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

by Stephen Kinzer

the cabaret cards they needed to perform in New York. In 1949 he made national headlines by arresting Billie Holiday for possession of opium. She insisted that she had been clean for a year and accused White of planting evidence. A jury acquitted her, but the ordeal and White’s relentless pressure helped fuel her decline toward early death. In 1950, White went to work

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The Bedford Street complex was about to become something unique: a CIA “safe house” in the heart of New York to which unsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously drugged, with the goal of finding ways to fight Communism. It

GOTTLIEB AND HIS CIA comrades were hardly the only Americans who believed during 1953 that the world was facing apocalypse. Many others agreed. MK-ULTRA was conceived and launched as Americans were succumbing to deep fears.

These challenges to Western power were portrayed in the United States not as symptoms of rising nationalism in the developing world, but as coordinated salvoes in Moscow’s war of global conquest.

These frightening events confirmed the existential dread that led Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Sidney Gottlieb to justify the extremes of MK-ULTRA. The narrative of encirclement and imminent danger that Americans were fed was distant from reality, but it seized hearts in Washington and had profound effects.

Same tactics being used today

It justified all of its projects, even those that caused immense pain to individuals and nations, as necessary to block Communism’s relentless expansion.

Allen Dulles set MK-ULTRA in motion, he was also preparing several other covert operations that would have earth-shattering effects. He sent the chief of his Tehran station $1 million for use “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh,” and by August his men had deposed the Iranian prime minister in the first CIA coup. Immediately he began planning to duplicate the feat in Guatemala. He also expanded the CIA station in Vietnam and intensified operations aimed at fomenting anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe. In

Wilson came from a civilian background—he had run General Motors before taking over the Pentagon—and sought restraint. He wanted assurances that human subjects in drug experiments were truly volunteers who had given informed consent, as required by the Nuremberg Code.

The Special Operations Division was an invaluable MK-ULTRA partner. Its scientists compounded chemicals that CIA officers administered to prisoners in “special interrogation” sessions at secret prisons around the world. Some of them also worked with the CIA’s Technical Services Staff to develop gadgets that field agents could use to carry out drug attacks. Much of the science behind them came from experiments on human subjects.

Unethical experimentation by US gov

several pilots among the released prisoners asserted that they had dropped bio-weapons from their warplanes—contradicting Washington’s fierce insistence that it had never deployed such weapons. “The most-used germ bomb was a 500-pounder,” one pilot reported. “Each had several compartments to hold different kinds of germs. Insects like fleas and spiders were kept separate from rats and voles.” These allegations set off a new burst of denials from Washington. Gottlieb,

Newsweek described them as “shifty-eyed and groveling,” and said they had betrayed their country in exchange for better treatment, because they had fallen in love with Asian women, or because of the appeal of “homosexualism.” Several

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they represented the weakening of American masculinity and its replacement by a generation of “pampered kids” and “mama’s boys.”

reinforcing the manly man

As soon as Gottlieb learned that Sandoz had no desire to protect LSD, he secretly began paying an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, to try to break its chemical code. The company’s scientists went to work immediately.

sandoz created lsd

Finding the answer would require intense experiments. Soon after launching MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb found a physician to conduct them: Harris Isbell, director of research at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a prison. The Bureau of Prisons co-administered it with the Public Health Service. Most inmates were African Americans from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain if abused. That made them fine subjects for clandestine drug experiments. Isbell had conducted “truth

first experiments for mk ultra on AA's prisoners in kentucky