Sidney Gottlieb, chemist and intelligence officer: born New York 3 August 1918; married 1942 Margaret Moore (two sons, two daughters); died Washington, Virginia 7 March 1999. Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood's first Black movie He assembled a string of whores, many of them black heroin addicts whom he paid in drugs, to lure their clients to the CIA-sponsored drug and sex sessions. The Bizarre History of MK-Ultra & CIA Mind Control - Tripsitter Gottlieb's inventiveness also ran to a variety of assassination plots against various foreign targets. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. And even less well remembered is one mission in the Agencys Phoenix operation in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Well-known is the journey of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb . These experiments were conducted on more than 150 patients, one of whom was Robert Loguey. But, as John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: the CIA and mind control (1979), the definitive work on the subject, wrote: "He never did what he did for inhumane reasons. A more ambitious project was described in a CIA memo as follows: We thought about the possibility of putting some [LSD] in a city water supply and having citizens wander around in a more or less happy state, not terribly interested in defending themselves., This was certainly a hazardous time to be at any public function attended by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and his associates. The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA's Mind-Control Mayhem 'Poisoner In Chief' Details The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control : NPR Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman's murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died. Well-known is the journey of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumbas toothbrush. That however did not deter the CIA from awarding him its highest honour, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, before it destroyed the bulk of the MKUltra files. He devoted his final years to work in a hospice, looking after the dying. A story in which for more than twenty years the CIA paid for such illegal activities, protected criminals from arrest, let others suffer without intervention and tried to destroy all evidence of its crimes? The recklessness of the program helped to motivate the creation of new intelligence oversight structures. He also told a Senate investigation after his retirement that none of the testing yielded practical results. Within Technical Services MK-ULTRA projects came under the control of the Chemical Division, headed from 1951 to 1956 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a New York Jew who received his doctorate in chemistry from California Tech. . Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Hunter were among the users of the drug that became part of the rebellion for their generation. The C.I.A., convinced that its enemies had developed a method to control human minds, developed MKUltra to find its own techniques until the 1960s, inspired by the work of Japanese and Nazi scientists. He attended City College in New York, Arkansas Polytechnic, and graduated with a bachelors degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1940. The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. Drug addicts would get cash, drugs or treatment. Gottliebs career came to an end in 1973 when Richard Nixon removed Richard Helms from his position as the director of the C.I.A. He was not an effective assassin though, as he did not successfully kill any of the intended targets. When the saga did unfold before the Kennedy hearings in 1977, the Washington Post offered this laconic and dismissive headline, The Gang that Couldnt Spray Straight, accompanied by a trivial story designed to downplay the whole MK-ULTRA scandal. How CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb - Daily Mail Online Over the next three days, the subject underwent intense interrogation, while CIA doctors gave him intravenous infusions of hallucinogens and placed him under hypnosis. These studies indicate that from the CIAs earliest days it has had a keen interest in developing methods of social control over potentially disruptive elements in American society. White called this enterprise Operation Midnight Climax. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. According to documents obtained by TMZ . Eventually Earman wrote a 24-page report for McCone in which he harshly denounced the drug-testing program, which he said put the rights and interests of all Americans in jeopardy. Helms and Gottlieb fiercely defended MK-ULTRA to McCone, with Helms raising the spectre of a Soviet chemical gap, claiming that widespread testing was necessary to keep pace with Soviet advances. Tom Powers, the biographer of MK-ULTRAs patron and protector, Richard Helms, skips over the program in his 350-page book The Man Who Kept the Secrets. In 1953, Dr. Abramson was given $85,000. The Fall or Dive of Sydney Gottlieb and Company Noting the apparent tolerance of the subjects to this incredible regimen of lysergic acid, Isbell explained in chilling tones that this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type. In another eerie reprise of the Nazi doctors Dachau experiments, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected with psilocybin, rectal thermometers inserted, lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and joints whacked to test neural reactions. In the Cold War years, we didn't even know about it: MKUltra, directed by Sidney Gottlieb of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). James Bond had Q, the scientific wizard who supplied 007 with dazzling gadgets to deploy against enemy agents. He wanted the patients awake so that he could chart the minute changes in their consciousness the deeper the scalpel blade sliced into the frontal lobe. Top 10 U.S. Government Experiments Done on Its Own Citizens Sidney Gottlieb Biography. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech therapy. "We Dissolve Minds": Sidney Gottlieb and His Horrific Experiments The CIA men organized a weekend party at another Agency safehouse in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The psycho-sabotage was apparently a rousing success, and greatly encouraged Gottlieb with the potential for similar dosing of charismatic left figures around the world. Im afraid of men yes, Im very much afraid of men. Its cruel, its idiotic, its unspeakably horrible. Early years and education. Sidney Gottlieb: Mastermind of MKULTRA - The Deep State Blog Cameron was not hidden away in a dark closet: he was one of the most esteemed psychiatrists of his time. White had now gone back to work at the Narcotics Bureau in New York. All these attempts to coerce a confession from him failed, but the Army Intelligence men remained convinced of his guilt. In frustration, Gittinger, the CIA psychologist, locked himself in the bathroom, sprayed furiously and inhaled as deeply as possible. No peaceful settlement has ever been agreed upon. It kept him out of World War II, but it did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion. Ken Kesey. My uncle Frank Olson died sometime around 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 28, 1953 when he "jumped or fell" from his room on the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. To this end Cameron developed a dire treatment. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb excelled in the sciences at City College. A CIA report on the project says that, among other things, Artichoke was meant to investigate the theory that agents might be given cover stories under hypnosis and not only learn them faultlessly, but actually believe them. Ken Kesey on LSD. Abroad, the Soviet Union and increasingly China were regarded as mortal threats. Sidney Gottlieb. The plan was to invite a crowd of party-goers and then spray the rooms with an aerosol formulation of LSD concocted in Gottliebs shop. Prisoners could get reduced sentences for agreeing to participate in the experiments. And in the context of the time, who could argue?". Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist at the head of MKUltra . Both of these techniques would later become staples of the operations of one of MK-ULTRAs most infamous contractors, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The author of the Bender-Gestalt used her CIA money to pump hallucinogens, including LSD, into children between the ages of seven and eleven. Since he passed, fans have wondered how Sidney Poitier died and what caused his death. Sidney Gottlieb - Biography JewAge This nominally private enterprise was run by an old CIA hand named J. C. King, who had headed the CIAs Western Hemisphere Division during the Bay of Pigs and was officially moved out of the Agency shortly thereafter. Andrew Pulver. Sidney Gottlieb. When he left the C.I.A., Gottlieb seemed to reinvent himself, running a leper colony in India for more than a year. The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. Bulger would eventually write about his experiences, which he described as horrifying. In fact, US military and intelligence agencies had been dabbling in mind control research for more than forty years. To start the LSD experiments, he convinced the CIA to buy the entire world supply of the drug, and the CIA complied, spending $240,000. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the CIA psychiatrists who were covertly observing them. The psychologist, whose specialty was the use of hypnosis in intelligence operations, worked as a contractor for Naval Intelligence and was later to advise CIA researchers such as Martin Orne and Milton Erickson. Comment. Linda McDonald was typical of Camerons victims, who tended to be women. Then he was offered a glass of whiskey, which had been spiked with Nembutal. He also had a club foot. One of the men in the CIAs Technical Services Division later told Marks, If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it on ourselves we sent it to San Francisco.. Some of his experiments were conducted in American prisons, and some in detention centers in Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. Despite his physical affliction he was an ardent square dancer and exponent of the polka, capering across many a dance floor and dragging visiting psychiatrists and chemists on terpsichorean trysts where appalling plans of mind control were ruminated amidst the blare of the bands. Annette, un poema eroico as it's meant to be heard, narrated by Chiara Francese. This answer is: Sidney Gottlieb obituary | CIA | The Guardian The safehouse became a working lab for the CIAs Technical Services Division, fitted out with two-way mirrors, listening devices and concealed cameras. In two cases, Dr. Benders treatments lasted, on and off, more than a year. He studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and after he finished his Ph.D. he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Sidney Gottlieb, chemist and intelligence officer: born New York 3 August 1918; married 1942 Margaret Moore (two sons, two daughters); died Washington, Virginia 7 March 1999. Shortly after he left the CIA, Gottlieb went to India, where for 18 months he managed a leper hospital. Many of the children were kept on the drugs for weeks at a time. It wasnt long before the CIA researchers carried their investigations beyond the safehouse on Telegraph Hill. It was also Batesons stash of LSD that eventually found its way to experiments being conducted on student volunteers by Dr. Leo Hollister. And when I say afraid thats just a word I use. 'America's Dr. Mengele': The Jewish Biochemist Backed by the - Haaretz What Sidney Gottlieb was running was a covert program aimed at mind control [and] experimenting with LSD on some of the most vulnerable Americans with no consent at all. By 1952 the CIAs scientists began to test their techniques on what a CIA memo described as individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants, subjects having known reasons for deception. As one CIA psychologist told John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering investigation into these activities in the late 1970s, one did not put a high premium on the civil rights of a person who was treasonable to his own country. One suspected double agent was taken to a thoroughly isolated CIA safehouse in rural Germany, far removed from surrounding neighbors. The man was told that he was to undergo a series of routine medical and psychological tests as condition of his employment. His scientific abilities however were evident when he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1940. Saxitoxin, the substance on the poisoned pin, belongs to a class of naturally occurring aquatic poisons that, according to one study, "surpass by many times such known substances as strychnine, curare, a range of fungi toxins, and . The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is displayed in the foyer of the original headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, 2009. My medical file even says I took my guitar with me. Sidney Gottlieb Biography | HowOld.co As reported by multiple sources, Clark was neither arrested nor prosecuted for the murder. Three decades earlier . Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. Kinzer describes the Poisoner-in-Chief's hand in the assassination of . And Im even more afraid of women. The subject was also attached to a polygraph machine. The project ceased in 1973 and was exposed to the public in 1975. At home, McCarthyism was at its apogee. The Agency had two main concerns: the acquisition of supplies and new compounds, and veto power over sales of such materials to the Eastern bloc. I had no identity, no memory. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. After the MK-ULTRA program was exposed, McDonald, Loguey and six other Cameron victims filed suit against the CIA. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. To take one example, in 1953 the CIA became concerned that Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical firm for which Albert Hoffman had developed LSD, was planning to put the drug on the open market. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a traceincluding . Separating the Red and Blue. In 1968, in the year of Sidney Gottlieb's passing, on April 4th, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader, was shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis. Gottliebs death, on this date in 1999, was from unspecified causes. To oversee this operation, Gottlieb turned to George Hunter White, whom we last encountered testing the marijuana truth drug on Mafia muscle man Augusto Del Gracio. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control is a 2019 book by The New York Times journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer.The book contains untold stories of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chemist called Sidney Gottlieb, who tried to "find a way to control the human brain". I thought in 1978 when our books were appearing, when we were doing media work all over the world, that we would finally get the story out, the vaults would be cleansed, the victims would learn their identities, the story would become part of history, and the people who had been injured could seek recompense, recalled Alan Scheflin. After getting a doctorate in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1940, he married Margaret Moore, who had been born in India. During his studies in California, Gottlieb met Margaret Moore, the India-born daughter of Christian missionaries, whom he married in 1942. TSD was tasked with providing case officers with . The POWs were shot up with barbiturates, allowing them to go to sleep, then abruptly awoken with injections of amphetamines, hypnotized, then questioned. Sidney Gottlieb | Intelligence Wiki | Fandom In fact, it was in the Agencys self-interest that these people be diagnosed as drug addicts or as psychotics. Sidney Poitier died of heart failure, dementia and prostate cancer One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. This didnt end his role as an agent for MK-ULTRA. The period was one of extreme fear almost paranoia among U.S. officials, from the double threat of the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. He coedits the Hitchcock Annual (with Richard Allen), and his books include Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 2; Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews; and Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City. When she was later interrogated, the agent defended it hotly, denying her true name and rationalizing with conviction the possession of identity cards made out to her real self. Artichoke also explored using hypnosis to recruit high-level political agents and unmask spies and double agents, a particular obsession of James Jesus Angleton, the CIAs counterintelligence chief. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. All along, Estabrooks said, the deeper personality was that of the Marine, which had been programmed to operate as a kind of subconscious spy. I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. The objective was to research how children who spoke different languages were able to communicate. For the CIA researchers any type of informed consent was antithetical to their research task, which was to make unwilling subjects talk and covertly elicit cooperation. Dr. Scott Gottlieb served as the 23rd Commissioner of Food and Drugs on May 11, 2017 to April 5, 2019. One of his subjects was a young creative writing student at Stanford, Ken Kesey, who would become the drugs chief proponent in the sixties counterculture. According to detailed account in the Artichoke files, the entire operation was conducted on the second floor of the safehouse, so as not to arouse the curiosity of the household staff and security detail.. THE FOLLOWING are highlights from a new book, Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer. Sidney Gottlieb, the child of Hungarian immigrants, was born on August 3, 1918. McDonald was a 25-year-old mother of five young children. He was interrogated, hypnotized, and given a polygraph and truth serum. CIA's Gottlieb Ran LSD Mind Control Testing - Los Angeles Times As he headed off toward eventual death from cirrhosis of the liver, White wrote an envoi to his old sponsor Sidney Gottlieb: I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Ed passed in his sleep at age 92, his mind still as sharp as ever, his spirit fiercely defiant. The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms. The project was under the direct command of a Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and received undisclosed but almost unlimited millions of dollars for hundreds of experiments on human subjects at hundreds of locations across the United States, Canada and Europe, the eventual budget for this program apparently having exceeded $1 billion per year. Their house was a former slave quarters, and Gottlieb rose every morning before sunrise to milk his herd of goats. CIA Project MK-ULTRA - Medical Kidnap Two CIA scientists in attendance, Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook, were responsible for the drugging and did it as an experiment, according to the complaint. His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. On page 56, Marks noted that Sidney Gottlieb, longtime head of the MK ULTRA program, "refused to . He was born in 1918 the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, but never adopted the faith; indeed much of the rest of his life was a search for religious fulfilment, via agnosticism, Christianity and even Zen Buddhism. Wiki User. At least 40 wives of those enrolled had been diagnosed with the disease, and . The project, called MKUltra, began in 1953, two years after Gottlieb had joined the agency as chief of its technical services division. The CIA had become increasingly frustrated with its inability to break down suspected NLF leaders by using traditional means of interrogation and torture. A more ambitious project was described in a CIA memo as follows Technical Services Division concocted a plan to spike punchbowls with LSD at the Agencys Christmas party, an amazing idea considering that only a year earlier a similar stunt had resulted in the death of Frank Olson. Though Bluebird had begun in the CIAs Security division, a contretemps at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany caused the transfer of these CIA researchers to the Covert Operations sector of the agency. After a police investigation, it was determined that Olson either jumped or fell to his death a tragedy that was not entirely uncommon in New York City. I was a vegetable. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. The CIA funneled large grants to the University of Oklahoma, home to Dr. Louis Jolly West. In the midst of their MK-ULTRA researches, the CIA had concluded that since prisoners had lawyers who might turn ugly, it was probably not a good idea to use them as human guinea pigs. They had doped up NLF officers with LSD, hoping that by inducing irrational behavior, the seemingly unbreakable solidarity of their captives could be broken and that the other inmates would then begin to talk. First, he put his patients into a prolonged sleep by injecting them with a daily mixture of Thorazine, Nembutal and Seconal. However, Gottlieb died in 1999 . Sidney Gottlieb oversaw much of the CIA's research - and at times operations - involving 'mind control' and poisons. 10 Real Victims Of The CIA's MK-ULTRA Program - Listverse As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief.". Eventually Thornwell turned to the intelligence officers for help in escaping this harassment. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services . Less well-known is the handkerchief laced with botulinum that was to sent to an Iraqi colonel. After learning of Whitey Bulger LSD tests, juror has regrets Her physician advised her husband that he should take Linda to see Dr. Cameron at his clinic in Montreal. Allen eventually became disappointed with the research into hypnosis, and developed a keen interest in the more robust fields of electro-shock therapy and psycho-surgery. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (Sid) was a scientist and chemist working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran the Technical Services Division (TSD) and before that position he ran the Chemical Division within TSD. MKULTRA And The CIA's War On The Human Mind - Dark Outpost He died in 2008 at the age of 102 . "Sidney Gottlieb never became a household name, mostly because he never paid for his crimes.". 13 Chilling Facts About MK-Ultra, The Government Mind Control - MSN