As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services . These people, supposedly being delivered from their drug habits, were awarded heroin and morphine in amounts relative to the nature of a particular research task. 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. Eventually Thornwell turned to the intelligence officers for help in escaping this harassment. I never had the guts to kill myself or Id have got out of it long ago. (Good Morning, Midnight). But aside from these pioneering works, how did the American press and historians of the CIA deal with this astonishing saga, in which a man such as Olson lost his life, thousands of people were involuntarily and unknowingly dosed with drugs so dangerous or untested that the CIAs own chemists dared not try them? In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. He simply continued his researches in Baghdad-by-the-Bay. At least 40 wives of those enrolled had been diagnosed with the disease, and . He had two reasons: they were unlikely to complain, and there was, he believed, a higher potential that these people could handle untoward side-effects. The code-name ULTRA may have been an echo from Helmss and Dulless OSS days, when ULTRA (the breaking of the primary German code) represented one of the biggest secrets of World War II. Gottlieb distributed it to hospitals and other institutions under the guise of fake foundations. One of the CIAs first grants to an outside contractor was to a psychiatrist who claimed that he could use electro-shock therapy to produce a state of total amnesia or excruciating pain. Another $100,000 CIA grant went to a neurologist who vouched for lobotomies and other types of brain surgery as useful tools in the art of interrogation. Then there are the endless potions directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela in Paris on November 22, 1963. In 1982 he was found drowned in his swimming pool in Maryland. 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. Gottlieb's contribution was to oversee MKUltra. On Nov. 28, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson died on impact after falling 13 floors from his room in the Statler Hotel in New York City. The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is displayed in the foyer of the original headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, 2009. 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. 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. Sidney Gottlieb died on March 7, 1999 at the age of 80. The Central Intelligence Agency had Sidney Gottlieb, a Bronx-born biochemist with a . Poitier, who became the first Black man to win the Oscar for Best actor in 1964, died on the evening of . When Helms was on his way out, he and Gottlieb destroyed the records of the experiments. He also volunteered at a hospice. The new personality talked Communist doctrine and meant it. Estabrooks and the army contrived to have the Marine given a dishonorable discharge and encouraged him to penetrate the Communist Party. This essay is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. Sidney Gottlieb oversaw much of the CIA's research - and at times operations - involving 'mind control' and poisons. 10. The CIA, therefore, had to get its blow in first. If Sidney Gottlieb's parents hadn't fled Hungary in the early 20th century, we can assume that his life, like that of millions of other European Jews, would have ended in one of the extermination camps built by Nazi Germany. He then got a masters degree in speech therapy and bought an old log cabin in Virginia, with the idea of setting up a communal living space. He also told a Senate investigation after his retirement that none of the testing yielded practical results. 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. Its tools were mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD. An international commission in 1952 concluded that the charges had merit. Gottlieb asked White to establish a CIA safehouse in New York, invite suitable subjects to party there, drug them covertly and then review their behavior. White claimed he was such an expert in physical combat that he had killed a Japanese agent in a hand-to-hand encounter. Its subjects, almost all of them unwitting, were society's outcasts: prostitutes and their clients, mental patients, convicted criminals - people, in the words of one of Gottlieb's colleagues, "who could not fight back". James Bond had Q, the scientific wizard who supplied 007 with dazzling gadgets to deploy against enemy agents. Comment. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb believed that, to control minds, he would have to blast away the existing mind and then insert a new one. Here also were developed surveillance equipment and kindred tools of the espionage trade. In the meantime, the CIA helped underwrite Eli Lillys efforts to produce synthetic LSD. Later, back in Virginia, where he owned a 15-acre goat farm, he worked with dying people in a hospice, and tried to organize a commune. After getting a doctorate in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1940, he married Margaret Moore, who had been born in India. Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. LOS ANGELES Sidney Poitier, the renowned actor, director and activist, died of a combination of heart failure, Alzheimer's dementia and prostate cancer, according to his death certificate . The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms. Although most of the patients did not die from the effects of the plutonium injections, the government's secrecy and willingness to subject its own citizens to such experiments raised suspicion from many. He gathered his findings and confronted Gottlieb and Helms. Her physician advised her husband that he should take Linda to see Dr. Cameron at his clinic in Montreal. 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. His brainstorms included a poisoned cigar, shoes infused with the highly toxic thallium, and a TV studio sprayed with LSD. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. CIA Sidney Gottlieb, the man who oversaw all of the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments. The New York Medical . 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. And none of that happened.. Despite the fact that Kennedys subcommittee had Whites records, which documented Lashbrooks visits to Bedford Street, Lashbrook received no challenge from the subcommittee when he insisted that he had never gone anywhere near the CIA safehouse. I had to be toilet trained, McDonald said. 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. Nation Feb 18, 2020 3:10 PM EST. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind. For secrecy's sake, the program's 162 experiments were spread out across multiple . I was a vegetable. andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK . Unsurprisingly, it was soon discovered that the clients were more likely to talk after sexual activity. More about Gottlieb then gave the green light for CIA station officers in Manila and Atsugi, Japan, to begin the operational use of LSD. In Frankfurt, where the CIA was ensconced in the former offices of IG Farben, a CIA civilian contractor an American psychologist named Richard Wendt was assigned the task of testing a cocktail of THC, Dexedrine and Seconal on five people under interrogation who were suspected of being double agents or bogus defectors. His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. In one experiment, a female CIA security officer was hypnotized and provided with a new identity. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. During his last years, he engaged in two hobbies: herding goats and folk dancing. And not only did the subcommittee have Whites diary, it also had Lashbrooks signature on receipts for Whites substantial expenses in New York. 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. I had no identity, no memory. In one such experiment, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were then opened and electrodes were implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. Isbell also played a key role as the middleman for the CIA in getting supplies of narcotics and hallucinogens from drug companies. how did sidney gottlieb die. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. He also had a club foot. By the early 1970s, the CIAs dirty tricks came under increasing press and congressional scrutiny, and in 1973 agency director Richard Helms gave the order to destroy most of the extant records of the MK Ultra program. Both of these techniques would later become staples of the operations of one of MK-ULTRAs most infamous contractors, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. 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. 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. Isbell developed a points system to secure their cooperation in his research. 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. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . He headed both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatry Association. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. And when I say afraid thats just a word I use. Bulger would eventually write about his experiences, which he described as horrifying. Ultimately, Sandoz agreed to supply the Agency with 100 grams a week, deny requests from the Soviet Union and China, and also to furnish the Agency with a regular list of its LSD customers. 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. In 1953, Dr. Abramson was given $85,000. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. In addition to administering high doses of LSD, he subjected people to psychological torture, including electroshock therapy. Advertisement. Im afraid of men yes, Im very much afraid of men. 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. Discover the Italian Audiobook at Audible. Gottlieb was the first LSD maven, the original acid visionary. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. Earman probed deeper, unearthing what he swiftly concluded was an illegal, indeed criminal, venture. how did sidney gottlieb die. Free trial available! They duly offered to put the sergeant in protective custody in an abandoned millhouse. Certainly, one of the most nefarious of the MK-ULTRA projects was the depatterning research conducted by Scottish-born psychiatrist Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. Historian Stephen Kinzer emphasises the anonymous nature of Gottlieb's role; even at the CIA, his work was completely unknown, yet Gottlieb had what Kinzer describes as a 'licence to kill' by the US government. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Amid the ensuing fracas, the CIAs man fled up a cathedral tower and threatened to throw himself off it. Operating from his houseboat, King supervised a network of Amazon tribespeople, anthropologists and botanists to bring back new toxic compounds, including yage, the powerful hallucinogen used by the Yanomamo. Of course Im afraid of them. Human subjects were evoked in the tactful phrase unique research material. At first the CIA experimented mostly on prisoners, drug addicts and terminally sick destitutes. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful . Then in 1957 Cameron found a new stream of money, Gottliebs MK-ULTRA accounts. 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. One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. This mind control research was dubbed Artichoke.. American chemist and spymaster. The broad outlines of Gottlieb's story have been public for years. 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. In the early 1960s, the CIA even helped set up a company to scour the Amazon for potential new drugs, the Amazon Natural Drug Company. In 1954, Gottlieb and his colleagues in the 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. 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. The names Fanny Bender Gottlieb and Louis Gottlieb are also cited on . It was felt to be mandatory, Gottlieb went on, and of the utmost urgency for our intelligence organization to establish what was possible in this field., The CIA had followed the trial of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Budapest in 1949 and concluded that the Cardinals ultimate confession had been manipulated through some unknown force. Initially the belief was that Mindszenty had been hypnotized, and intrigued CIA officers conjectured that they might use the same techniques on people they were interrogating. 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. There was never any evidence that Thornwell had anything to do with the missing NATO papers. The session was recorded with a special device that is easily concealable and was monitored by the CIA medical division and investigators from Angletons counterintelligence division. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZlvWIUeA1Y, Body and Shadow by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Comment Cest by Michael Mantler, Himoko Paganotti and the Max Brand Ensemble, Difficult Women: a Memoir of Three by David Plante, Marx, Capitalism and the Madness of Economic Reason by David Harvey, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa by Stephanie Ordering, Jean Rhys: You want to know what Im afraid of? 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. His cause of death was revealed nearly a week after his demise. The therapeutic sessions were filmed and passed along for viewing by Himmler. Loguey was sent to Cameron by his family doctor, who believed that a persistent pain Loguey complained about in his leg was psychosomatic. Through the early 1950s, Camerons work received the lavish support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The trips lacked the consciousness-heightening ambitions of the Leary generation, however. I hate the whole bloody business. Connoisseurs of CIA denials should study Lashbrooks performance in 1977, when he was questioned during Ted Kennedys senatorial probe. Source: (indiewire.com). While in Germany Cameron also lent his hand to the journals. During his studies in California, Gottlieb met Margaret Moore, the India-born daughter of Christian missionaries, whom he married in 1942. The safehouse became a working lab for the CIAs Technical Services Division, fitted out with two-way mirrors, listening devices and concealed cameras. From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. And that was the end of my life.. After the war Cameron developed a near obsession with schizophrenia. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Gottlieb was involved in assassination attempts during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, developing unconventional weapons, including a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, poison gifts for Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leader in the Congo. Courtesy the CIA, via npr.org, Sidney Gottlieb, left, and his attorney, appearing at a Senate hearing in 1977. He perfected a contaminated handkerchief for use against an Iraqi colonel, poisoned presents that were to eliminate the troublesome Fidel Castro, and a poisoned dart designed to get rid of Patrice Lumumba, Communist sympathiser and leader of the Congo. Amid these security lapses, the Security branch lost control of research, which now passed to Covert Operations, and eventually into the hands of Dr. Gottlieb. He was 94. There Thornwell was secretly given LSD over a period of several days by army and CIA interrogators, during which he was forced to undergo extremely aggressive questioning, replete with racial slurs. The Proposed TikTok Ban Goes Too Far. (AP) One of the jurors who convicted notorious crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger says she regrets her decision after learning that he was an . He believed . They were testing a weapon; for their purposes, they might as well have been in a ballistics lab. But the Olson disaster reduced their enthusiasm for self-testing, and so did another mishap that occurred when an unwitting CIA officer had a dose of LSD slipped into his coffee at the Agencys offices on the Mall in Washington, D.C. She was suffering from a modest case of post-partem depression and chronic back pains. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. Source: (npr.org), Richard Helms, Gottlieb's supervisor. The MK-ULTRA funds pouring into the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s had a similar purpose: the study of the structure and dynamics of urban youth gangs. Sidney Poitier, whose elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood's first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. Passing through Isbells center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the shape of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. The evil in some of these MK-ULTRA documents is almost palpable . 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. Only the enemy had changed. He had not told new agency director John McCone about the program, and he double-crossed Earman on a promise to do so. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Initially they cut down the risk margin by administering the various hallucinogens to themselves, tripping regularly at CIA safehouses and institutions such as the CIAs wing at Georgetown and at Dr. Abramsons floor at Mount Sinai Hospital. Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. This had the double utility of squelching the charges of germ warfare and also of justifying the Bluebird program. All of these activities made the Technical Services Division a vital partner of the covert operations wing of the Agency. Isbells research notes indicate double, triple and quadruple as he hiked the doses. . Bulger was given LSD every day for a year. Prisoners could get reduced sentences for agreeing to participate in the experiments. In one case, he claimed that he had created a new personality in a normal Marine. Then he was offered a glass of whiskey, which had been spiked with Nembutal. 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 Agency eventually agreed to a settlement, paying out $750,000 but the CIA still maintains it was not culpable for Camerons actions. As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. Hotly pursued by CIA colleagues, he fled across a bridge over the Potomac and was finally cornered, crouching in a fetal position near Arlington National Cemetery.. Helms told McCone that positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing., McCone put a freeze on CIA-sponsored testing at the safe-houses, but they remained open for George Whites use with the CIA paying the bills until 1966, when White retired. 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. In 1961, James Thornwell, a black US Army sergeant who worked at a NATO office in Orleans, France, came under suspicion of stealing classified documents. West would later go on to head the Violence Project at UCLA, where he and Dr. James Hamilton, an OSS colleague of George White and a recipient of CIA largesse, performed psychological research involving behavior modifications on inmates at Vacaville state prison in northern California. Since he passed, fans have wondered how Sidney Poitier died and what caused his death. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. Shortly after he left the CIA, Gottlieb went to India, where for 18 months he managed a leper hospital. Ed was an original subscriber to CounterPunch and never failed to praise us when we got things right and shame us when we screwed up.