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The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

September 9, 2019

2:50 PM ET

Heard on Fresh Air

TERRY GROSS

37-Minute Listen

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CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

Courtesy of the CIA

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."

The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA’s Mind-Control Mayhem

The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA’s Mind-Control Mayhem  

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.

Kevin Canfield

 Updated Nov. 30, 2019 3:01PM ET / Published Nov. 30, 2019 5:00AM ET 

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.