Gottlieb was forced to retire in after the removal of Richard Helms following the Watergate scandal. It was an odd activity for an ex-CIA agent to take up in his retirement from a career of brainwashing, interrogation, and drug experimentation, but one that Kinzer suggests was an attempt to clear his conscience.
Although the Church Committee uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra, Gottlieb was seen only as a chemist, with the full extent of MK-Ultra yet to be exposed. With the revelations that came out of the Church Committee, members of the public were able to slowly piece together their experiences and finally understand what had happened to them. However, Gottlieb died in , having faced little consequence for his actions.
A creator but also a destroyer. MK-Ultra is a story that gives us just a small insight into the overwhelming power of the CIA and American government. It reveals the frantic, secretive nature of the Cold War and the levels the US government was prepared to go to in order to upstage the Soviet Union. However, in doing this they let thousands of their own citizens down, deceiving them and involving them in experiments that would haunt many for the rest of their lives.
Kinzer, Stephen. Kurz, Rainer Hermann. Morressier, Maret, Susan. Price, David H. North Carolina: Duke University Press, Files Download Download Full Text 2. Abstract Project MK Ultra refers to a set of top-secret CIA experiments that took place from to and involved unwitting subjects being administered drugs and hypnosis.
Disciplines Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Included in Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons. Gottlieb was an atypical choice for the CIA. Gottlieb was spellbound by LSD early on. After getting glimpses of its use in early studies, he became convinced that the Soviet Union was stockpiling LSD for mind control experiments. The immediate goal was to find a drug that could act as a truth serum for use in espionage. A Soviet agent could be dosed with LSD, the theory went, and induced to confess government secrets.
On numerous occasions, he surreptitiously dosed his CIA colleagues and informed them only several hours later. The objective was to obliterate consciousness so that a new mind could be implanted in the subject. After 10 years of unsuccessful research, Gottlieb conceded in a CIA memo that mind control was impossible. But writing about Gottlieb was a different sort of challenge. An elusive character, the man lived entirely under the radar, and very little is known about his personal life and clandestine CIA career.
Likely inspired by his own prodigious use of LSD, Gottlieb was a hippie before the hippies: he meditated, lived in an eco-lodge without indoor plumbing, grew his own vegetables, and rose before dawn to milk goats.
He and his wife raised four children, and even shared a life-long passion for folk dancing. Poisoner in Chief is a biography of Dostoyevskian proportions.
Gottlieb emerges as a tortured soul, penned in by personal compunction and a twisted sense of patriotism. He sought desperately to atone for his sins during the last three decades of his life, before dying, some have speculated, by suicide.
The Wikipedia page on him was pretty brief, for example. How did you stumble across him? And why did you decide to write a biography about him? Sidney Gottlieb lived his entire life in total invisibility.
My book is essentially the biography of a man who was not there. Let me put it his way: I think I have discovered the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century, unless there was somebody else who operated a network of torture centers, lived in absolute secrecy, and had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the United States government.
This was a former director of the CIA. And I believe him. I think he was telling the truth. He probably had never heard of him. As I filed that detail in the back of my mind, I began to wonder about that story.
So, wait a minute now. The CIA made poisons to kill a foreign leader, so it must have been done by a person, a scientific expert, not just a CIA agent. Somebody at the CIA was making poisons. And then I discovered that this man was Sidney Gottlieb, and it soon dawned on me that the one thing that you could find out about Sidney Gottlieb — that he was the poison maker — was actually not the most important thing. Making those poisons was just the job of a sophisticated pharmacist. What is it about MK-Ultra that makes it so appealing to online communities, particularly when trying to make sense of something weird or tragic?
Scott Wark, a researcher in meme theory at the University of Warwick, says the internet has opened up a lot of alternative forms of information but at the same time it has introduced a lot of things into our lives that are hard to understand. The world is burning, finance makes no sense to the layperson, institutional politics are fucked. The proliferation of the inexplicable and the polarisation of politics are the perfect conditions for a rise in conspiratorial thinking—and MK-Ultra.
He gives the example of Sandy Hook deniers entering into the mainstream thanks to controversial pundits such as Alex Jones. So long as governments commit injustices and atrocities, conspiracy theories like MK-Ultra will translate these onto an individual scale.
The MK-Ultra program was officially a failure, with the CIA, embarrassed by its lack of concrete findings, shutting it down in
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