Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

by Stephen Kinzer

Soon after Gottlieb arrived in Washington, friends told him he needed a lawyer. One suggested Terry Lenzner, who had worked for the Senate Watergate Committee. Gottlieb called him. After they met, Lenzner wrote: “I was in contact with Dr. Death himself.”

The Independent said he 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.”

Ultimately more than seven hundred scientists, engineers, and other technical specialists who had served the Third Reich came to the United States on Paperclip contracts.

That law, written in part by Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer who was aching to return to the clandestine world, is loosely worded. It authorizes the CIA to carry out “functions and duties related to intelligence affecting national security,” and to use “all appropriate methods” in that pursuit.

Greene proposed that America’s military scientists be given a new mission. At the outer edge of imagination, he suggested, beyond artillery and tanks, beyond chemicals, beyond germs, beyond even nuclear bombs, might lie an unimagined cosmos of new weaponry: psychoactive drugs. Greene believed they could usher in a new era of humane warfare.