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

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

- The mad scientist behind America’s mind-control quest with LSD
- The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments

 

" Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them."  

 

" They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it."

The mad scientist behind America’s mind-control quest with LSD
By Larry Getlen September 16, 2019

In his mid-20s, future crime kingpin Whitey Bulger spent time in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for hijacking and armed robbery. While there, he volunteered to be part of a drug experiment that sought to find a cure for schizophrenia.

Or so he was told.

 

In reality, the experiment sought to determine how much LSD the human mind could take before it snapped. Bulger was fed large doses of the drug nearly every day for 15 months without being told what it was.

He later wrote of the horrors he experienced during this time.

 

“Hallucinating. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

When Bulger asked to be released from the experiment, he was refused since, he was told, “We are close to finding the cure.”

 

Bulger, who was later convicted of 11 murders, may be an unsympathetic victim, but these same experiments were being conducted on unsuspecting civilians at the behest of one power-mad CIA official.

 

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

by Stephen Kinzer tells the story of Gottlieb, a chemist obsessed with finding a way to control the human brain, no matter how many innocent minds he destroyed in the process....

 

Born in The Bronx in 1918, Gottlieb received a doctorate in biochemistry and after working several research jobs for the government, was recruited by the CIA in 1951 by Deputy Director Allen Dulles, who would later lead the agency.

Dulles believed that there were undiscovered methods for controlling the human mind, and that these processes could help the US win wars. He hired Gottlieb to lead the effort into mind-control research, which he named “Artichoke,” by any means necessary.

 

Many in the intelligence community were convinced that the Soviet Union and China had made great advancements in brainwashing, and they sought to perfect the technique themselves. Hypnosis and electroshock were among the methods tested, but Gottlieb became obsessed with the potential of LSD.

 

After sampling the drug himself and feeling “as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body,” he began testing it on military volunteers. Soon after, he stopped caring whether people had volunteered and began administering the drug to unwitting subjects, including CIA trainees.

 

Gottlieb and many around him truly believed that LSD held the secret to controlling minds.

 

“CIA employees were given LSD and then induced to violate oaths and promises,” Kinzer writes. “In one [mock interrogation], a military officer swore never to reveal a secret, revealed it under the influence of LSD, and afterward forgot the entire episode . . . Gottlieb came to believe that [LSD] could be the key to mind control. He was the first acid visionary.”....

 

Gottlieb, given free rein by the CIA, authorized and funded “experiments” like this across the country, victimizing countless innocent people who simply sought relief for medical and psychological issues.

 

“Under Gottlieb’s direction, with Dulles’ encouragement . . . Artichoke had became one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government,” Kinzer writes.

 

The eventual breadth of the program, which was rechristened MK-ULTRA and given an even larger budget, was stunning....

 

In time, Gottlieb was running similar safe houses around the world, and his experiments became even more audacious and cruel. When he decided to try to learn just how much LSD the human mind could take, he recruited prison doctors around the country. While Bulger was one victim, most were African American.

 

He also got more doctors and hospitals around the country involved, funneling the money through front groups to hide the CIA’s involvement.

 

At the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, “hundreds of students from Harvard, Emerson and MIT were paid $15 to drink a little vial of a clear, colorless, odorless liquid that might produce an altered state.” It was later found that “none of those involved in the experiments had the proper training or understanding to guide participants . . . [and] several [students] had negative reactions. One hanged herself in a clinic bathroom.”

 

In experiments conducted by a New York allergist named Harold Abramson, who received $85,000 from Gottlieb, Kinzer writes that “12 ‘pre-puberty’ boys were fed psilocybin, and 14 children between the ages of 6 and 11, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.”....

 

Gottlieb continued on at the CIA, working on more conventional spy-craft devices like rocket launchers and bomb sensors to help the Vietnam War effort.

He retired in 1973 after 22 years with the agency, destroying all the MK-ULTRA files (or so he thought) before he left.

 

When another secret CIA program was exposed by reporter Seymour Hersh in 1974, it ignited a slew of investigations into the CIA, and Gottlieb’s name was made public in regard to the LSD experiments in 1975. He eventually testified before Congress several times, but only after being granted immunity from prosecution.

 

By the end of his life, he was working as a speech pathologist for children. He died in 1999, and never paid for his cruelty....

https://nypost.com/2019/09/16/the-mad-scientist-behind-americas-mind-control-quest-with-lsd/

 

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments
Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.
By STEPHEN KINZER September 15, 2019

 

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.

 

Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.

 

....For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders....

 

Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA’s covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the agency, considered his mind control project—first named Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA—to be of supreme importance, the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States.

 

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited....

 

Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.

 

In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.

These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick.

 

One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick....
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/15/cia-fort-detrick-stephen-kinzer-228109

 

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'
September 9, 2019 Heard on Fresh Air Terry Gross

....On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods

The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.

Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'

 

The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

 

For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.

 

Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.

 

On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas

Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...

CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it....

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief

 

 

Traumatic memory: memory disturbances and dissociative amnesia

The following articles provide compelling scientific evidence in support of the phenomena of dissociation and recovered memory.

Included are cases involving survivors of childhood abuse, survivors of the Holocaust, and war veterans.

In addition to supporting the phenomenon in general, these articles also counter the argument that recovered memory is (a) no more than a recent cultural “fad” and (b) specific to false accusers of sexual abuse.

http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/scholarly-resources/traumatic-memory/

excerpts:
Bremner, J. D., Krystal, J. H., Charney, D. S., & Southwick, S. M. (1996). Neural mechanisms in dissociative amnesia for childhood abuse: Relevance to the current controversy surrounding the “false memory syndrome.” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 71-82.

....CONCLUSIONS: John Nemiah pointed out several years ago that alterations in memory in the form of dissociative amnesia are an important part of exposure to traumatic stressors, such as childhood abuse. The studies reviewed here show that extreme stress has long-term effects on memory. These findings may provide a model for understanding the mechanisms involved in dissociative amnesia, as well as a rationale for phenomena such as delayed recall of childhood abuse.

....Briere, J., & Conte, J. R. (1993, January). Self-reported amnesia for abuse in adults molested as children. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 6(1), 21-31.

....A sample of 450 adult clinical subjects reporting sexual abuse histories were studied regarding their repression of sexual abuse incidents. A total of 267 subjects (59.3%) identified some period in their lives, before age 18, when they had no memory of their abuse. Variables most predictive of abuse-related amnesia were greater current psychological symptoms, molestation at an early age, extended abuse, and variables reflecting especially violent abuse

....Chu, J. A., Frey, L. M., Ganzel, B. L., & Matthews, J. A. (1999, May). Memories of childhood abuse: Dissociation, amnesia, and corroboration. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 156(5), 749-755.

....Childhood abuse, particularly chronic abuse beginning at early ages, is related to the development of high levels of dissociative symptoms including amnesia for abuse memories. This study strongly suggests that psychotherapy usually is not associated with memory recovery and that independent corroboration of recovered memories of abuse is often present.

....DeWind, E. (1968). The confrontation with death. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 302-305.

Excerpt: “Most former inmates of Nazi concentration camps could not remember anything of the first days of imprisonment because perception of reality was so overwhelming that it would lead to a mental chaos which implies a certain death.”

....Durlacher, G. L. (1991). De zoektocht [The search]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

Dutch sociologist Durlacher, a survivor of Birkenau, describes his search for and meetings with another 20 child survivors from this camp. Excerpt: “Misha….looks helplessly at me and admits hesitantly that the period in the camps is wiped out from his brain….With each question regarding the period between December 12, 1942 till May 7, 1945, he admits while feeling embarrassed that he cannot remember anything….Jindra…had to admit that he remembers almost nothing from his years in the camps….From the winter months of 1944 until just before the liberation in April 1945, only two words stayed with him: Dora and Nordhausen

....Elliott, D. M., & Briere, J. (1995, October). Posttraumatic stress associated with delayed recall of sexual abuse: A general population study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 8(4), 629-647. (Child Abuse Crisis Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA.)

Abstract: This study examined delayed recall of childhood sexual abuse in a stratified random sample of the general population (N = 505). Of participants who reported a history of sexual abuse, 42% described some period of time when they had less memory of the abuse than they did at the time of data collection. No demographic differences were found between subjects with continuous recall and those who reported delayed recall. However, delayed recall was associated with the use of threats at the time of the abuse.

....Feldman-Summers, S., Pope, K. S. (1994, June). The experience of “forgetting” childhood abuse: A national survey of psychologists. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62(3), 636-639.


Abstract: A national sample of psychologists were asked whether they had been abused as children and, if so, whether they had ever forgotten some or all of the abuse. Almost a quarter of the sample (23.9%) reported childhood abuse, and of those, approximately 40% reported a period of forgetting some or all of the abuse. The major findings were that (1) both sexual and nonsexual abuse were subject to periods of forgetting; (2) the most frequently reported factor related to recall was being in therapy; (3) approximately one half of those who reported forgetting also reported corroboration of the abuse....


Herman, J. L., & Harvey, M. R. (1997). Adult memories of childhood trauma: a naturalistic clinical study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 10(4), 557-571.

Abstract: The clinical evaluations of 77 adult psychiatric outpatients reporting memories of childhood trauma were reviewed. A majority of patients reported some degree of continuous recall. Roughly half (53%) said they had never forgotten the traumatic events. Two smaller groups described a mixture of continuous and delayed recall (17%) or a period of complete amnesia followed by delayed recall (16%).

....Krell, R. (1993). Child survivors of the Holocaust: Strategies of adaptation. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 38, 384-389.

Excerpt: “The most pervasive preoccupation of child survivors is the continuing struggle with memory, whether there is too much or too little….For a child survivor today, an even more vexing problem is the intrusion of fragments of memory—most are emotionally powerful and painful but make no sense. They seem to become more frequent with time and are triggered by thousands of subtle or not so subtle events

....Kuch, K., & Cox, B. J. (1992). Symptoms of PTSD in 124 survivors of the Holocaust. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 337-340.

Potential subjects with confirmed or suspected organicity, bipolar or obsessive compulsive disorder were excluded. One group (N=78) had been detained in various concentration camps for greater than 1 month. A second group (N=20) had been detained in Auschwitz and had been tattooed. A third group (N=45) had not been in labor camps, ghettos, or had hidden in the illegal underground. Psychogenic amnesia was found in 3.2% of the totals sample, in 3.8 of the general concentration camp survivors, and in 10% of tattooed survivors of Auschwitz. 17.7% (N=22) of the total sample had received psychotherapy.

....Loftus, E. F., Polonsky, S., & Fullilove, M. T. (1994, March). Memories of childhood sexual abuse: Remembering and repressing. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18(1), 67-84. (University of Washington, Psychology Department, Seattle, WA.)

Abstract: Women involved in outpatient treatment for substance abuse were interviewed to examine their recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Overall, 54% of the 105 women reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. Of these, the majority (81%) remembered all or part of the abuse their whole lives; 19% reported they forgot the abuse for a period of time, and later the memory returned.

....Melchert, T. P. (1996, October). Childhood memory and a history of different forms of abuse. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 27(5), 438-446. (Texas Tech University, Department of Psychology, Lubbock, TX.)

Abstract: A widespread professional and public controversy has recently emerged regarding recovered memories of child sexual abuse, but the prevalence and nature of these memories have received limited empirical examination. This study (N = 553 nonclinical participants) found that very similar proportions of those with histories of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse reported that they had periods without memory of their abuse (21%, 18%, and 18%, respectively).

....Musaph, H. (1993). Het post-concentratiekampsyndroom [The post-concentration camp syndrome]. Maandblad Geestelijke volksgezondheid [Dutch Journal of Mental Health], 28(5), 207-217.

Amnesia exists for certain Holocaust experiences, while other experiences are extremely well remembered.

....van der Hart, O., Bolt, H., & van der Kolk, B. A. (2005). Memory fragmentation in dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 6(1), 55-70. (Department of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.)

Abstract: This study examined the quality of self-reported memories of traumatic experiences in participants with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and compared them with their memories of non-traumatic, but emotionally significant life experiences. Systematic interview data were gathered from 30 DID patients in The Netherlands. All participants reported a history of severe childhood abuse; 93.3% reported some period of amnesia for the index traumatic event, and 33.3% reported periods of amnesia for significant non-traumatic childhood experiences. All participants who had been amnestic for their trauma reported that their memories were initially retrieved in the form of somatosensory flashbacks. This suggests that, like PTSD patients, DID patients at least initially recall their trauma not as a narrative, but as somatosensory re-experiencing.

....Wagenaar, W. A., & Groeneweg, J. (1990). The memory of concentration camp survivors. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 4, 77-87.

Abstract: This study is concerned with the question whether extremely emotional experiences, such as being the victim of Nazi concentration camps, leave traces in memory that cannot be extinguished. Relevant data were obtained from testimony by 78 witnesses in a case against Marinus De Rijke, who was accused of Nazi crimes in Camp Erika in The Netherlands. The testimonies were collected in the periods 1943–1947 and 1984–1987. A comparison between these two periods reveals the amount of forgetting that occurred in 40 years. Results show that camp experiences were generally well-remembered, although specific but essential details were forgotten. Among these were forgetting being maltreated, forgetting names and appearance of the torturers, and forgetting being a witness to murder.

....Williams, L. M. (1994, December). Recall of childhood trauma: A prospective study of women’s memories of child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62(6), 1167-1176. (University of New Hampshire, Family Research Lab, Durham, NH.)

Abstract: One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question “Do people actually forget traumatic events such as child sexual abuse, and if so, how common is such forgetting?” A large proportion of the women (38%) did not recall the abuse that had been reported 17 years earlier. Women who were younger at the time of the abuse and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have no recall of the abuse.

....Yehuda, R., Schmeidler, J., Siever, L. J., Binder-Brynes, K., & Elkin, A. (1997). Individual differences in posttraumatic stress disorder symptom profiles in Holocaust survivors in concentration camps or in hiding. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 10, 453-465.

46% of 100 survivors report amnesia on PTSD measures.
http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/scholarly-resources/traumatic-memory/