worse, it's frightening to think that all of what the author details over the course of this book was sanctioned and done in the name of national security and the defense of freedom. It also makes you wonder if anyone involved ever had the least qualms of conscience. "Awful" this story may be, but at the same time, it's compelling enough that you absolutely cannot stop turning pages.

[Ross Blocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA mind control program, has always occupied a murky place in my own mind. Having heard about it alternately through factual and conspiratorial sources, I've never been fully sure just how broad its reach was and how successfully it discovered (or failed to discover) methods to control human behavior. In Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer unpacks what is known about the program and the enigmatic, complicated figure who animated it.

Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish immigrants. He earned multiple degrees in Chemistry, including a PhD from Caltech. During World War II, he was eager to enlist, but was rejected for having a club foot. In 1951, he was recruited by the CIA, and his knowledge of poisons was a particular asset, folding nicely into existing efforts for the US to build its biochemical knowledge and arsenal. Finally, he'd found a way to help defend his country against its newest external threat.

Kinzer details WWII experimentation on both German and Japanese sides. The latter was news to me, and it was fascinating to learn of Shirō Ishii and the terrible war crimes Unit 731 perpetrated on hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, primarily Chinese. There was an Allied conflict over what to do with these infamous perpetrators: most wanted to prosecute, but an influential minority sought to recruit. Project Paperclip funneled many former Nazis into the US to work in exchange for immunity, and allowed many others to escape altogether. The army converted a base called Detrick into the headquarters for its biological warfare laboratories. One CIA program, Project Bluebird (renamed Artichoke), tried to create assassins by means of hypnosis, deprivation and chemical influence.

These efforts, fueled by fear that the communists had already discovered a method of "brainwashing" dissidents, led to Gottlieb's appointment as the head of a new project to aggregate everything known about mind and body control: MK-ULTRA (also MKUltra, among other permutations: MK- being the prefix for projects run by "Technical Services Staff", at which Gottlieb ran the chemical division). MK-ULTRA was top secret even within the already tight-lipped agency. Very few people knew the scope of the operation, and many of its 149 subprojects were carried out by doctors and institutions who did not know their funding came from the CIA. Gottlieb was endlessly curious, resourceful and inventive, and presided over subprojects as diverse as torture houses in Germany, isolation and deprivation studies, memory wiping experiments, hypnosis, electroshock therapy, lie detection, sleight of hand (famed magician John Mulholland was recruited to write a guidebook that taught agents to discretely deliver poison), handwriting analysis (graphology), spraying massive amounts of bacteria into San Francisco to see how efficiently it spread (resulting in the death of at least one man), using sex workers to pry secrets out of agents, stockpiling of various rare poisons, and the effects of various mind-altering substances: psychedelic mushrooms, barbituates, and most infamously, LSD.

LSD was Gottlieb's go-to drug. He took it himself some 200+ times, and seemed convinced that MK-ULTRA would discover a method to harness its mind-altering powers to wipe memory, program assassins, extract secrets and confessions, or simply incapacitate enemies. The problem (well, ONE problem) was that the project gave LSD to unwitting participants, ignoring the Nuremburg Code's dictates, along with the dictates of basic conscience. This backfired horribly as early as 1953, when one of Gottlieb's own scientists, Frank Olson, was drugged with LSD at a retreat with other project members. He sank into depression, realizing he'd made a mistake and wanting to leave the CIA. Days later, Olson fell to his death from the 13th floor window of a New York hotel. There's very strong reason to believe he was purposefully murdered in an effort to protect the project's secrets, but details didn't emerge for decades. Netflix's new series Wormwood is all about this incident and the resulting pain for Olson's family and the US government. When news of the secret druggings became public decades later, hundreds of people suddenly had explanations for terrible and heretofore-inexplicable occurrences from years past. In the process, Gottlieb and his associates initiated figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter into LSD use, unwittingly sparking the drug- and counter-culture of the 60s and beyond.

Though it wasn't technically terminated until 1973, MK-Ultra was mostly abandoned in 1963. Gottlieb was pulled into other projects, and had a whole second career within the CIA. Numerous political assassination attempts called upon his expertise to prepare items for death and incapacitation. The famed silver dollar pendant U-2 pilot Gary Powers wore? That was created by Sidney Gottlib, armed with a potent shellfish poison that even Powers's Russian capturers didn't recognize. A Communist official in Iraq was killed by a scarf loaded with tuberculosis. Gottlieb personally delivered a kit with botulinum poison to assassinate the Prime Minister of Congo, but another group conveniently killed him first. He was involved in assassination attempts on Fidel Castro requested by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Gottlieb's dedication led him to research substances and methods that matched the locale: he wanted deaths to be ruled as accidental. He hatched plans to sprinkle thallium in Castro's boots, to make his beard fall out. A batch of Fidel's favorite cigars, laced with botulinum, was never used, but remained deadly to the touch for years afterward. A favorite restaurant was chosen for a poisoning attempt, but Castro stopped going there. The Cuban dictator loved to dive, and one plot involved a rare shell being planted under water with explosives. Another plan was to give Castro a tainted diving suit seeded with disease-causing-fungus and tuberculosis. The lawyer James Donovan (played by Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies) was to have delivered the suit, but switched it out for another.

Throughout various changes of leadership at the CIA, Gottlieb lucked out by having well-placed benefactors who could protect and find uses for him. His final stint was as a gadget man, the Q to CIA's various Bonds. He ran the Technical Services division, which created all the stuff you might expect to see in Mission Impossible (he had agents ready to field inquiring calls after each episode aired). This included miniaturized and concealed cameras, audio bugs, undetectable pistols, guns that when stolen by enemies could track their positions, a keylogging typewriter, and even an "acoustic kitty" (in which a live cat was implanted with a microphone). Unfortunately for Gottlieb (and fortunately for cats) this proved a failure, as the cat refused to approach its eavesdropping targets. So much for mind control. Remember the Watergate burglars? They were equipped with devices made by the Technical Services team.

In the fallout of the Watergate scandal, Nixon fired the CIA's director Richard Helms, who refused to help create a cover story to protect the president. Helms had been Gottlieb's protector, and the writing was on the wall. Gottlieb left after 22 years at the agency, still young at 55, but not until after he'd destroyed all the MK-ULTRA documentation he could get his hands on. He struggled with finding suitable work after having spent two decades overseeing torture, drugging, and spy operations. He and his wife started traveling the world, volunteering (perhaps in an effort to work off bad karma incurred in his professional life). The next couple CIA directors sought to change the agency's culture, rooting out the lawlessness of past administrations. A variety of congressional commissions and public inquiries led to the revelation of many embarrassing secrets, including the existence of MK-ULTRA. Kinzer shares the push-and-pull battle as Gottlieb fought to remain out of the public eye (quite literally: only a handful of photos of him are known to exist) and avoid prosecution and deposition, saying he'd forgotten much and put his CIA years behind him as he moved on to work as a speech pathologist, community volunteer, folk dancer and international humanitarian. Even his death at the age of 80 is shrouded in mystery: many suspect that he killed himself to avoid mounting inquiries, but his wife respected his wishes and never divulged even his manner of death.

It's a fascinating story full of contradictions of conscience and character, triumph of patriotic fervor and paranoia over moral and legal concerns, and unexpected connections to many other historical events. For all of Gottlieb's rigorous experimentation, MK-ULTRA never discovered any reliable ways to subvert human autonomy or build assassins. While we can be glad of that, the program and Gottlieb himself still managed to have an outsized effect. The torture manuals his team assembled were modified over time, and are still influential in the age of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rumors of mind control and memory erasure have influenced plots from The Manchurian Candidate to The X-Files, Men in Black and Captain America. MK-ULTRA did much to incite and validate the concerns of conspiracy theorists, who can validly point to many programs in which the US government has systematically manipulated and spied upon its own citizens. Poisoner in Chief is a multi-faceted and important piece of history, thoroughly and soberly told.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart, or for anyone who cherishes their innocence. It is a disturbing, uncomfortable read.

Primarily a history of the project called MK-ULTRA, which I had heard about because one notorious subproject was carried out in Montreal at the Allen Institute. Patients would go to a clinic for anxiety or postpartum depression, and they would be unwittingly subjected to experimental mind-control processes funded by the CIA — sensory deprivation, psychic driving, sleep deprivation, and dosed with drugs such as LSD. Some people never recovered or killed themselves and this was a huge scandal when it eventually came out. The director of the program, Dr. Cameron, "fell off a cliff" under mysterious circumstances, so was never able to testify. Hundreds of Canadians received compensation from the CIA, but no Americans have ever been compensated for their mistreatment.

In the USA, these experiments were performed on "expendables": prison inmates, college students, and psychiatric patients, as well as other unwitting victims lured to "safe house/brothels" in New York and San Francisco. Boston gangster Whitey Bulger was dosed with LSD while in prison, and author Ken Kesey was given LSD by the government while he was a college student (under the guise of medical research).

Some of these techniques were refined and promoted in the CIA interrogation handbook, and became more well-known (infamous) during the so-called war on terror as "Enhanced interrogation techniques."

Did you know the US government wanted to study the dispersal of a biological agent in an urban centre, so they sprayed a supposedly benign bacteria from a ship in the San Francisco harbour for six days. The bacterium turned out to be not completely harmless but only a few people died, and it was the Cold War, so everything was excusable given the times. Right?

International assassinations, regime changes, the death of Frank Olsen ("jumped or fell"), the Church Commission, and so on. Four stars because (besides the zoo elephant in Oklahoma injected with a massive dose of LSD who died within two hours) I'm not sure how much is new here —the approach is different, organized around Sidney Gottlieb (who was in charge of most of the projects) but he remains enigmatic and still quite unknown.

For anyone who believes that the CIA mandate forbids activities within the U.S. this book would be a wake-up call.

[Steven Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, POISONER IN CHIEF: SIDNEY GOTTLIEB AND THE CIA SEARCH FOR MIND CONTROL is a very troubling and disconcerting book. The fact that the United States government sanctioned a program designed to conduct what the author terms, “brain warfare” highlights a policy that allowed for torture, the use of chemicals to develop control of people’s thoughts, murder, and the disintegration of people and their quality of life making one want to question what these bureaucrats, the military, and the intelligence community as well as the president were thinking. Those who are familiar with Kinzer’s previous works, THE BROTHERS, a duel biography of the John Foster and Allen W. Dulles; ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, which describes the errors of American policy toward Iran and the overthrow of the Shah; BITTER FRUIT, an analysis of the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954; OVERTHROW, a history of CIA coups including Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, among the author’s nine books will recognize his fluid writing style, impeccable research, and pointed analysis. In his current effort all of these qualities are readily apparent and apart from a certain amount of disgust by what they are reading you will find the book an exceptional expose.

Kinzer’s deep dive into the lethal and unscrupulous world of “brain warfare” must be seen in the context of time period that he discusses. The United States found itself in the midst of the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union with intelligence focusing on Russian research into mind control. With Soviet aggressiveness in Eastern Europe and beyond, the rise of Communist China, the Korean War, and the domestic ramifications of McCarthyism the mindset of the American military, intelligence organizations, and politicians were open to anything that could keen up and surpass the Communist bloc in any area that was deemed a threat to American national security.

The story originates with World War II with German and Japanese scientists researching how people’s thoughts could be controlled and how chemical and biological weapons could be employed against civilians and soldiers. At the outset the book focuses on how the American government handled enemy scientists following the war, particularly “Operation Paperclip,” a program to integrate captured scientists and flip them to provide their expertise and research for the United States – see Anne Jacobsen’s OPERATION PAPERCLIP and books by Ben Macintyre for a detailed description. Many of the scientists were guilty of crimes against humanity during the war, but that did not stop what policy makers believed to be a matter of extreme importance.

Once Kinzer provides the origins of the programs developed he delves into the life of Sidney Gottlieb, a rather ordinary individual from the Bronx whose interest growing up included biology and chemistry which eventually led to a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin where he would meet Ira Baldwin who would recruit him and become his boss which eventually placed Gottlieb in charge of America’s mind control program beginning with research into the application of mind altering drugs including LSD, and the title, “Poisoner-in-Chief.”

Kinzer finds Gottlieb to be a free spirit who cultivated spirituality and wanted to be close to nature as he chose a personal voyage that was remarkably unconventional. At work he did the same; “rejecting the limits that circumscribed more conventional minds and daring to follow his endlessly fertile imagination. This approach allowed him to conduct research into numerous areas all designed to see if a person’s thoughts and behavior could be reoriented in a way that would benefit American national security. Kinzer will build his narrative block upon block of the infrastructure that the CIA created to conduct its brain research. Beginning with Operation Bluebird in 1951, which was designed to be a broad and comprehensive, involving domestic and overseas activity including “safe houses” all over the world to conduct experiments. Later the program was renamed Artichoke which would take it to the next level, and finally MK-ULTRA which would harness chemicals, biological agents, assassination, torture, and sensory deprivation in order to carry out the mission.

Kinzer describes in detail the scientists and doctors involved, with particular focus on Gottlieb; the roles of CIA head Allen W. Dulles and his second in command, Richard Helms; the experiments themselves conducted with “expendables” who were likely prisoners, unsuspecting foreigners and American citizens, coopted doctors and scientists, as well as CIA employees. The impact on people’s lives is explored in detail and in the case of Frank Olson, a scientist who had an expertise in the distribution of airborne biological germs, was involved in research who began to question his role winds up jumping out of the thirteenth floor window of a New York hotel shortly after he was given a drink laced with LSD that he was unaware of. The programs described by Kinzer are hard to fathom and the fact that no one was held accountable is even more upsetting.

Those involved in the programs believed they were all that stood in the way between their country and devastation. Kinzer has benefited from the Freedom of Information process, numerous interviews by participants and victims, in addition to other types of research. His conclusions are damning and if one follows the chain of command it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who approved experiments and the program in general. It took the failure of the Bay of Pigs to cost Allen W. Dulles his position and later the Watergate break in which linked Gottlieb’s research and inventions to bring about a degree of change and congressional investigations.

This resulted in the end of Gottlieb’s career as President Gerald R. Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission to investigate actions taken by the CIA outside its charter in 1974 and finally the Church Committee hearings. The problem for investigators was that Gottlieb had destroyed a great deal of the evidence of CIA murders, plots, and research and the 1950s and 60s. Further, President Ford did not want too much information to enter the public realm as the Rockefeller Commission result was not as damning as it could have been. In the end Gottlieb would testify anonymously before Congress, but with a “grant of immunity” which protected him from prosecution. It is interesting that by the early 1960s after years of relentless MK-ULTRA experiments Gottlieb reached the conclusion that there was no way to take control of another’s mind.

The author introduces a number of interesting and important characters into his narrative. The saga of Frank Olson is important as it took years for the truth about his death to emerge. George Hunter White a sadistic narcotics officer who opened a “national security whorehouse” to carry out his activities. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University, one of a number of psychiatrists who worked with the CIA. John Mulholland, a magician who would write THE OFFICIAL CIA MANUAL OF TRICKERY AND DECEPTION. Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University who conducted experiments at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. Whitey Bulger, the Boston mobster was a victim of one of Pfeiffer’s drug experiments. Dr. Harold Abramson, a New York allergist who shared almost total knowledge of MK-ULTRA with Gottlieb. John Marks, the author of THE SEARCH FOR THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. The work of these individuals and others was very impactful for Gottlieb’s work, but in the end, it will be for naught.

Kinzer’s research brings out a number of fascinating tidbits. First, Gottlieb developed the cyanide capsule that Francis Gary Powers was supposed to use when his U-2 plane was shot down over Russia. Two, Gottlieb delivered and developed the poison the CIA was to use to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960. Third, Gottlieb helped develop poisons designed to kill Fidel Castro. Lastly, the drug that Gottlieb and his associates hoped would allow them to control humanity had the opposite effect. The LSD experiments and their results would fuel a generational revolt unlike any in American history as they were popularized by the likes of Ken Kesey, the author of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and Harvard professor Timothy Leary.

Kinzer’s description and summary of results pertaining to “brainwashing” experimentation and implementation brings to the fore the paranoia of the 1950s and 60s. It is an important book as it shows how the government can engage in processes that violate the civil rights of Americans as well as foreigners on their own soil, in addition to the numerous deaths that took place. It remains astounding that Gottlieb’s successors would resort to other types of illegal activities like waterboarding in addition to other techniques from an earlier period, again in the name of national security. Detention centers and CIA “black sites” for rendition of prisoners, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, Guantanamo Bay etc. are all legacies of Gottlieb’s work. Kinzer takes the reader to some very interesting places both inside and outside the human psych with Sidney Gottlieb as our guide, but in the end his contribution to our knowledge of the period is greatly enhanced and it makes for an amazing read.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this book in a goodreads drawing.

In the early days of the cold war, the CIA rose from the ashes of the OSS. The higher ups were obsessed with the ideas of brain washing and mind control. They were convinced that the Russians led the way.

Sidney Gottlieb got a job experimenting with drugs and hypnosis techniques, and also untraceable poisons, and all the stuff we read about in spy novels, and quickly became head of the department.

The book examines Gottlieb's life, and the events that allowed him to become so powerful without any real checks.

Not bad, but through it all, Gottlieb himself remains a cipher.

[doug bowman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Fresh Air

As so often happens, most of the non- fiction works that I read come out of hearing an episode of the National Public radio show, Fresh Air. I have never been disappointed by a book presented on the show. This book was engrossing and horrific at the same time. It's subject is at once sinister and compelling.

[Viki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was heavy mentally and emotionally. I honestly had to put it down because of the gravity of the history within. Sidney Gottlieb was a mass murderer and an evil human being. I’m glad he’s dead. This book was instrumental in my understanding of the CIA and the inherent lechery and degeneracy in American foreign policy.

[Dana-Adriana B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Experimentele CIA se vor a fi mai bune decat a nazistilor, a chinezilor, a japonezilor....dar tot torturi sunt, crime in numele "stiintei".

[freddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

11/5/25: really really good as usual. now i just have to write a paper on it
5/11/24: absolutely excellent. also completely horrifying. it accomplished the difficult task of being nonfiction, not sensationalizing what happened, and being incredibly engrossing and engaging. the cold war is a huge interest of mine so reading a book like this was very interesting to me

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sidney Gottlieb was a complex guy. He didn’t come across to me as a psychopath, but he sure did psychopath type stuff. The man behind the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. I think what drove him was patriotism and the terror that the Russians would get there first. None of that excuses what he did.

This is an important piece of history.

[Sarah Gabriel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is harshing my mellow. Life is too short to read boring books about the CIA. I specifically picked this up because I thought it would be an exciting and cheesy conspiracy theory read. Not a legitimate history of CIA projects. I do think the information it contains is important... I just have better things to do with time currently. DNFd 111 pages in.

[Isabelle reads a book a day because she has no friends · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely mind-blowing. I was gripped from the start. I learned so much information that I was never meant to know and loved every second of it.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Off

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite getting top billing, Gottlieb takes a back seat to his work in this breathless recounting of the CIA's immoral MKUltra program. If you ever need an example of how a false premise is going to lead to a false conclusion, this would be it. Based on the belief that the ONLY way U.S. trained soldiers would betray their country is if the enemy had developed mind-control capabilities, the CIA funded a 10-year project to research mind control techniques of their own. The good news is that at the end of their wide-ranging studies, they were able to say definitively that there was no chemical or mechanical way to control another person's mind. However, most readers will probably come to the conclusion that the human toll- not to mention the long-term damage to the CIA's credibility, which I'd argue continues to undermine the organization today- as well as a few of our other democratic institutions, probably wasn't worth it.

Given the lack of documentation of the program (Gottlieb destroyed over 150 files once he was forced out of the CIA) and a lack of personal papers, Kinzer does a good job creating a cohesive narrative based on the available facts, but it's clear he doesn't have enough to satisfactorily answer the central question of the book- how could someone like Gottlieb, a man who was searching for spiritual enlightenment, be a torturer? Kinzer also makes the decision to tell the narrative twice (once in real time and then again as a Congressional investigation) rather than wrestle with other questions that naturally come up. I'd like to know how the CIA answered the questions about the troops' treasonous behavior once they realized that mind control wasn't a thing. I'd also like to know what they thought of other types of persuasive techniques that were being studied or developed at the time. (He could have gone there given how much time he spent discussing the ways in which fiction influenced thinking at the CIA at the time.) It's one of those books that probably would have been better as a long-form article.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

What You Need To Know: After the United States spent billions heroically sacrificing and conquering the Nazi party in World War II we then turned around and hired a bunch of them (start by Googling “Project Paperclip”). The reason was to compete against the new threat known as the Soviet Union. Because of patriotism, we couldn’t let the Reds get to the advancements in technology before we did. The problem is the BEHAVIOR adapted. Example: this book. The stuff Sidney Gottlieb and his cronies did was straight out of the Nazi playbook, their predecessors.

Read this true story and prepare to be horrified. Today is October 31st. Happy Halloween.

[Sandra Deaconu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dacă sunteți interesați de politică, istorie politică și spionaj, atunci aceasta este cartea potrivită pentru voi. Dacă vă interesează mai mult partea sociologică și științifică a subiectului, atunci înarmați-vă cu răbdare! Însă aproape sigur este că, dacă deja vă pasionează și îngrijorează deopotrivă conspirațiile, la finalul lecturii paranoia va fi în floare. Recenzia aici: https://shorturl.at/7RvuY.

,,au fost expuși unor gaze toxice pentru a li se preleva ulterior plămânii ca să fie studiați; au fost «prăjiți» încet cu curent electric pentru a se determina voltajele necesare inducerii decesului; au fost atârnați cu capul în jos pentru a se studia evoluția sufocării naturale; au fost închiși în camere cu înaltă presiune până când le-au sărit ochii din cap; au fost învârtiți în centrifugă; infectați cu antrax, sifilis, ciumă, holeră și alte boli; femeile au fost fecundate forțat, pentru a furniza bebeluși în vederea vivisecției; au fost legați de țăruși pentru a fi incinerați de soldații care testau aruncătoarele de flăcări sau lăsați să înghețe lent pentru a observa evoluția hipotermiei. S-a injectat aer în venele victimelor pentru a provoca embolii; li s-a injectat sânge de animale pentru a urmări ce efecte va avea. Unii au fost disecați de vii sau li s-au amputat membrele, astfel încât medicii să le poată urmări moartea lentă din cauza hemoragiei sau cangrenelor."

[Audrey Grimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

super super interesting, disturbing, thought provoking. the ww2/Cold War time period just had so much lore and this is some deep lore

[Христо Блажев · Rating 4 out of 5]

Отровителят на ЦРУ – Сидни Готлиб: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/o...

Причината за създаване на проект “Синя птица” е, че “Служителите на ЦРУ в Европа били изправени пред сходно предизвикателство. Те редовно залавяли предполагаеми съветски агенти и търсели методи за разпит, чрез които да откъснат тези затворници от тяхната идентичност, да ги накарат да разкрият тайните си против собствената им воля.” Този проект бил преценен като перспективен и били потърсени възможности да се развие. Кинзър пише: “Дълес и Хелмс се заели да завербуват някой химик с въображение, амбициран да търси забранения плод, с достатъчно железен характер, за да ръководи експерименти, които биха могли да обезпокоят съвестта на други учени, и готов да не обръща внимание на юридическите тънкости в служба на националната сигурност”. След това проектът получава ново име: “Артишок” (какво въображение, а?).

Издателство "Изток-Запад"
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/o...

[holldog · Rating 3 out of 5]

too smart for me but fucking MENTAL on the parts I understood

[Alexandru · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer's book is a good overview of Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that was the mastermind behind the famous CIA project MK Ultra. The book covers all of the main events from World War II, the Cold War, the wars in Korea and Vietnam when Gottlieb led a team of researchers that experimented with drugs, mind control and various secret gadgets.

Gottlieb wasn't only a lab doctor, he actually went out in the field and worked as a secret agent. He was a chemist by trade so started with the development of poisons but then became obsessed with the idea of using various chemical compounds to control and alter the behaviour of people. He recruited ex-Nazi scientists and experimented on live humans in CIA dark sites in places such as Germany, Canada or Korea. He is best known for initiating the LSD experiments of the CIA which ended up launching the hippie counter-culture movement.

The book is very engaging and well written as the incredible life of the shy and spiritual Gottlieb unfolds. He didn't shy from anything from poisoning of politicians, attempted assassinations of Castro, torture of war prisoners and experimenting on his own colleagues.

The book is of course critical of Gottlieb's inhuman experiments, however the author appears to be naive when speaking about American rivalry with the Soviet Union and China. He seems to treat the threat from these other powers as American paranoia. This is the despite the fact that there is ample evidence of similar Soviet and Chinese experimentation programs, for example the development of Chimaera viruses by the Soviet Union.

All in all this is a very interesting book which has only whetted my appetite for the history of covert programmes of this era.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A disturbing portrait of Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA research into mind control. He believed as it the USA that there was a potential for communists to develop mind control drugs and experimented on the same. During the 50s and 60s, Gottlieb and his team lured homeless, prostitutes, criminals and people they decided would not attract attention if they disappeared and conducted experiments on them. Some were discredited, others permanently injured and a few died. Sidney Gottlieb told his stories under immunity from prosecution in 1975 in front of Congress. World leaders such as Castro and Lumumba were targeted for assassination. Prisoners and college students were used as guinea pigs. His nickname was Dr. Death.

[Miebara Jato]

A few days ago, my friend and I had a heated disagreement, it almost comes to blows, with a man that has this dogs-only restaurant close to a bar that we frequent. This man in question breeds dogs. When the dogs grow to maturity, he'll slaughter them in the most inhuman way. After he slaughters them, he'll cook them and sell. The day that my friend and I quarrelled him, he'd just brought about 7 pops because he'd slaughtered and sold all the adults that he previously had. Seeing those beautiful and innocent pops, we felt genuinely sorry for them. So that day we went to him and suggested to him that he should do another business that the way he's treating the dogs is unfair.

When I read this book and learning about all the horrific things Sidney Gottlieb and his colleagues in the CIA did, it turned me apart. Gottlieb, why? CIA, why? America, why?

[Paulina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is such a difficult book to give a rating to. The amount that it covers and in such detail is impressive and when you look at bibliography it is truly incredible. Yet I just feel like there’s too much in here and it’s not super coherent. It fails to know what its main focus is, trying to centre the book around Sydney Gottlieb, but there’s so many unnecessary details that all of it gets lost. Nonetheless if someone is interested in CIA history and how the US has been breaking international laws it’s a good read.