Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. To this end Cameron developed a dire treatment. 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. After the MK-ULTRA program was exposed, McDonald, Loguey and six other Cameron victims filed suit against the CIA. Sidney Gottlieb. 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. Over the next three days, the subject underwent intense interrogation, while CIA doctors gave him intravenous infusions of hallucinogens and placed him under hypnosis. I had no identity, no memory. 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.. At one point his interrogators threatened to extend the state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity. They consummated this promise. It was Dr Sidney Gottlieb, chief chemist at the CIA, who was to be the mind behind MK-Ultra. Using injections of amphetamines he brought patients out of their sleep three times a day when they would be forced to endure severe electro-shock treatments involving voltages forty times more intense than those considered safe and therapeutic at the time. In the divisions laboratories and workshops researchers labored on poisons, gadgets designed to maim and kill, techniques of torture and implements to carry such techniques to agonizing fruition. 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. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave tacit approval, in March 1960 Gottlieb also got going on developing methods for surreptitiously assassinating Fidel Castro, head of the pro-Soviet regime dug in some 140 kilmometers off the coast of Florida. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York City on Aug. 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish, Estabrooks wrote. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. The Agency eventually agreed to a settlement, paying out $750,000 but the CIA still maintains it was not culpable for Camerons actions. 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. The chief CIA chemist during the 1950s and 60s, Sidney Gottlieb, brought it to America. He also enjoyed a long relationship with US intelligence agencies dating back to World War II, having been brought to Nuremberg by Allen Dulles to help evaluate Nazi war criminals, most notably Rudolf Hess. 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. John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. This treatment would sometimes last two and half to three months. The officers also told colleagues of Thornwell that the black man had been sleeping with their wives and girlfriends: several of these men beat up Thornwell in a jealous rage. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a traceincluding . 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. Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. 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. In these instances a certain modicum of informed consent was often required. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb excelled in the sciences at City College. 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. 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. 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 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. 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? MK-ULTRA was created on April 13, 1953, when CIA director Allen Dulles approved Helmss proposal to develop the covert use of biological and chemical materials. 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. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. Earman probed deeper, unearthing what he swiftly concluded was an illegal, indeed criminal, venture. 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. 10. The MK-ULTRA projects were not limited to research on adults. These Bluebird interrogations continued throughout the Korean War. The secretive scientist who only had one known picture of himself was hired in 1951 by Allen Dulles, who would later . 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. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturerthe agency's "poisoner in chief.". Annette, un poema eroico as it's meant to be heard, narrated by Chiara Francese. I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh. 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. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of . Both of these techniques would later become staples of the operations of one of MK-ULTRAs most infamous contractors, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. In 1951, Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. 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. Isbell developed a points system to secure their cooperation in his research. 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. He headed both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatry Association. He did not foresee that LSD would leak out of . Lilly, the Indianapolis-based drug company, succeeded in this endeavor in 1954. You killed your mother. When Loguey went home, he was shocked to discover that his mother was alive and apparently well. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. 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. When he left the C.I.A., Gottlieb seemed to reinvent himself, running a leper colony in India for more than a year. Who wouldnt be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas? Source: dailytelegraph.com.au, A guinea pig in the LSD experiments. Margaret Mead sat with Ewen Cameron on the editorial board of a CIA-funded publication called the Research in Mental Health Newsletter, which discussed the use of psychedelic drugs to induce and treat schizophrenia. In addition to administering high doses of LSD, he subjected people to psychological torture, including electroshock therapy. Over that period, McDonald received 102 electro-shock treatments. Directed by Sidney Gottlieb, experiments took place across America in colleges, prisons, and mental institutions, as well as internationally in Canada and Europe. And that was the end of my life.. In all the agency conducted 149 mind-control experiments. Sidney Gottlieb was an American military psychiatrist with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. For twenty years, he was the senior scientist. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a traceincluding . 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. Passing through Isbells center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the shape of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. Gottliebs death, on this date in 1999, was from unspecified causes. . So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful . Sidney Gottlieb. 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. Alexander CockburnsGuillotined! Not everything was destroyed, and so they have been able to piece together parts of what Gottlieb did. In frustration, Gittinger, the CIA psychologist, locked himself in the bathroom, sprayed furiously and inhaled as deeply as possible. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. In the early 1990s, Ed was an early supporter of our environmental rag, Wild Forest Review, and invited me to start writing for Lies of Our (ie., NY)Times. From the fall of 1953 to the late spring of the following year, White hosted a string of parties, inviting a stream of unsuspecting CIA subjects to Bedford Street, spiking their food and drink with chemicals such as sodium pentothal, Nembutal, THC and, of course, what White referred to as the LSD surprise. Whites immediate supervisor in New York was Richard Lashbrook, the man who shared Frank Olsons room on the latters last night on earth. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. Linda McDonald was typical of Camerons victims, who tended to be women. Anxious to keep up, the CIA in 1953 initiated the MK Ultra program, with Gottlieb at its head, which over the next two decades undertook a total of 149 different studies intended to explore mind control. Gottlieb's contribution was to oversee MKUltra. 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 . The therapeutic sessions were filmed and passed along for viewing by Himmler. This time Whites surveillance post was a small bathroom, with a two-way mirror allowing him to peer into the main room. Wiki User. The man dashed out the building, across the street, past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, hallucinating that he was beset by monsters with huge eyes. 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. Gottlieb was the first LSD maven, the original acid visionary. The New York Medical . He had not told new agency director John McCone about the program, and he double-crossed Earman on a promise to do so. 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. MKUltra aggressively researched mind control -- or "brainwashing" -- using human subjects as guinea pigs. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. 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. Born with a clubfoot and afflicted with a severe stammer, Gottlieb pushed himself with unremitting intensity. Im afraid of men yes, Im very much afraid of men. On March 7, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb, who over a period of some two decades oversaw much of the CIAs research and at times operations involving mind control and poisons, died at the age of 80. 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. 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. White would sit on the lavatory, martini in hand, watching prostitutes give CIA designer drugs to their unsuspecting clients. Gottlieb was originally employed as a master chemist. The project ceased in 1973 and was exposed to the public in 1975. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. As John Marks put it, the CIA experimenters did not trip for the experience itself, or to get high, or to sample new realities. As reported by multiple sources, Clark was neither arrested nor prosecuted for the murder. 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. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 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. 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 . He completed his doctorate in biochemistry at California Institute of Technology. The whole enterprise was assigned the code-name MK-ULTRA and was run out of the CIAs Technical Services Division, headed in the 1950s by Willis Gibbons, a former executive of the US Rubber Company. As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. Three decades earlier . 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. 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. While there was no way for an enemy to expose Joness dual personality, they suspected it, and played the same trick on us later.. Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA. Sidney Poitier, whose groundbreaking acting work in the 1950s and 60s paved the way for generations of Black film stars, has died aged 94. The CIAs Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, developed a hypnosis project called Bluebird, whose object was to get an individual to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.. A year earlier, however, Gottlieb had retired. Andrew Pulver. In fact, he taught us all how to read to read between the lines, through the bullshit and beyond the imperial dogma. Sidney Gottlieb, the child of Hungarian immigrants, was born on August 3, 1918. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. He died in 2008 at the age of 102 . Communication in war is always a headache. What I really mean is that I hate them. His death was announced on Friday by the . Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 - March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.