More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 15 - March 22, 2020
Once it was established that Nazi intelligence officers could be quietly forgiven and brought into America’s service, a precedent was set for Nazi scientists.
At the Kransberg Castle interrogation center, clerks began using paperclips to mark the files of prisoners whose backgrounds presented “the most troublesome cases.” From that practice came the code name of the clandestine project by which Nazi scientists were given falsified biographies and brought to work in the United States: Operation Paperclip.
more than seven hundred scientists, engineers, and other technical specialists who had served the Third Reich came to the United States on Paperclip contracts.
“the scientific teams wore blinders. Dazzled by German technology that was in some cases years ahead of our own, they simply ignored its evil foundation—which sometimes meant stepping over and around piles of dead bodies—and pursued Nazi scientific knowledge like a forbidden fruit.”
While the Americans protected veterans of Unit 731, the Soviets captured twelve of them and charged them with war crimes.
the Nuremberg Code was never incorporated into United States law.
Agency trainees were given LSD without forewarning.
Under Gottlieb’s direction, with Dulles’s encouragement and Helms’s bureaucratic protection, Artichoke had become one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.
Writers have described him as “fat and bull-like,” a “vastly obese slab of a man” who looked like “an extremely menacing bowling ball.”
none of the CIA officers familiar with MK-ULTRA is known to have raised any objection.
In the conformist America of that era, though, “brainwashing” was a magnificently convenient explanation for every form of human behavior that people did not understand.
Americans took hypnosis seriously during the early Cold War.
experiments, including one in which twelve “pre-puberty” boys were fed psilocybin, and another in which fourteen children between the ages of six and eleven, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.
the unspoken rules that shaped CIA culture. “Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset,”
Further weapons he was working on [included] a cigarette lighter which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin, and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.”
“In CIA safe-houses in Germany,” according to one study, “Olson witnessed horrific brutal interrogations on a regular basis. Detainees who were deemed ‘expendable,’ suspected spies or ‘moles,’ security leaks, etc., were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis, and torture to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”
Some of these drug experiments required risking the health of participants, like one at the Walter E. Fernald School in Massachusetts in which mentally handicapped children were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium.
the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with Wolff as founding president. All of its funds came from the CIA.
As MK-ULTRA reached its peak, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology became the principal portal through which Gottlieb lured talented scientists
“If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves,” one MK-ULTRA man said later, “we sent it to San Francisco.”
a national security whorehouse,
“White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop—he made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew,” Feldman told an interviewer years later.
Allen Dulles, Director of CIA, may make no mistakes in assessing intelligence, but he should not be the lone judge.”
At the very moment when masses of Americans were finally coming to believe that “brainwashing” was not only real but an imminent threat, Sidney Gottlieb and his MK-ULTRA comrades were reaching the opposite conclusion.
The CIA never sent aerosolized LSD into Cuba.
Gottlieb’s team then came up with an even stranger scheme. They persuaded themselves that part of Castro’s appeal, like the strength of Samson, came from his hair—specifically, his beard. If the beard fell away, they thought, so might Castro’s power.
By the late 1950s, according to the novelist Gore Vidal, LSD had become “all the rage” in New York’s high society.
Among the students who took LSD in these early experiments was a budding novelist named Ken Kesey,
Grateful Dead tours were traveling LSD circuses.
Allen Ginsberg also discovered LSD through Gottlieb.
Timothy Leary, the most famous preacher of LSD gospel, came to the drug through a different path, but also one that Gottlieb helped blaze.
They invented LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom.
“It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond, and to damage the integrity of the CIA,” Ford said. “I automatically assume what you did was right unless it’s proven otherwise.”
Portraying Gottlieb as having been unsupervised and out of control was a sensible strategy. It obscured the fact that senior CIA officers like Dulles and Helms approved and encouraged his work. Just as important, it deflected attention away from the institutional responsibility of the CIA, the White House, and Congress.
HISTORY AND MORALITY loom like threatening clouds over any attempt to assess Sidney Gottlieb’s life and work.
Are there limits to the amount of evil that can be done in a righteous cause before the evil outweighs the righteousness?
