Poisoner in Chief Quotes

“That substance was a paralytic poison called saxitoxin that can be extracted from infected shellfish. It is related to the algae that cause red tide and other waterborne infections. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, it can kill within seconds.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“AMERICANS SHOULD HAVE been able to celebrate the release of 7,200 soldiers from Communist prisons after an armistice ended the fighting in Korea in July 1953. Instead they recoiled in shock. Many prisoners, it turned out, had written statements criticizing the United States or praising Communism. Some had confessed to committing war crimes. Twenty-one chose to stay behind in North Korea or China. The Pentagon announced that they were considered deserters and would be executed if found.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“A lawsuit, if allowed to proceed, would give the family, as well as homicide detectives in New York, a tool they could use to force disclosure of deep secrets. President Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Dick Cheney, recognized the danger. Cheney warned Rumsfeld in a memo that a lawsuit might force the CIA “to disclose highly classified national security information.” To head off this looming disaster, he recommended that Ford make a public “expression of regret” and “express a willingness to meet personally with Mrs. Olson and her children.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“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.” That amounted to an assurance that, if at all possible, Helms would be shielded from accountability for the CIA’s actions on his watch.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Munich was also the base for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, CIA-connected broadcast services that beamed news and anti-Soviet propaganda into Communist countries. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, headed by the former Nazi officer Reinhard Gehlen, had its headquarters in the outlying district of Pullach.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“The image of CIA men traipsing through Mexican villages in search of a fungus that would help them defeat Communism seems outlandish in retrospect. Gottlieb, however, saw the “magic mushroom” the same way he saw LSD and every other substance he was investigating. All were potential weapons of covert war.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“CIA officers had already visited a mushroom-producing region of Pennsylvania and told a couple of growers that they might be asking for help producing a rare fungus. Gottlieb cautioned, however, that research into the psychoactive properties of mushrooms must “remain an Agency secret.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Agent James McC.” Later he was identified as James McCord, who would go on to become a footnote to American political history as one of the Watergate burglars.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“In 1949 he was one of several scientists from Camp Detrick who traveled to the Caribbean island of Antigua for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of animals to toxic clouds.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“As subjects, Pfeiffer used inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Some CIA officers thought of the FBI as a haven for dumb cops and ham-fisted thugs. FBI agents, returning the favor, considered CIA men amateurish prima donnas and, as one put it, “mostly rich boys, trust fund snobs who thought they were God’s answer to all the world’s ills.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“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.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Much of what the CIA called “Artichoke work” qualifies as medical torture. Dosing unwilling patients with potent drugs, subjecting them to extremes of temperature and sound, strapping them to electroshock machines, and other forms of abuse were not, however, the only things these imaginative scientists did.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Despite the clarity of that imperative, and despite the seven death sentences that had been pronounced on Nazi scientists who were judged to have violated it, the Nuremberg Code was never incorporated into United States law.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“CIA officers who conducted Bluebird interrogations at Camp King and Villa Schuster counted on guidance from “Doc Fisher,” a German physician who had worked at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington and spoke good English. “Doc Fisher” was General Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Nazi army. During the war he had approved experiments at the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“While the Americans protected veterans of Unit 731, the Soviets captured twelve of them and charged them with war crimes. All were convicted and given prison terms ranging from two to twenty-five years. Their trials were not widely publicized.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Often the victims were still conscious when their organs were removed, because Ishii believed that the best data could be collected at the point of death.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners during wartime, along with those who worked with him, escape punishment. Unlike their German counterparts, however, they were not brought to the United States. Instead the Japanese scientists were installed at laboratories and detention centers in East Asia. There they helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not be legally conducted in the United States.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography. They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as “ardent Nazi” were re-categorized as “not an ardent Nazi.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“It specifically forbade cooperation with anyone who had been “a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Nazi scientists were given falsified biographies and brought to work in the United States: Operation Paperclip”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“SHOULD EVERYONE WHO helped run the Nazi machine be prosecuted for war crimes, or could some be brought to work for the U.S. government instead?”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Roosevelt authorized creation of the first U.S. agency dedicated to studying biological warfare. From its anodyne name—War Research Service—no one could deduce its mission. Anyone curious, though, could have made an educated guess by noting that its director was the renowned chemist George Merck, president of the pharmaceutical company that bears his family name.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Much of their data was unique because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea: instead of hanging Blome, let’s hire him.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“Blome developed aerosol delivery systems for nerve gas, to be tested on inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp; bred infected mosquitoes and lice, to be tested on inmates at the Dachau and Buchenwald camps; and produced gas for use in killing thirty-five thousand prisoners at camps in Poland where patients with tuberculosis were being held.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“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.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“For years Gottlieb had overseen medical experiments and “special interrogation” projects in which hundreds of people were tormented and many minds were permanently shattered. No one had ever plunged into this kind of work with more ambition or enthusiasm.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control