Such was the clandestine contribution of the city of flower power to the national war effort in Vietnam. 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. 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. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. At home, McCarthyism was at its apogee. What I really mean is that I hate them. Directed by Sidney Gottlieb, experiments took place across America in colleges, prisons, and mental institutions, as well as internationally in Canada and Europe. Informed consent was often a condition in any treatment of the terminally ill poor. So we went, Linda McDonald recalled in 1994 on the Canadian Broadcasting Company program, The Fifth Estate. In one case, he claimed that he had created a new personality in a normal Marine. The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is displayed in the foyer of the original headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, 2009. Early years and education. 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. Advertisement. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb excelled in the sciences at City College. Well-known is the journey of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb . I was a vegetable. Sidney Gottlieb (Bronx, 3 de agosto de 1918 - Condado de Washington, 7 de maro de 1999) foi um qumico norte-americano mais conhecido pelo seu envolvimento com a CIA - Central de Inteligncia Americana, no programa ilegal de pesquisa em seres humanos denominado Projeto MKULTRA.. O nome de nascimento de Sidney Gottlieb Joseph Scheider.Em 1951 ele foi admitido na CIA como perito em . 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. Gottliebs colleagues at Army Intelligence were conducting their own experiments with LSD, called Operation Third Chance. Unfortunately its visible contribution, of spawning a hippy movement which led the protest against the war, was far more effective. A year earlier, however, Gottlieb had retired. Ray died in jail in 1998. . START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? MKUltra aggressively researched mind control -- or "brainwashing" -- using human subjects as guinea pigs. Source: dailytelegraph.com.au, A guinea pig in the LSD experiments. This time Whites surveillance post was a small bathroom, with a two-way mirror allowing him to peer into the main room. 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 1955 the Narcotics Bureau transferred White to San Francisco. Sidney Poitier, whose groundbreaking acting work in the 1950s and 60s paved the way for generations of Black film stars, has died aged 94. Cameron used a variety of exotic drugs on his patients, once slipping LSD to an unsuspecting woman fourteen times over a two-month period. I was very sad to learn that Edward S. Herman died last Saturday morning. 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. And Im even more afraid of women. 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. 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. SIDNEY GOTTLIEB was living vindication for conspiracy theorists that there is nothing, however evil, pointless or even lunatic, that unaccountable intelligence agencies will not get up to in the pursuit of their secret wars. 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. 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? Born with a clubfoot and afflicted with a severe stammer, Gottlieb pushed himself with unremitting intensity. American chemist and spymaster. All of these San Francisco sessions were filmed and tape-recorded, in another eerie parallel with Nazi research: Himmler had recommended to the doctors conducting the Dachau experiments in cold water immersion that perhaps the subjects be revived by animal warmth, meaning sex with prostitutes held in a special building at Dachau. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 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. Here also were developed surveillance equipment and kindred tools of the espionage trade. In July 1968 a team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. 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. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services . Abroad, the Soviet Union and increasingly China were regarded as mortal threats. There was never any evidence that Thornwell had anything to do with the missing NATO papers. In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles appointed Gottlieb to "run the covert program". 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. Gottlieb urges federal government to surge vaccines to Michigan. This treatment would sometimes last two and half to three months. 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. Codes can be broken. Earman probed deeper, unearthing what he swiftly concluded was an illegal, indeed criminal, venture. McDonald was a 25-year-old mother of five young children. 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. 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. The MK-ULTRA projects were not limited to research on adults. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Posted in Crime, Policy, Science, War | 2 Comments Gottliebs death, on this date in 1999, was from unspecified causes. His grant proposal listed six areas of investigation: disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting of information, suggestibility and creation of dependency. Gottlieb's life after the CIA resembled a quest for atonement. He was even, by . As director of TSD, Sid was like the character "Q" in the James Bond movies. Over the next three days, the subject underwent intense interrogation, while CIA doctors gave him intravenous infusions of hallucinogens and placed him under hypnosis. 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. 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. White had now gone back to work at the Narcotics Bureau in New York. TSD was tasked with providing case officers with . CIA and armed service colleagues were also involuntarily subjected to acid, sometimes with lethal consequences. But it turned out to be an exceedingly hot day and the party-goers kept the windows open, allowing breezes off the Pacific to swirl through the room, thus dispersing the LSD. The CIA memos of the time are filled with complaints about the difficulties of finding suitable human subjects for experimental research. 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. Loguey recalls that one of the negative messages Cameron piped into his room for twenty-three straight days was, You killed your mother. CIA Sidney Gottlieb, the man who oversaw all of the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments. In 1982 he was found drowned in his swimming pool in Maryland. Free trial available! Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a traceincluding . I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh. "No other American ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely . Lobotomies were another area of intense interest for Dr. Cameron, who instructed his psycho-surgeons to perform their operations using only mild local anesthetics. The CIA funded a project at the Childrens International Summer Village. Gottlieb was the first LSD maven, the original acid visionary. White was guaranteed an unceasing flow of drink, all of it paid for by Gottlieb. 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". The trips lacked the consciousness-heightening ambitions of the Leary generation, however. 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. The money for Isbells research was being funneled by the CIA through the National Institutes of Health. Another early recipient of Gottliebs money was Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. 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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.. After the war Cameron developed a near obsession with schizophrenia. In 1953, Dr. Abramson was given $85,000. Indeed, the house became a model for subsequent CIA interrogation facilities. 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. Loguey was duly diagnosed as a schizophrenic by Cameron, which rendered him immediately available as a guinea pig for Camerons CIA project. 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. The conviction and apparent sincerity with which an individual will defend a false given under post-hypnotic suggestion is almost unbelievable.. 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 . You killed your mother. When Loguey went home, he was shocked to discover that his mother was alive and apparently well. The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish, Estabrooks wrote. She was suffering from a modest case of post-partem depression and chronic back pains. The LSD safehouse program continued in both New York and San Francisco until 1963, when the CIAs new Inspector General, John Earman, stumbled across the enterprise. Richard Prince was given CIA money for research on folk medicine and faith healing among the Yoruba people in Nigeria. 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.. More about He did not foresee that LSD would leak out of . Three decades earlier . Afraid of them? 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. After a few days of observation, Cameron had diagnosed McDonald as an acute schizophrenic and had her transferred to the medical torture chamber he called the Sleep Room. For the next eighty-six days, McDonald was kept in a near comatose state by the use of powerful narcotics, and awakened only for massive jolts from Camerons electro-shock machine. Had he been deported to Auschwitz he might even have fallen into the hands of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. Sidney Gottlieb Biography. Sidney Gottlieb died on March 7, 1999 at the age of 80. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. In two cases, Dr. Benders treatments lasted, on and off, more than a year. Her physician advised her husband that he should take Linda to see Dr. Cameron at his clinic in Montreal. The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. 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. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, left, a former CIA scientific chief, talks with his attorney Terry Lepsing before testifying to a Senate health subcommittee. 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.. 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. Gottlieb retired in 1972, having concluded that all his work had been useless. Source: (npr.org), Richard Helms, Gottlieb's supervisor. Then in 1957 Cameron found a new stream of money, Gottliebs MK-ULTRA accounts. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? The broad outlines of Gottlieb's story have been public for years. 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. Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. It was Dr Sidney Gottlieb, chief chemist at the CIA, who was to be the mind behind MK-Ultra. The CIA funneled large grants to the University of Oklahoma, home to Dr. Louis Jolly West. 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. Prisoners were also given LSD, notably Whitey Bulger, who volunteered for what he thought were experiments to find a cure for schizophrenia. This bizarre foray in behavioral conditioning consisted of the patients being assaulted by verbal messages played on a loop-feed tape player for sixteen hours a day; the speaker was often hidden under a pillow and was designed to deliver the messages subliminally while the patient slept. The best-known experiments involved LSD, although that's not Gottlieb's only legacy. At least 40 wives of those enrolled had been diagnosed with the disease, and . According to documents obtained by TMZ . 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 . Over that period, McDonald received 102 electro-shock treatments. I had no identity, no memory. 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. Additionally, CIA agents captured expendables in Asia and Europe and subjected them to not only LSD, but electroshock and other methods of torture, asking them questions to see if they could destroy the human ego. Mr. Gottlieb ''had had a real . Cameron was not hidden away in a dark closet: he was one of the most esteemed psychiatrists of his time. His cause of death was revealed nearly a week after his demise. 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. Haaretz.com, the online English edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, gives you breaking news, analyses and opinions about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. He sat on numerous boards and was a contributing editor to dozens of journals. Dr. Scott Gottlieb was sworn in as the 23rd commissioner of Food and Drugs on May 10, 2017. Its tools were mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD. While in Germany Cameron also lent his hand to the journals. America, you have a new commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration. The top-secret project led to the death of many people, countless lawsuits, and the Presidential Order for Transparency. June 11, 2022 . Connoisseurs of CIA denials should study Lashbrooks performance in 1977, when he was questioned during Ted Kennedys senatorial probe. 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. Source: (indiewire.com). With his wife Margaret, he spent 18 months in India running a leper hospital. To further the scientific work, Gottlieb sent out the Agencys chief psychologist, John Gittinger, to evaluate the prostitutes through personality tests and, since part of the research was to evaluate the use of sex as a means of eliciting information, to instruct the women in interviewing techniques. The author of the Bender-Gestalt used her CIA money to pump hallucinogens, including LSD, into children between the ages of seven and eleven. He studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and after he finished his Ph.D. he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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. All right, Ill tell you. Criminologists revere Allen as a pioneer in the use of the polygraph. 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. Bateson, in turn, gave some to his friend, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 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. In fact, it was in the Agencys self-interest that these people be diagnosed as drug addicts or as psychotics. 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. The Central Intelligence Agency had Sidney Gottlieb, a Bronx-born biochemist with a . MK-Ultra began in 1953, and its creator, chemist Sidney Gottlieb, only admitted that its end goal of human mind control was an impossibility a decade later.