He believed that he could cure the condition by first inducing a state of total amnesia in his patients and then reprogramming their consciousness through a process he termed psychic driving. Camerons base of operations was the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Its cruel, its idiotic, its unspeakably horrible. He was not an effective assassin though, as he did not successfully kill any of the intended targets. 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. You killed your mother. When Loguey went home, he was shocked to discover that his mother was alive and apparently well. 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. 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. June 11, 2022 . I never had the guts to kill myself or Id have got out of it long ago. (Good Morning, Midnight). Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Sidney Gottlieb Biography. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. At the end of it all, just as the conspiracy theorists would have predicted, Gottlieb himself pronounced that the entire exercise had been a waste of time. The names Fanny Bender Gottlieb and Louis Gottlieb are also cited on . Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. 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. 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. It was Dr Sidney Gottlieb, chief chemist at the CIA, who was to be the mind behind MK-Ultra. Helms knew he was in a spot of trouble. 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. White rented two adjoining apartments at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. 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. At home, McCarthyism was at its apogee. Such was the clandestine contribution of the city of flower power to the national war effort in Vietnam. 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. It was a period when paranoia ruled at Langley, the Virginia headquarters of the CIA. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . CIA men would often go down to the Tenderloin district, visit bars and slip hallucinogens into patrons drinks. 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. America had lost its nuclear monopoly, while field operations against Moscow would soon be thrown into turmoil by the obsession of James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, that the agency had been penetrated by a mole at the highest levels. This is a field with which I am familiar through formulating guidelines for the technique used by the US in two world wars. EASTHAM, Mass. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty but his judgement is always open to question. About the Author. They duly offered to put the sergeant in protective custody in an abandoned millhouse. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful . Perhaps the most infamous experiment in Louisville came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black male heroin addicts for seventy-seven straight days. In 1955 the Narcotics Bureau transferred White to San Francisco. Laurent Guynot, a Ph.D. historian and engineer, is the author of From Yahweh to Zion, the best book ever written on the so-called "Jewish question."As he explains in the video below, Dr. Guynot discovered the JQ through the study of the two biggest "deep events" in U.S. history: 9/11 and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers (which must be seen as two prongs of a single . Richard Prince was given CIA money for research on folk medicine and faith healing among the Yoruba people in Nigeria. All right, Ill tell you. Its leadership was also fixated by the fear that the great Communist powers were perfecting techniques of mind control - The Manchurian Candidate made real. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief.". The CIA men organized a weekend party at another Agency safehouse in Marin County, north of San Francisco. "No other American ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely . Gottlieb and his wife, a fundamentalist Christian, lived on a farm in the Shenandoah Mountains in northern Virginia. "Sidney Gottlieb never became a household name, mostly because he never paid for his crimes.". On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. The secretive scientist who only had one known picture of himself was hired in 1951 by Allen Dulles, who would later . 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. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech therapy. 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. At least 40 wives of those enrolled had been diagnosed with the disease, and . 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. Discover the Italian Audiobook at Audible. The safehouse became a working lab for the CIAs Technical Services Division, fitted out with two-way mirrors, listening devices and concealed cameras. The CIAs House of Horrors: the Abominable Dr. Gottlieb, Marx, Capitalism and the Madness of Economic Reason, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa, The CIAs Changing Take on the Climate Emergency, Emancipation, Hollywoods Best Civil War Film Ever. He headed both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatry Association. Mr. Gottlieb ''had had a real . 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. 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. 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? The cooperation of the Narcotics Bureau was secured by a deal whereby the bureau could use the apartments for drug stings during CIA down time. Source: (whyy.org), Ken Kesey, one well-known subject. Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259). In 1971, Estabrooks gave a chilling portrait of his career in an article in Science Digest titled Hypnosis Comes of Age. One of the most fascinating but dangerous applications of hypnosis is its use in military intelligence, Estabrooks wrote. Sidney Poitier, whose groundbreaking acting work in the 1950s and 60s paved the way for generations of Black film stars, has died aged 94. John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. His scientific abilities however were evident when he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1940. 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. He simply continued his researches in Baghdad-by-the-Bay. The secretive scientist who only had one known picture of himself was hired in 1951 by Allen Dulles, who would later become the head of the CIA and two years later, Gottlieb was running MKUltra, named for the ultra-sensitive activities they were participating in. In two cases, Dr. Benders treatments lasted, on and off, more than a year. Cameron was eased out of his post at Allan Memorial in 1964 and died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967 at the age of sixty-six. The Artichoke scientists deemed the interrogation profitable and successful. They noted that post-hypnotic suggestion had left the subject completely confused with a severe headache and a vague and faulty memory of the interrogation. It wasnt long before the CIA researchers carried their investigations beyond the safehouse on Telegraph Hill. Gottlieb then gave the green light for CIA station officers in Manila and Atsugi, Japan, to begin the operational use of LSD. Of course Im afraid of them. These Bluebird interrogations continued throughout the Korean War. In one case, he claimed that he had created a new personality in a normal Marine. 2011-08-10 20:32:02. Ken Kesey on LSD. 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. In particular, it was believed that both countries were developing methods of brainwashing or controlling the minds of human beings, a scenario depicted in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate.. All these attempts to coerce a confession from him failed, but the Army Intelligence men remained convinced of his guilt. He worked as a member of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) and eventually became head of the Chemical Division. These experiments ended in failure, leaving the prisoners to became little more than lab material for experiments. Sidney Gottlieb. Except that he was real. 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. He graduated. Bulger was given LSD every day for a year. The top-secret project led to the death of many people, countless lawsuits, and the Presidential Order for Transparency. He worked with the CIA during the Cold War, using all of his scientific know-how in the field of biochemistry to help America get a leg up over the evil Ruskies. 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. He studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and after he finished his Ph.D. he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Gottlieb was originally employed as a master chemist. 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.. They would also hand out doctored cigarettes. The CIA funded a project at the Childrens International Summer Village. Sidney Gottlieb died on March 7, 1999 at the age of 80. Its tools were mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD. Details are scanty because Helms ordered all CIA records on the programs destroyed, but much of the unique research material came in the form of prisoners at Californias Vacaville prison, the Georgia state penitentiary and the Tennessee state prison system. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services . CIA and armed service colleagues were also involuntarily subjected to acid, sometimes with lethal consequences. 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. Source: dailytelegraph.com.au, A guinea pig in the LSD experiments. Prostitutes would slip drugs to their customers, and the results would be observed by agency officials through two-way mirrors. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. (AP) One of the jurors who convicted notorious crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger says she regrets her decision after learning that he was an . As he said, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me.". Meads former husband, medical anthropologist Gregory Bateson, was given CIA-procured LSD by Harold Abramson. Both of these techniques would later become staples of the operations of one of MK-ULTRAs most infamous contractors, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. A year earlier, however, Gottlieb had retired. I had never existed in the world before. Sidney Gottlieb, the child of Hungarian immigrants, was born on August 3, 1918. 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. For secrecy's sake, the program's 162 experiments were spread out across multiple . Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a source of inspiration in the counterculture movement, was first exposed to LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a part of the MKUltra project while still a graduate student at Stanford University. As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. The most bizarre brainwave of Gottlieb (himself a frequent user of LSD) was to set up a string of CIA-controlled brothels in San Francisco which operated for eight years. He was also a lusty drinker with a preference for straight gin. He devoted his final years to work in a hospice, looking after the dying. The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish, Estabrooks wrote. In his way Sidney Gottlieb was a loyal servant of American government - but his ways differed only in degree from the experiments for which the wartime allies, among them the US, sent Nazi doctors to the gallows for crimes against humanity. The aim was to wipe out the patterns of thought and behavior which were detrimental to the patient and replace them with healthy patterns of thought and behavior, said Dr. Peter Roper, a colleague of Camerons who still defends the experiments. In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. Here also were developed surveillance equipment and kindred tools of the espionage trade. This is MK-Ultra and its real victims. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. Not everything was destroyed, and so they have been able to piece together parts of what Gottlieb did. Eventually Thornwell turned to the intelligence officers for help in escaping this harassment. Many Democrats . Free trial available! White was guaranteed an unceasing flow of drink, all of it paid for by Gottlieb. More about It was the normal habit of Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues back in Virginia to test all materials on themselves, but more than 800 different compounds were sent over to Isbells shop for the addicts to try first. According to documents obtained by TMZ . In 1951, he was recruited by the CIA, where he was appointed head of the technical services staff of the chemical division. An advocate for the rights of former slaves, Hinds died at the site, but not before identifying the gunman, George Clark, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Wed 10 Mar 1999 20.28 EST. He was portrayed by Tim Blake Nelson in Errol Morris Wormwood in 2017, which was based on the death of Frank Olson who was connected to Gottlieb and died under mysterious circumstances. Their house was a former slave quarters, and Gottlieb rose every morning before sunrise to milk his herd of goats. 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. This essay is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. He sat on numerous boards and was a contributing editor to dozens of journals. The content of their conversations often centered on family and work problems something the prostitutes probably could have told the CIA without any investment of taxpayer money. The well-known psychiatrist Loretta Bender was also a recipient of MK-ULTRA funds. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief.". 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. CIA Sidney Gottlieb, the man who oversaw all of the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments. 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". By that point, 28 of the participants had died from syphilis, and 100 more had passed away from related complications. Source: (wikipedia), Tim Blake Nelson who portrayed him in Wormwood. But that didnt end the matter. Some of his experiments were conducted in American prisons, and some in detention centers in Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. He did not foresee that LSD would leak out of . 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. The therapeutic sessions were filmed and passed along for viewing by Himmler. The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, left, a former CIA scientific chief, talks with his attorney Terry Lepsing before testifying to a Senate health subcommittee. Simultaneously, US POWs held in North Korea were being paraded by their captors, alleging that the US was using chemical and biological agents against the Koreans and the Chinese. 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. 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. As reported by multiple sources, Clark was neither arrested nor prosecuted for the murder. Cameron was eased out of his post at Allan Memorial in 1964 and died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967 at the age of sixty-six. For continued experimentation, Gottlieb now decided to begin widespread testing on the urban poor: street people, prostitutes and other undesirables. At one point his interrogators threatened to extend the state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity. They consummated this promise. All of these activities made the Technical Services Division a vital partner of the covert operations wing of the Agency. He had not told new agency director John McCone about the program, and he double-crossed Earman on a promise to do so. White called this enterprise Operation Midnight Climax. 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. Earman was particularly galled by the itemized list of expenses, including $44 for a telescope, $1,000 for a few days of Whites liquor bill and $31 to pay off a local lady whose car White had rammed. 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. 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. how did sidney gottlieb die. There was never any evidence that Thornwell had anything to do with the missing NATO papers. David B. 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. She was suffering from a modest case of post-partem depression and chronic back pains. Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259). 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. 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. Prisoners were also given LSD, notably Whitey Bulger, who volunteered for what he thought were experiments to find a cure for schizophrenia. During his studies in California, Gottlieb met Margaret Moore, the India-born daughter of Christian missionaries, whom he married in 1942. The same year, Gottlieb concocted a blend of viruses to be injected into the toothpaste of Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba, but by the time he delivered it personally to the CIA bureau in Kinshasa, the freedom fighter had already been deposed in a coup. The project, called MKUltra, began in 1953, two years after Gottlieb had joined the agency as chief of its technical services division. Sidney Gottlieb[97] was a Jewish-American chemist who joined the CIA in his early 30s and within two years was appointed by Allen Dulles the designer and head of the agency's vast and top-secret MK-ULTRA program, which was initiated to explore mind control, human programming, assassination and much more. He then moved back to rural Virginia, where he indulged two longstanding hobbies, folk dancing and goat herding. 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. 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. Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. 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. We do know, however, who some of the people who became involved in the LSD culture were -- they were introduced to the drug because of Gottlieb, although they never knew his name. But CIA documents reveal that an ulterior motive was the identification of promising young foreign agents. Less well-known is the handkerchief laced with botulinum that was to sent to an Iraqi colonel. However, Gottlieb died in 1999 . It kept him out of World War II, but it did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion. 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. And even less well remembered is one mission in the Agencys Phoenix operation in Vietnam in the late 1960s. For two decades he ran a CIA programme aimed at nothing less than control of the human mind. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. In 1952, the codeword Bluebird was changed to Artichoke. Connoisseurs of CIA denials should study Lashbrooks performance in 1977, when he was questioned during Ted Kennedys senatorial probe. In all the agency conducted 149 mind-control experiments. When Helms was on his way out, he and Gottlieb destroyed the records of the experiments. He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. An international commission in 1952 concluded that the charges had merit. Source: (npr.org), Richard Helms, Gottlieb's supervisor. Gottlieb was interested in finding possible new drugs in Nigeria and in the mind-control techniques of Yoruba shamans. Sidney Gottlieb, the child of Hungarian immigrants, was born on August 3, 1918. White would sit on the lavatory, martini in hand, watching prostitutes give CIA designer drugs to their unsuspecting clients. Cameron used a variety of exotic drugs on his patients, once slipping LSD to an unsuspecting woman fourteen times over a two-month period. The hypnotic courier, on the other hand, provides a unique solution. Estabrooks related in matter-of-fact detail his role in hypnotizing intelligence officers for dangerous missions inside occupied Japan, describing how through hypnosis he had locked information inside the mind of unwitting soldiers, information that could only be retrieved by Estabrooks and other designated military psychologists. 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. Census records bear this out (e.g., United States Federal Census, 1930, for Sidney Gottlieb in Bronx, New York ). Kevin McCarthy is No Edward Snowden, But He Should Find the Comparison Flattering, Assessing Nicaraguas Long Haul toward Liberation and Economic Democracy, A National Divorce? Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman's murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died. Many of the children were kept on the drugs for weeks at a time. He defined the mission as an investigation into how individual behavior could be altered through covert means. He gave this description in 1977 during the Kennedy hearings, testifying via remote speaker from another room. Then he was offered a glass of whiskey, which had been spiked with Nembutal. As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. Another early recipient of Gottliebs money was Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. In late 1953, Gottlieb took his black bag to Europe, where at a political rally he primed the water glass of a speaker whom the CIA wanted to render ridiculous. He also investigated the practical benefits of inducing paralysis in some of his patients by giving them injections of curare. 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. 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.. Then in 1957 Cameron found a new stream of money, Gottliebs MK-ULTRA accounts. 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. 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.
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