Identifying The US Chief of Poison and Mind Control (NYT's Journalist Stephen Kinzer Interview)

How much do you know about America's LSD-taking, goat-owning, hippie-dad who also happened to orchestrate the stalking, poisoning and mind-destroying torture of countless innocent US citizens?

Well, today's episode will quickly get you up to speed on the United States' most powerful, and troubling, government official that you've probably never heard of, Sydney Gottlieb, the head of CIA's MK Ultra project. And, buckle up, because it's a wild ride!

Boston Globe and New York Times' award-winning investigative-journalist Stephen Kinzer has had a lauded, multi-decade career as war correspondent, author, professor, and perpetual speaker-of-truth-to-power through reporting on over 50 different countries, but his most recent book, Poisoner in Chief, is possibly his most provocative work yet.

Poisoner in Chief brings to light an incredible amount of new information about the previously unscrutinized head of one of America's most secretive, and disturbing, intelligence programs, Sydney Gottlieb.

Get ready for a discussion of Nazis, LSD, poisonings, torture, club-feet, whore-houses, stalking and drugging of American citizens, corrupt cops, assassinations, mind-control experiments, communists, history of the CIA, and a bloody wake of ignored civil-liberties and pointlessly shattered lives all in the name of the "greater good." In short, it's about as feel good, fuck-yeah-America, patriotic of an episode as you can get!

And, if listening to it gets your red, white and blue blood proudly pumping, consider also checking out any of Stephen's other truth-seeking non-fiction books, like:

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

You can also find additional Stephen Kinzer articles and information at his website stephenkinzer.com, and follow him on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/stephenkinzer

Last, if you support independent thought and discussion, please consider telling someone about the Independent Riot Podcast, and leaving us a 5-star review on whatever podcast player you use. 

Thanks!

Transcript

JD

All right. Thank you very much, Stephen, for taking the time to do this. Your book, which I mentioned to you in the, our last email exchange is one of the most fascinating and terrifying things I have read in recent memory. It’s, it’s an amazing one.

SK

I mean, here I, I’m sitting in this little office where I work and I essentially was living in this room with Sydney Gottlieb for several years. And if you think it was a little bit frightening and wearing to read the book, just imagine what it was like to go through the work of going, finding everything and who this guy was and what he did and living with it for all this time. It was emotionally wearing, I’ll tell you.

JD

I was actually gonna ask you that. Is there a psychological, because the subject matter you cover so fearlessly, and so throughout your entire career, it seems, is so, you know, exposing the status quo or questioning conventional takes on things. Is there any lasting like psychological stress from creating a book like this? Like that you’re going to be the next victim, the next Frank Olson or something?

SK

As you said, this isn’t anything new for me. I’ve spent most of my career looking at things in the world that are very unpleasant, to put it mildly. So I was a war correspondent for the New York Times. I lived through the whole Central America Wars. I lived through the whole Yugoslavia Wars. I’ve seen a lot of terrible things and I’ve seen enough dead bodies and enough blood and enough crying mothers to last me for several lifetimes. Now, is it wearing? Yes, of course it is. Does it have an effect on you? Yes, it does. Now, I don’t have flashbacks or nightmares or anything like that, but it has helped shape my personality, certainly. And early on in my career, when I started to confront some of these awful things that I had to see, I had to find a way to deal with it, to assimilate it. And here’s what I came up with. I told myself, these things are happening whether you’re seeing them or not. And the fact that you’re seeing them gives you the chance to expose others to the reality of what has happened. So if you become overly emotional at what you’re seeing at the injustices or the brutalities of the world, it might mean you’re a little disconnected from the fact that those things are going on every moment, whether you’re seeing them or not. So, I’ve told myself that this is my job to try to convey the reality of some of these episodes. And the value of that makes me feel that having to confront some of these unpleasant realities is worthwhile.

JD

Yeah. Well, this book is amazing, I will so strongly encourage anyone to pick up a copy of this after listening to the episode. The Poisoner in Chief, which just came out in 2019, I believe, or 2020, your most recent book. It is, first of all, extremely well written. It’s, I mean, like, even if you just pick it up and you’re not normally into nonfiction, your writing is superb. And it’s told basically like something that could turn into a Netflix series or a movie because it’s so gripping of all the different instances and characters involved. But what you’re doing in that book is exposing a lot of material that for the, I, I’ve only heard about for the first time, some of it, people probably know like MK ultra and stuff, but you’re going into true investigative journalism to bring more facts about that, uh, program and about the time period, which I am getting more and more fascinated with in the early years of the CIA. And so without me trying to give too much of an overview of it, it’s basically written from the, or centered on the gentleman who was the chemist who was in charge of MKUltra. And a lot of the experience, experiments they were doing at that time named Sidney Gottlieb, who I’ve heard in another interview you described as potentially the most powerful, unknown individual in modern American history. So maybe that’s a good place to start off, like, what’s this book about? Who’s Sidney Gottlieb? And then we can get into the more horrific, sensational parts of it.

SK

Well, maybe I can answer that by explaining how I got into this subject, what drew me to it. How did I find out about it? Because this story is completely unknown. And in fact, I’m painfully aware that I’ve only uncovered a small portion of what MKUltra was and what Sidney Gottlieb did. All of the records were destroyed as he was leaving the CIA. So most of it remains unknown and probably will forever. Nonetheless, there’s enough there to make it clear that something amazing was happening in the depths of the CIA during the early and mid 1950s. So here’s how I got into the story. I had written a book about the two brothers who ran American foreign policy during the 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Alan Dulles, who was head of the CIA. One of the projects that the CIA was involved in the late 50s and early 60s was in the Congo. And at one point, the CIA sent somebody to the Congo carrying poison, which was supposed to be used to kill the Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. So I mentioned this episode in my book about the Dulles brothers, but it stuck with me. That’s really quite a thing. It must be the only time in history that an official of the US government was sent to Congo, to another country carrying poison made by the CIA to kill the leader of that country. So I asked myself, who would have carried that poison? Would that have been a courier? I looked into it and it turns out, no, it was not a courier. The guy who did that was the chief of the chemical division of the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. He’s the man who made the poison and he carried it to the Congo to deliver to the CIA station chief to use in killing Lumumba.

JD

And what so what was his code name? Didn’t you mention in the book that like something Joe?

SK

Yeah, Joe from Paris. Yeah, the idea the CIA station chief in the Congo was told to expect a visitor who would come to him and introduce himself and say, I’m Joe from Paris. As it turned out, the station chief knew Gottlieb. He recognized him as the head of the chemical division. And in fact, when Gottlieb handed him the poison and told him, you’ve got to use this to kill the leader of this country. His reply was, holy shit, who ordered this operation? And Gottlieb replied, President Eisenhower. So I began to realize that Gottlieb had actually been called to testify on assassination plots by the CIA. So all those poisons that were made to kill Fidel Castro, the LSD pills, everything, all of that was made by Gottlieb. He made poison that was supposed to try to kill Zhou Enlai. He made those lethal pills that were given out to CIA operatives in other countries. They got caught and they wanted to. Yeah. Yeah, so they were called L pills for lethal. So everything that had to do with poisons, that was Gottlieb. The more I got into Gottlieb, the more I realized that making poisons to kill foreign leaders or unfriendly people of various sorts was just a side light for him. Really he was just a pharmacist. Anybody could have done that. But there was another part of Sidney Gottlieb that I began to get into. And I realized that making poisons was just a kind of a side light to his main job, which MK Ultra Project. It had that name because Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, considered it the ultra project. What was it? It was trying to find out the secrets of mind control. How can you seize control of another person’s body and mind and make that person do what you want? Alan Dulles realized that if you could do that, the prize would be nothing less than global mastery. And having been carried away by generations of movies and stories and novels about how people put pills and drinks and control people through Psychiatry he believed that this could really be done He brought Sydney Gottlieb in Gottlieb became the director of MKUltra He was given what effectively amounted to a license to kill He was able to travel to foreign countries Germany, for example, or Japan or South Korea, and requisitioned prisoners from either the CIA or military police. And then he would carry out grotesque experiments on these prisoners to try to find ways to destroy them as human beings, to destroy their minds, destroy their bodies. His idea was that before you could find a way to implant a new mind into somebody’s brain, you had to destroy the mind that was in there. And he used all sorts of drugs. He used incredible varieties of techniques. And a number of these people were experimented to death. We don’t know how many. But during the course of my research, I did go to Germany and I found what I believe is probably the first CIA secret prison. It was a black site where Gottlieb conducted his experiments. And when I went there, I met the guy who owns the building now. He’s a little young German entrepreneur. And he took me around. He took me into the basement. And he said, these storage rooms were the cells where Sidney Gottlieb and his Nazi partners carried out the experiments that were essentially just continuations of the experiments that had been going on during World War II a few years earlier at the concentration camps just down the road. And he also told me when I bought this house, I started talking to people in the neighborhood and the older people here all know what happened in this house. And they’ve told me that the bodies of people who were killed under Gottlieb’s experiments are buried in forests, which are now covered over by shopping malls and apartment blocks all around this neighborhood.

JD

Wow, that was one part that was so troubling, but in a sort of sickly humorous way, part of your book was that period, it seems like there were a lot of memos going back between back and forth between people involved in the CIA and that period of all reassuring each other they could dispose of the bodies. I think there’s three or like. And I was just like, wow, that’s a lot of reassuring to each other that you can get rid of bodies for nothing to be going on.

SK

Yeah, they used this phrase, disposal. So disposal will not be a problem. That was a meaning that we’re not going to kill the guy. So sometimes it would say disposal will not be a problem. And they also had a great name for the prisoners and refugees and other people that they picked up as their victims. They called them expendables. So send me three expendables. That would be the way Gottlieb would ask for three people that were going to be subjected to experiments that could be possibly fatal.

JD

And this is a fascinating thing that I think sometimes just gets pushed into the realm of conspiracy theory, but like maybe you could go into this just a little bit more. The formation of the CIA itself, I believe, came from the World War II division, the OSS, correct? And then could you talk a little bit about that and ostensibly like why was what they were fighting against, which is, you know, potentially there’s some legitimacy in the idea of what they were doing, but then their decisions like Operation Paperclip bringing Nazis, it seems like it quickly went off the rails from

SK

Yeah, well, you’re right that the CIA was born out of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. That was the American spy agency during the Second World War. At the very end of the Second World War, as it was clear that the Nazis were going to be defeated, the head of the OSS, William Donovan, went to see President Roosevelt and asked him for permission to launch a program in which the OSS would hire former Nazi spies. His idea was the Nazis have been active all over Eastern Europe and especially all over Russia. We don’t have any contacts in Russia. They were our ally. The Nazi secret service, the Nazi spy services are very valuable to us. So I’ve done have been asked, Roosevelt, I’d like your permission to hire these Nazi spies. Roosevelt wrote back and said, no, not allowing any Nazi spies to come and join the US government. Soon after that, Roosevelt died. Harry Truman reversed that decision. And as a result of that, the OSS and later on the CIA absorbed the entire Nazi spy network. They became important parts of the CIA. Wow. Then this idea of bringing Nazis to America expanded. The next group was the rocket scientists. They then went to Truman and said, you know, the Nazis also had great rocket scientists. If you’re hiring Nazi spies and it’s okay to hire Nazis now, we want to hire some Nazis too, the rocket scientists. And we did that. That’s how Werner von Braun came to the United States, the guy who directed our interplanetary rocket program. And then the third piece came, and that came from the CIA chemists. They went to the president and said, look, you’re already hiring Nazi spies and Nazi rocket scientists. We’re in a project now to try to find ways to destroy the human mind. And we need information, like how much poison does it take to kill a baby compared to how much poison does it take to kill a grownup if you’re using sarin gas, for example? We can’t find that out, but we know people who did those experiments. Those are the Nazi doctors and their Japanese counterparts, who in some cases were doing things even more horrific than the Nazis. So in that way, those fiendish Nazi doctors and their Japanese counterparts came to become part of MK Ultra because they were the only people in the world that had carried out these extreme experiments in which killing someone or torturing someone to death was perfectly acceptable. That was the ethos they brought into the CIA and that helped shape MKUltra.

JD

And that’s where the CIA seems to like euphemisms quite a bit and little cute phrases. That’s where artichoke work came from, right? Which is basically a euphemism for torturing and…

SK

Before MKUltra emerged, that was a consolidation of a few scattered mind control research projects at the CIA, there were earlier programs. There was one called Bluebird, so named because the idea was if you could find the right serum, you could make your prisoners sing like a bird. They would talk. They would tell you everything. Then there became a project called Operation Artichoke supposedly named for Alan Dulles’ favorite vegetable. I was never able to verify that. And when they used that phrase, artichoke work, you’re right, it was really a euphemism for torture. And Sidney Godley, as I said earlier, had this license to kill and license to torture. Now, it’s important to realize how the accountability or lack of accountability structure was built for MK Ultra. Only a couple of people had a real idea of what Sidney Godley was doing. His sort of rabbi at the CIA was Richard Helms, who was head of covert operations and then later became director of the CIA. And then of course there was the top boss, Alan Dulles, and maybe one or two others. Now, these people all knew that Godley was doing awful things, that his experiments had to be bloody and horrific, that he was probably killing people. And exactly for that reason, they didn’t want to hear about it. In any other circumstance, if you were supervising an employee who was doing very sensitive and horrible work, you’d want to supervise that person very closely. But at the CIA, it was the opposite. You don’t want to know anything about it because in CIA culture and the culture of secret services in general, ignorance can be an asset. You don’t want to know everything. You want to be able to say, I didn’t know what he was doing. And I think that those guys like Helms and Dulles insulated themselves from the details of Gottlieb’s work specifically for this purpose so that they could later say, it was one crazy guy. He went off the rails. We didn’t know what he was doing. And that is indeed exactly what they did say. When William Colby was director of the CIA, he had to face the relatives of one of the victims of MKUltra. And he said that there was a lack of… There was a lack… of supervision. Some of our people went off on their own and he was right. But the lack of supervision was intentional. It was aimed specifically at allowing future CIA directors to say, we didn’t know what he was doing. And they didn’t. And the reason they didn’t is because they didn’t want to know.

JD

And William Colby, he was the one that sort of had a, even though he is CIA director, he came to have kind of a change of heart. Then there’s some evidence not to go too off on a tangent away from the actual, the book itself, but towards the end of the book, you cover this, he might’ve been killed, correct?

SK

Colby revealed a number of CIA secrets when asked to do so by the United States Senate. Many people at the CIA thought this was terrible. They couldn’t believe that Colby would do this and that he would simply look at a request and say, well, it’s the government of the United States that wants this, it’s the US Senate, I guess I should provide it. They were horrified at this. And Helms was among them. Helms was one of the people who had destroyed the MK ultra records. And he hated what Colby had done, as did many old CIA veterans. After Colby left the CIA, he died in a mysterious canoeing accident and there’s speculation about what might’ve been behind it, but I don’t think any firm conclusion has ever been reached.

JD

Canoes are not the most dangerous thing in the world typically. So going back to your book and the timeline there, so we’ve already kind of set the scene of after World War II, they’re doing… actual Sydney Gottlieb is doing actual torturing and experimentation already on expendables over in Germany and potentially in Asia with the Nazis and Japanese torturers they’ve basically brought into the fold to give their expertise on how to break people down and how to conduct these torture experiences. But then… for anyone that thinks like, okay, well, that’s happening. A foreign country that might just be classified as war, that it comes to American shores, right? As far as the safe houses they have set up here, can you go into explaining some of that part of it? Especially, I believe his name is George Hunter White.

SK

There are the characters that turn up in this story are really amazing. So you’re right. Worse, the fatal experiments, the most brutal ones were probably carried out abroad because there you had people that you could kill inside the United States. There were also all sorts of MK ultra projects that as far as we know, didn’t result directly in deaths, but certainly destroyed many human lives. Liked to carry out experiments in prisons, because the prisoners, of course, are available. He had good relations with the directors of a number of prisons and their prison doctors, and these doctors would recruit prisoners for Gottlieb’s experiments. Usually the prisoners would have no idea what the experiment was or what they were being given, so there was no informed consent. None of the Nuremberg rules were ever followed. So for example, I came across an experiment at the US prison in Lexington, Kentucky that was sponsored by Gottlieb. In this experiment, a group of about eight African-American inmates was segregated into a padded cell and fed what were described as triple and quadruple doses of LSD every day for 77 days. Now, presumably the purpose of that was to find out if such an overdose of LSD could destroy a person’s mind, and my guess is the answer would be yes, it probably did. Now, I used to wonder, what about those guys? We don’t know their names. No records were kept, or at least they’ve been destroyed now. Did they ever know what happened to them? Did they ever recover? What must their lives have been like? We don’t know anything about this. Not so far away in Atlanta, Georgia, Gottlieb was also involved in carrying out LSD experiments. And we happen to know this because one of the very few of Gottlieb’s victims who realized that he was a victim and then wrote about it was in that prison. And that guy was the famous Boston gangster Whitey Bolger. He was a young car thief and hijacker who had been sent to federal prison Atlanta. He was told by the prison doctor that there was a project going on to find a cure for schizophrenia. And he would be contributing to humanity, not to mention getting some good time and privileges in jail, if he would volunteer. And he did. And he was fed massive doses of LSD. He writes about having nightmares his entire life. He could never turn the light off while he was asleep for the rest of his life. He was afraid to say what he was seeing and what he was feeling, because then he said, he wrote, I thought then they would never let me out. Later on in the 70s, when that prison doctor in Atlanta was unmasked as a contractor for MKUltra, and Bulger realized what had happened to him, he told the other guys in his gang, I’m gonna go to Atlanta, I’m gonna find that doctor, and I’m gonna kill him. Now he never did that, but that shows you the intensity that he felt. So these projects were going on in hospitals and clinics and prisons all over the United States and even in Canada. One of the more bizarre pieces of the Gottlieb story has to do with a fellow that you mentioned, George Hunter White, who was a federal drug enforcement officer and also a major drug user. He used every single drug that he ever confiscated. He was really one of these wild law enforcement officers who lives very much on the borderline.

JD

Yeah, he’s the definition of bad lieutenant of the Cop who is worse than the people he’s putting in prison

SK

So Gottlieb hired George Hunter White who was then the director of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics office in San Francisco to set up a particular kind of experiment where Gottlieb could test one of his theories. The theory was that maybe mixing sex and drugs could be a technique that would loosen people’s consciousness so that they would say things that they normally wouldn’t say. And so the CIA set up a bordello in San Francisco. Place that I went to visit while I was working on this book. Of course, now the house has been all rebuilt. And so what would happen there is that women would pick up their clients and they would bring them to this bordello, which was all decorated in this kind of a Toulouse Le Trec prints and various sex toys, like bordello chic, I guess you’d call it. And there, the girl would give the guy a drink. And in that drink was whatever combination of drugs that Gottlieb wanted to test this week. And of course the men would then go crazy. George Hunter White would be sitting behind a one-way mirror in the next room, sitting on his portable toilet, drinking martinis out of a pitcher. And the guys would never be able to complain because of the circumstances. So here’s a situation where the CIA set up a national security whorehouse in San Francisco with the idea that this was going to help the United States defeat world communism.

JD

He was not a scientist, was not trained in observing. He was an obese, corrupt narcotics cop that was alcoholic and a drug user himself and he would sit on a portage on and just watch people have sex and get drugged. And he was the guy reporting. This was no science.

SK

It was supposed to be a scientific research project, but this was no science. Later on, I dug through so many court records and I did find a fascinating deposition by George Hunter White’s assistant, who turned out to be very talkative years later, and he said that every time Sidney Godley would come to San Francisco to check out the project, it was called Operation Midnight Climax. He would also ask for women himself. And so they would supply Gottlieb with these prostitutes. And I began to think to myself, no, the program is so bizarre. And it doesn’t seem like you’d be able to get any real scientific data out of it, particularly the way it was not monitored by anybody who had any knowledge of psychology or any science, that maybe the whole project was just a way for Gottlieb to go out and have some fun and get away from the wife and kids. And it would be called official business. So, uh, who knows? I mean, having been a middle-aged man myself, I can, um, imagine that could have been pretty appealing to somebody like Gottlieb.

JD

The insane thing is both the, yeah, the, the fact, uh, for anybody that hasn’t written or read the book yet, it’s just insane that this is a government sanction funded program that even if the end goals are noble, which is questionable, but even if that is the objective is to beat the Russians to mind control, just, it seems like, yeah, the entire way it was conducted would have never given them any tangible results anyway. So it just turns out, yeah, that it’s basically a bunch of guys taking LSD, dosing other people with LSD and torturing people.

SK

Yeah. And the worst of it is that the people that were victims really never had any idea of what was happening to them. And many lives were ruined and many lives were taken.

JD

Yeah. Wasn’t George Hunter White at one point, it reminded me almost of a serial killer. Wasn’t he going out at night like to clubs and stuff and he would actually trick people into coming back to his apartment just to dose them with LSD to see what happened?

SK

Yeah, he started doing this in New York before he moved to California. Yeah, he would recruit people. He would go, he had a couple of fake identities. He would pose as a seaman or an offbeat artist and make friends with people, bring them back to his apartment, and then feed them all kinds of drugs. Then finally this got systematized under Gottlieb’s supervision. So they didn’t seem to have the slightest hesitation in doing this and then later on in a in a deposition his assistant says You would never want to go back to one of these people afterwards and ask them How are they doing check up on them because that would give you send some hint that you knew what was going on So it was just part of the practice after you destroy them or mess with them in whatever ways you did Just leave them out there wondering what happened to them.

JD

Yeah, and that that’s just so horrific. And you give several individual accounts of people that were actually were the stories around them getting drugged by these people. I believe there’s a guy in Europe somewhere that got Glickman, I think his name was that Gottlieb probably poisoned him or dosed with LSD himself and never basically recovered like his life was pretty much thrown completely off by that.

SK

This was one of the few stories that’s come out. You can only pick a couple of them and extrapolate how many of these there might be. So yeah, the story is that a person who probably was Sidney Gottlieb was in a bar called Le Selec in Paris. And they found another American guy, this fellow Glickman, who was an artist, brought him in there and gave him a drink with LSD in it. At the time they were also conducting experiments to see if people with hepatitis would be especially susceptible to LSD. And he had hepatitis. So they dosed him with this and he had a total psychological collapse. He stopped working, he dropped out of art school, he locked himself in his apartment for months, told his girlfriend to leave him, she would never be happy again. Finally his parents came and rescued him. He never worked again. He became a kind of a street person in New York. And then one of the reasons his story is so interesting is that in the mid 70s, when the existence of MK Ultra was revealed, this guy’s sister called him and said, you got to get the New York Times today. You got to read this story. This is you. This is what happened to you. Wow. And so, the very long story short, they started a lawsuit and then got Glickman died. But the sister continued the lawsuit for 25 years. And then finally, it looked like Gottlieb was finally going to be put on trial as a defendant, where he would have to testify not only about this episode, but about everything that MKUltra was. And just as the trial was about to begin, Gottlieb died. The lawyer who had been pursuing this case for more than 20 years, told me I’m absolutely certain he committed suicide. He fell on a sword. He didn’t want to be the instrument by which all of this was revealed. And so the Glickman case was at the very beginning of MK ultra and maybe it fed into the end of Sydney.

JD

Wow. Can, can you go into a little bit or, or the, the story of Frank Olson? Because I think that’s something that people have partially heard about, but like Frank Olson’s case was really where things started to kind of fall apart for MKUltra, right?

SK

Well, MKUltra continued at full blast after the little Frank Olson episode, but it showed you how seriously the CIA took this primitive. So there were only a small number of chemists in MKUltra. And they were making all these poisons and drug combinations. And then they would fly to other countries to watch people being tortured with the substances that they had developed, or sometimes watching people die. Frank Olson was one of these chemists. He traveled to several places to watch. His expertise was aerosols. So he was the person who could turn any poison into an aerosol. And he went to watch some experiments in England, apparently one in which somebody was killed. And he started to have attacks of conscience. And he told, he went back to the CIA and said that he wanted not only to quit MKUltra, he wanted to quit the CIA. He even mentioned to one of his friends that he was interested in finding a good journalist. Now, if the reality of MK Ultra had become public, it would have devastated the CIA, destroyed it perhaps, and devastated the image of the United States in the world. The stakes were immense, if you can imagine suddenly every newspaper in the world printing stories the CIA is going around the world killing people in murderous, torturous experiments. This would be a huge episode. So the CIA had to deal with this. The very top people at the CIA had to deal with the possibility that there could be a leak out of MKUltra. So Olson was taken for psychiatric care. He was brought to a retreat in which he was given LSD without his knowledge, perhaps in an attempt to get him to say what he was thinking or what he was doing. And then one night around Thanksgiving of 1953, when Olson was in New York, getting his psychiatric care and rooming in a hotel room with another CIA chemist, he went out the window of the hotel on the 13th floor, right across the street from Penn Station and was killed in the fall. So that was described in small items in his local newspaper as the suicide of an army chemist. Well, he was not an army scientist, that’s all they say. Well, he was not an army scientist. He was working for the CIA. And whether it was a suicide has now come under very heavy questioning. I go through this all in the book. And Errol Morris has made a wonderful TV series about this. When you put all the pieces together. Now looking back on it, even cops that have investigated it say the suicide story really doesn’t hold together. Now it was right about this time that the CIA produced their famous assassination manual. This came out in 1953, the same year that Oleson was killed. The techniques that are described fit very well with what happened to Oleson. In that manual, it says throwing somebody from a top window is a great way to do it to kill him, but you should smash his head in first with a heavy object. Well later on the body was exhumed and sure enough there’s a big bruise on the guy’s forehead. And it’s now become fairly clear, although it’s never been officially concluded, that the author of the assassination manual was Sidney Gottlieb and it would make perfect sense.

JD

What’s so fascinating is not only Sidney Gottlieb’s role in all of this, but then the fact that he is almost completely unknown, but then also his personality himself is the juxtaposition of like in some ways you could describe him as a hippie in his personal life, like from him living on a farm, uh, owning goats, meditating, and then that somehow is reconciled with him running the, this torturing program of the CIA being an expert in poisons and trying to control people’s minds literally like that, that must’ve blown you away to, as you found out more about him. This is one of the things that makes Godly so interesting and so infinitely puzzling.

SK

So, Gottlieb didn’t live like any other federal employee in the 1950s. As you said, he lived off the grid. He lived in a house with no running water, way out in the wilderness, and got up before dawn to milk his goats and wrote poetry and studied Zen Buddhism. His later life, he devoted himself to tutoring children who had speech defects as he did, working in hospitals. He was a hugely compassionate person. So he was the gentle-hearted, sweet torturer. How did he combine these two pieces of his personality? I sometimes used to imagine him at the office in Washington, where his office was right across from where the Kennedy Center is now in Washington, and he would be working on these diabolical poison projects and driving out to this Fort Detrick in Maryland where he had his laboratories and how you would destroy people and kill them and just wipe away their minds. And then maybe driving, maybe when he crossed the border into Virginia, just all faded away. And he became the sweet, loving, hippie, meditating dad. So I asked myself, how could this be? It’s interesting, he had four adult children, three of whom are still alive, but he made them, after he died, their mother made them promise never to speak about Sidney Godwin. And my attempts to get them to break that promise were unsuccessful, so I don’t know what he was thinking. But I postulate this possibility. Maybe, so how could he justify this to himself, given his inner character? Maybe he thought this, look, I’m a very offbeat person, I’m an individual. I’m allowed to live an unconventional life because I live in a free country. Now we are facing an enemy, the Soviet Union and global communism, that wants to destroy the possibility of any meaningful human life. They want to turn everybody into automatons and slaves. And a life like I’m living would become impossible. Therefore I’m actually carrying out these terrible acts.

JD

And he did say in one of his testimonies, this was very difficult work in pursuit of a larger ideal that actually was going to help create a peaceful world in which everybody could live the way they wanted to. And the number of people whose lives had to be destroyed to get there would be minuscule compared to what you might be able to prevent and what you might be able to succeed in doing in the world. This, this subject fascinates me. I recently did an interview with a gentleman named Jack Barsky, who was a former KGB Soviet illegal spy in the United States. And he talked about, and he’s had a complete conversion where he has come around to be a supporter of capitalism, democracy, and complete 180. But he talks about how it was at the time he was being trained and when he was a kid coming up in East Germany, that it was, they thought the United States was completely evil and they didn’t really understand though, what their power was. They didn’t understand what they could do. And it seems like this is almost a mirror image of that, that there’s a combination of fear and ignorance that’s driving all of this to almost comical levels. Is your experience, because I know you were stationed in Berlin as a journalist around the time of the Berlin Wall coming down, if you got any insight on that Cold War mentality of what created that and then how that continues to play in the world politics today?

SK

Demonizing your enemy is a very old technique. The enemy doesn’t have any good qualities. The enemy only wants to kill you or destroy you. The more you can believe this, the more you can justify horrific acts. And I think that during the Cold War, there was this mirror imaging. Each side thought that the other was bent on destroying it and that everything it did was only defensive in nature. Now, in the Cold War, this dichotomy became even more intense than it had been in other periods. I teach about the history of the Cold War, and I like to tell my students that I constantly say you have to try to put yourself back in the mindset of that time, where everybody thought and were told every day that the Soviets could be launching a nuclear attack to destroy all human life on our planet on our planet or on our continent, at any moment, there were clocks in the newspaper about how many minutes it would take for the nuclear weapon to get here. It would be 39 minutes, that would be 37 minutes. People were in their bomb shelters. We really thought destruction was imminent and that of course serves the purpose of people in government. So while I tell my students, you’ve got to try to put yourself back in the mindset of the time, sometimes I think that even I immersed in the story that didn’t live during that period. Even I can’t grasp it. You have to have been there to see the intensity. Yeah, they really believed that the Soviet Army could be pouring across. They filled a gap in Germany, and within 24 hours, they’d be at the English channel. And suddenly all of Europe would be seized by the Soviet Union. They really thought this could happen at any moment. So when you think of the stakes being that high, you can justify anything.

JD

Yeah. And the fact that there was no internet at that time, a lot of the things that we take for granted as being able to check things or hear different perspectives, they did not have any access to. So it was literally like when I was talking to Jack, it was just like, they were, they had one story they heard from their government and that was it. And that’s what they thought. And like you allude to that, like they, constantly on our side thought the Soviets might be able to control people’s minds. So they were racing against that imaginary threat the entire time, it seems like. And why did they come up with this idea? What made them think that communists or the Russians were working on mind control?

SK

Well, I think there are two factors. One is one that I mentioned earlier. And that is all of those movies and books and all the stories and Edgar Allen Poe and Gaslight, there was the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They grew up reading stories about mind control. And somehow they assumed that if novelists and screenwriters could invent it, it must be true. So that provided the psychological ground in which these seeds could sprout. And then the seeds were particularly coming from two episodes which the CIA misinterpreted. It’s a way that you project what you think must be happening without thinking about what really is happening. First of all, we had a case in Hungary where the Roman Catholic bishop was imprisoned and after some months was put on trial and he confessed to crimes that he obviously had not committed and he spoke in a kind of a monotone. It later turned out that he had been abused in the same way that prisoners have been abused since forever, isolation and intense repeated interrogations and sleep deprivation. But we didn’t believe that. We thought that somehow he’s being controlled. He’s not speaking with his own voice. Somebody’s telling him what to say. This wasn’t true, but we imagined it. And then the second episode happened in Korea after a number of American servicemen signed documents confessing to war crimes including dropping biological weapons on North Korea, which we always insisted we hadn’t done. And some of them denounced aspects of life in the United States. We assumed that the only way any good strapping American soldier could do these things is if he’d been brainwashed. And we felt that they must have done this. And in fact, when the prisoners were released in North Korea, they came back to Europe across Russia in a train and a train crossed through Manchuria in northern China. And that’s where the phrase, the Manchurian candidate came from. Somewhere in Manchuria, the communists must have drugged these people and seized control of their minds. Now, this helped feed one of Gottlieb’s great fixations, which was LSD. He was the first LSD maven. He was fascinated with LSD because it had such potent effects in such small doses, it was colorless, it was odorless, it was so easy to administer. So in 1953, Sidney Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD, which it did, from the Sandoz Company in Switzerland, which manufactured it. Gottlieb himself became a great LSD user. By his own account, he took more than 200 LSD trips. So he wanted to find out not only how to use LSD in horrific prison experiments, but he wanted to know how ordinary people would respond to LSD, knowing what it was in a clinical setting. So since the CIA doesn’t have clinics, what he did was set up a couple of bogus medical foundations. These foundations then approached university hospitals and clinics around the United States and said, we are wanting to sponsor investigations into this new drug, psychoactive drug called LSD. And we will pay you to carry out this research. And what you would do is put an ad in the newspaper, tell people exactly what it is. You pay them with money that we will give you, and then you give them the LSD, and you just observe them and send us back your clinical reports. So who were among the very first people who signed up to try this new drug? Ken Kesey, the guy who went on to the cuckoo’s nest. In fact, he got a job in the mental hospital and he later said, that gave me the material for my book, but that’s not why I got the job. I got the job because I wanted to steal the LSD out of the pharmacy, which he did. And then he started turning on all his friends. Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead was one of the early volunteers. He came home and turned the whole Grateful Dead and all their circle onto LSD. Another one was Alan Ginsberg, the poet. He got his first LSD from the CIA, from Sidney Gottlieb. So actually, Gottlieb was the channel by which LSD leaked out into the American culture. And the irony, of course, is that the drug that Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA the power to control the world wound up fueling a generational rebellion, which was aimed at destroying everything the CIA believed in.

JD

Yeah, that is, that is just fascinating. And the irony of that is incredible. What, while, uh, and granted, this is not in the book, but I just wanted to get your take on it, see if you had any thoughts. Uh, what do you think is it, do you know anything about the reality of like Charles? Charles Manson’s involvement with the CIA. There’s the book chaos that’s out that I believe ties Charles Manson to going to some sort of San Francisco clinic that was then tied to the CIA later on. Have you found anything that makes that seem credible?

SK

Manson seems to have had contact with a clinic that was run by somebody who was an MKL contractor, whether he was at that time or not is unclear. There’s also evidence that the Unabomber, yeah, Kaczynski was given drugs in some kind of a project at Harvard. Now, I have a firm rule in all of my books, which is I only report things that are proven and are factual. The chapter in every one of my books that I’m the proudest of is the footnotes. Everything in there is documented. So that limits me. I’m not able to get into these cases. I’m curious about them. Um, yeah, but, uh, I’m only reporting what is known and proven. And that alone is quite shocking and bizarre enough.

JD

Yeah, that, that alone is terrifying. Um, we’re, we’re getting close to running out of the time that you, uh, had for us today. One thing that I kind of wanted to touch on or ask just to end it is, and again, this is speculation. Uh, obviously, given all of this was happening 50, 60 years ago at this point, technology has infinitely expanded, progressed. Uh, or maybe you know, some things. What do you think the reality is of what the CIA could potentially be doing nowadays with technology where it’s at? Do you think the CIA is just running a completely clean, clean program at this point? No MK Ultras or are they continuing the same things? And in 50 years, we’re gonna find out a whole new slew of information of crazy experimentations and technological advances.

SK

MKUltra wound down in the late 50s and early 60s. And Gottlieb himself concluded in a memo, effectively, that there’s no such thing as mind control. Everything that he had done was for nothing. Actually, it’s a fantasy. You cannot make people do things that they don’t want to do. Like, you can’t make somebody commit a murder if they’re deeply opposed to murder. It’s only in books, only in movies. And he admitted this. Now… I think he was right. There’s no such thing as mind control, but he’s right in 1960. As you point out, the advances in cyber technology and artificial intelligence have been unbelievable in recent years and we’re just at the brink of this. So the truth that mind control is a myth might not be true anymore. And it would seem to me that the CIA would be a logical place to be figuring this out. So you suggested in your question, could we in 50 years find another book like this one written by the next Stephen Kinzer? Yeah, I think we could. It seems hard for me to believe that the CIA is not involved in any projects trying to figure out how to control human behavior. It just wouldn’t make sense. Those would be top secret. Ultra Secrets, if you want to put it that way. But to me, it makes perfect sense. In fact, I’d really be surprised if I could find out definitively that the CIA was not doing this. It just wouldn’t make sense. Given their background, their interests, what they see in the world, I suspect that there must be something like a modern cyber or electronic version of MKUltra buried somewhere deep in our national security apparatus. It’s a very reasonable assumption.

JD

So final question, a big picture. What is the way to improve this system? If you could wave a wand and, and let’s even give the CIA some sort of credit that at times maybe they have been on the right side of history and prevented wars or something with their clandestine activities. What is the way, is it just more oversight? Is it like a sunset protocol like in these things where the CIA can only exist for a certain amount of time and then you bring in new people or something? Like is there a big, how do we improve the system? So the CIA is not, or the national security apparatus, is not potentially killing us all or creating more problems than they’re helping.

SK

Our national security apparatus is now so vast. I remember when John Kerry kicked in as Secretary of State and he was asked about this and he said, some of these projects just have a life of their own. And I’m sure that there is no single person in the US government who knows everything that the national security agencies are doing. There’s no committee, nobody knows everything. There’s just too many private contractors, too many things are going on. So what would be a way to limit these abuses even in a small way? I think maybe one would be that the CIA could adopt the principles which we were supposed to adopt at the end of the Nuremberg trials. There’s a set of rules called the Nuremberg rules. And they say, for example, that if you’re going to experiment on anybody, you must have that person’s informed consent. Now the CIA has turned into a big torture agency since 9–11, and observing Nuremberg rules would probably dramatically change what the CIA feels that it’s able to do. But I think that since the Nuremberg rules were effectively declared by the United States, and they say clearly that people who are supervising torturers and criminals are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. That would make a difference at the CIA, but I don’t see them ready to do that. They feel above the law. And I think their explanation would be, um, sometimes we have to do things that are illegal. And in fact, we just had a Supreme court decision in the recent days in which the Supreme court said that the people who designed the torture programs in, uh, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib do not have to testify in a court suit because it’s national security. Now I’d like to see a little more openness and a little more respect within the CIA for rules that we demand others follow.

JD

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Well, we can end it there because I think you’re out of time. I would encourage anybody, I can’t rave enough. I’ve told several people about your book. It’s just mind blowing. Even if you have never gotten into this sort of stuff before of the shadowy side of American government. You do such an excellent job of giving the facts, but telling it in an engaging way that I guarantee if somebody starts reading this, they’re not going to put it down and it will make you ask a lot of questions.

SK

Well you use the word mind blowing, it was mind blowing for the author and I think it probably will be mind blowing for a lot of readers. Thanks for having me on.