BAD CHEMISTRY
A new book digs deep into
the horrifying career of Sidney Gottlieb, the scientist who ran the CIA's
damaging and possibly lethal experiments in drug-induced mind control.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/AP
Stephen Kinzer has written
books about civil wars, terror attacks, and bloody coups, but his latest might
be his most alarming. “I’m still in shock,” Kinzer says of what he learned
about the appalling experiments conducted by a government scientist most
Americans have never heard of. “I can’t believe that this happened.”
These aren’t the words of an
author trying to fire up the hype machine. Though the events recounted in
Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb
and the CIA Search for Mind Control took place a half-century ago, they’re
scandalous in a way that transcends time.
For much of his 22-year CIA
career, Gottlieb ran mind-control projects designed to help America defeat
Communism. In the ’50s and ’60s, Kinzer writes, Gottlieb “directed the
application of unknowable quantities and varieties of drugs into” countless
people, searching for the narcotic recipe that might allow him to mold his
human test subjects’ thoughts and actions.
Gottlieb and a network of
medical professionals gave LSD and other drugs to prisoners, hospital patients,
government employees, and others—many of whom had no idea they were being
dosed. A CIA staffer died in highly suspicious fashion after Gottlieb had his
drink spiked with LSD. Meanwhile, when his bosses considered killing a foreign
leader, Gottlieb developed custom-made poisons. Numerous people were harmed by
Gottlieb’s work, but because he destroyed his files on the eve of his 1973
retirement, it’s hard to quantify the carnage he wrought.
The broad outlines of
Gottlieb’s story have been public for years. Major newspapers ran obituaries
when he died in 1999. In 2017, he was portrayed by actor Tim Blake Nelson
in Errol Morris’ Wormwood. But Kinzer’s book, the first proper Gottlieb
biography, includes fascinating new facts about the end of his career and fresh
details about disturbing episodes he orchestrated.
Poisoner in Chief describes Gottlieb’s little-known participation
in torture sessions at U.S. military sites in foreign countries and reports
that in at least one case a doctor who worked with Gottlieb gave LSD to
children. Gottlieb was “the Josef Mengele of the United States,” Kinzer, a
former New York Times reporter and the author of many books,
told me in a recent interview.
How did Gottlieb, the
Bronx-born son of Hungarian Jews, become a man who would earn comparisons to a
ghoulish Nazi doctor?
After getting a doctorate in
biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, Gottlieb joined the
CIA in 1951, a time of fear and uncertainty. Just six years after the end of
World War II, American troops were fighting in Korea. Washington was
increasingly worried about what many believed was the existential threat posed
by the Soviet Union. Gottlieb was on the job for a few weeks, Kinzer writes,
when he was tapped “to invigorate” what would be known as the Artichoke
project.
Artichoke—the name was
essentially meaningless; it might’ve been a CIA boss’ favorite vegetable—gave
Gottlieb broad license to carry out mind control projects. Kinzer cites a CIA
memo that describes the mission: “the investigation of drug effects on ego
control and volitional activities, i.e., can willfully suppressed information
be elicited through drugs affecting higher nervous systems? If so, which agents
are better for this purpose?”
The CIA aimed to create
truth serum to use on prisoners and other compounds that would help wipe away
memories of events that would cause trouble for the agency. If all went as
planned, intelligence officers would have the ability to program people to carry
out missions like those later seen in Richard Condon’s novel The
Manchurian Candidate and the subsequent movie.
Artichoke projects often
amounted to “medical torture,” Kinzer writes. Inspired in part by brutal
experiments conducted by the Japanese military and the Nazis in the ’40s,
Artichoke included the “dosing (of) unwilling patients with potent drugs,
subjecting them to extremes of temperature and sound (and) strapping them to
electroshock machines.” Artichoke squads worked with impunity at American military
sites in Europe and Asia. Such projects were closely guarded secrets, but Poisoner
in Chief contains details that will be new to most readers.
“Gottlieb helped set up a
CIA safe house, where, unsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously
drugged,”
For instance, Kinzer notes
that when “Artichoke scientists came up with a new drug or other technique they
wished to test… they asked the CIA station in South Korea to supply a batch
[of] ‘expendable’ subjects.” A related CIA memo said the subjects were needed
for the testing of an unnamed but “important new technique,” adding, “Technique
does not, not require disposal problems after application.” This is ambiguous
language, but it suggests that the CIA knew that in some cases, human test
subjects might be killed in the process.
Gottlieb oversaw a
scientific unit at Maryland’s Camp Detrick (since renamed Fort Detrick), where
chemists researched the effects of LSD, heroin, and other drugs, sometimes
trying the substances themselves. But he was not just a creature of the lab.
“We know that he participated in torture sessions in East Asia,” Kinzer says,
speaking from his home in Massachusetts. “We know that he made repeated visits
to Germany, which, like Japan, was under U.S. occupation, so he didn’t have to
obey any laws. And he was also active in other parts of Europe.”
In time, Gottlieb became
intimately familiar with LSD’s mind-altering effects. He admitted that he’d
used the drug more than 200 times. “When I look at the variety of the projects
that he was involved in,” Kinzer says, “from hypnotism to electroshock to
parapsychology to handwriting analysis, I begin to think that maybe it was while
he was on LSD that he was thinking, ‘I got another idea.’”
By 1953, Kinzer writes,
“Artichoke had become one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored
by an agency of the United States government.” That year, Allen Dulles, one of
Gottlieb’s ardent backers, got the CIA’s top job. The new boss, Kinzer writes,
was among Washington’s leading mind control proponents: “Dulles never recoiled
from the most extreme implications of ‘brain warfare.’” Dulles wanted “to
intensify and systematize” the work done under Artichoke, Kinzer adds, and he
tapped Gottlieb to head a new program: MK-ULTRA, named for the
“ultra-sensitive” activities it was expected to carry out.
With a generous budget and
an “effectively unlimited supply” of LSD—the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly
manufactured the hallucinogenic drug for the CIA—Gottlieb became perhaps “the
most powerful unknown American of the 20th century,” Kinzer says.
A key MK-ULTRA initiative
involved medical professionals who agreed to administer drugs to their patients—often
without the patients’ knowledge or consent. For instance, when Gottlieb wanted
to know how much LSD a body could withstand, he got in touch with Harris
Isbell, a researcher at a Lexington, Kentucky addiction center who had made his
curiosity about LSD known in a letter to the CIA.
Working with a group of men
who “were not told what sort of drug they would be fed or what its effects
might be,” Kinzer writes, Isbell administered large doses of LSD. He reported
that the men experienced anxiety, hallucinations, and “choking.” As always with
CIA projects of this kind, it’s tough to say how much damage was done. But
Kinzer writes that at least one patient did speak out, saying that “for the
rest of his life he suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks, and
suicidal impulses.”
Another keen CIA
collaborator chaired the pharmacology department at Emory University. “As
subjects,” Kinzer writes, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer “used inmates at the federal prison
in Atlanta and at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey,”
administering depressants and hallucinogens in volumes that resulted in
seizures and hallucinations that lasted for days. One of Pfeiffer’s subjects
was James “Whitey” Bulger, who later became a notorious Boston gangland killer.
Bulger said that as a young inmate, he was given LSD daily for more than a
year.
“Kinzer appears to be the
first journalist to directly tie Gottlieb's departure from the CIA to the
scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.”
Another doctor—a New York
allergist named Harold Abramson, who got an $85,000 MK-ULTRA stipend—“developed
a special curiosity about the impact of mind-altering drugs on children,”
Kinzer writes. “He closely monitored experiments, including one in which 12
‘pre-puberty’ boys were fed psilocybin, and another in which 14 children
between the ages of six and 11, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100
micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.”
In Manhattan, meanwhile,
Gottlieb helped set up a CIA safe house, where, with the hands-on help of a
local narcotics cop, “unsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously
drugged,” their behavior monitored via surveillance equipment in an adjoining
apartment.
It was around this time that
Gottlieb attended a retreat with some other CIA men. The colleagues began
drinking, and a few minutes later, Kinzer writes, “Gottlieb asked if anyone was
feeling odd. Several said they were. Gottlieb then told them that their drinks
had been spiked with LSD.” The incident triggered an emotional crisis in one of
the men, a scientist named Frank Olson. Days later, Olson plunged to his death
from the window of a Manhattan hotel. As seen in Morris’ film Wormwood,
there’s compelling circumstantial evidence that Olson was murdered because the
CIA feared he would divulge one of the secret projects he’d worked on.
One of Gottlieb’s most
remarkable duties involved adversarial foreign heads of state. According to
colleagues, he prepared “a pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste” meant for Congolese
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (it went unused) and ran a scientific team that
considered a bizarre plot to disgrace Fidel Castro. Believing that the Cuban
leader’s charisma was linked to his facial hair, Gottlieb wanted to have
thallium salts sprinkled in his boots. “His beard would then fall out,” Kinzer
writes, “leaving him open to ridicule and overthrow.” This, of course, never
came to pass.
By 1963, MK-ULTRA’s final
year, Gottlieb and his colleagues “were forced to face their cosmic failure,”
Kinzer writes. “Their research had shown them that mind control is a myth—that
seizing another person’s mind and reprogramming it is impossible.”
Nonetheless, Kinzer believes
that Gottlieb left a deeply lamentable imprint on the modern CIA. He says
there’s “a direct line between Sidney Gottlieb’s work and techniques that U.S.
agents taught to Latin American security services in the 1960s and ’70s—these
techniques were also used in Vietnam—and then later on to the techniques of
torture and so-called extreme interrogation that were used at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo.”
Though Gottlieb’s decision
to destroy his files means that there’s much we’ll never know, Kinzer appears
to be the first journalist to directly tie his departure from the CIA to the
scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. Gottlieb’s team, he reports,
“prepared false identity papers for two of” the men who broke into the
Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex. The break-in
set off a chain of events that result in the ouster of CIA Director Richard
Helms. “Helms,” Kinzer explains, “was Gottlieb’s number one promoter and
enabler and sponsor for 20 years.” Nixon fired Helms in February 1973. Gottlieb
retired four months later.
After the CIA, Gottlieb took
steps to reinvent himself. The long-married father of four joined an arts
council in his Virginia town, acted in local holiday plays and worked with
children who had speech problems. “It definitely seems from the recollections
of people that knew him in his last 20 years that he was a very gentle soul,
kind of an eco-hippy,” Kinzer says. “Nobody had any idea of what he had done in
the past, but he was tormented by it.”
Gottlieb died in March 1999,
and when a cause of death wasn’t announced, at least two observers came to
believe that he killed himself to derail intensifying legal inquiries into his
actions. Eric Olson—Frank’s son—and Sidney Bender, a lawyer for a man who says
his life was ruined by a Gottlieb dosing, had both tried to hold Gottlieb to
account while he was alive. Instead, Kinzer writes, “they drank a toast to the
death of a man they considered a monster.”
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