The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination

by Stuart A. Reid

Gottlieb’s interest, however, lay in medicine, chemistry, and biology—in learning how to enhance, or lay waste to, the human mind and body. For a decade, he ran MKULTRA, the CIA’s human experiments in mind control for use in interrogation. Gottlieb and his men gave LSD to unwitting subjects—prisoners, college students, drug addicts, johns, and psychiatric patients, many of them Black. At an addiction treatment center in Lexington, Kentucky, seven human guinea pigs were kept on LSD for seventy-seven days straight. Gottlieb even ran his LSD tests on colleagues, once spiking the triple sec of an army scientist named Frank Olson; nine days later, Olson died after falling from the tenth floor of a New York City hotel.