Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  “I never wanted to go back to India,” she wrote in a letter home. “I have never had any nostalgia for it and have always felt that it was such a hopeless place … Then Sid and I went back to India, and I was there working in a mission hospital for three months and I got sick. I just couldn’t stand it—the whole thing. I found that in the forty years since I had left, nothing had changed—nothing … Village life is the same: the dirt, the monkeys, the stray dogs, the filth, the open gutters, the people defecating and peeing wherever they happen to be, the bribery, the total contrariness of everything. Nothing makes sense—to us! All the years that the British and the missionaries had spent had made no difference at all. OK, I accept that and now I know it. So it seems to me that they are a people who have a way—their way, which indeed has been in use and functioning for them a great deal longer than our way has been functioning for us—and they need to be left to do it their way.”

  While Margaret Gottlieb was convalescing and musing about the effects of imperialism in India, her husband became the subject of unwanted attention back home. They had been on the road for two extraordinary years. Suddenly the past came calling.

  Scandals were raining down on the CIA. The Rockefeller Commission’s mild report did not satisfy critics. Determined to dig deeper, the Senate formed a Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Its investigators found several documents mentioning plots to assassinate foreign leaders. The names of most CIA officers who sent or received these documents were redacted. One name, however, appeared several times: Sidney Gottlieb.

  Church Committee investigators asked the CIA for permission to interview this mysterious officer. They were told that he had retired and left the United States. The investigators insisted. Finally, with help from the CIA’s legal office, they found him.

  Gottlieb was in India when, on a spring day in 1975, he received a most disconcerting message. The Church Committee wanted to talk to him. His world travels were over.

  * * *

  IN A SECLUDED glen a few miles from the White House, Gottlieb first met the defender who would secure his future. He had returned from India to find the capital in an investigative frenzy. His besieged former colleagues at the CIA warned him that he might be among the targets, and urged him to hire a lawyer. One suggested a hard-charging Washington insider, Terry Lenzner, who had recently given a talk at Langley about the legal rights of CIA officers.

  Soon afterward, Lenzner received a telephone call from a man whose “husky voice had a pronounced stutter.” Gottlieb introduced himself. He asked for a meeting and “underscored his desire for discretion.” Lenzner suggested Rosedale Park, around the corner from his home.

  “I sat waiting on a park bench,” Lenzner wrote afterward. “A man with a limp came toward me. He was casually dressed, and his clubfoot dragged behind him. He approached cautiously, casting furtive glances around him—subtly enough that it was clear to me he had been well trained in the art of counter-surveillance. Once he took a seat beside me, he offered his hand. ‘I’m Sid Gottlieb.’”

  Lenzner replied that he was “glad we could get together,” and then Gottlieb began. He said he was outraged that Americans had taken to attacking the CIA, which was “devoted to the defense of this country.” As for suggestions that he had acted improperly, they were outrageous and he planned to hold a press conference to say so. Lenzner suggested that this might be unwise, since “all he would accomplish by going public would be to put an even larger target on his back.” Gottlieb pondered for a moment. Then he said he might be interested in retaining Lenzner’s services—but with a most unusual pre-condition.

  “Before we work together,” he told Lenzner, “I’m going to need a sample of your handwriting.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I have someone at the Agency who can analyze it and tell me whether I should trust you.”

  Lenzner could not have known it, but this was an expression of the interest in graphology that Gottlieb had nurtured since his MK-ULTRA days. He wrote out several random sentences. Gottlieb folded the paper, put it in a pocket, said, “I’ll get back to you,” and walked away. A couple of days later he called.

  “You checked out,” Gottlieb told him. “No character defects.”

  Gottlieb’s immediate problem was the newly created Church Committee, at whose summons he had returned to the United States. Its investigators wanted to question him about his role in assassination plots. He was willing, but Lenzner cautioned him: “Before you talk to any committee or anyone else, we’re going to ask for immunity from prosecution.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” Gottlieb told him. “I’m not going to hide behind the Fifth Amendment.”

  “Look, Sid, the goal here is to keep you out of the newspapers and, at a minimum, out of jail,” Lenzner replied. “You don’t understand how this works. You could very well be the fall guy in this whole investigation.”

  Lenzner, who had defended the radical priest Philip Berrigan and whose liberal friends were aghast when he agreed to represent Gottlieb, soon won his new client’s confidence. The two spent many hours together. Gottlieb could not confess all he had done, but his monologues, as Lenzner later recounted them, offered a flash of insight into his mind and memory.

  Because of his expertise in poisons, Gottlieb told me that he was put in charge of assassination programs for the agency. He managed several attempts to assassinate foreign leaders … Surprisingly, much of Sid’s work did not focus on US enemies abroad. The CIA also conducted experiments on American citizens. Sid was not at all defensive about the LSD program in general, and indeed thought it was essential to American security … Sid said that he had supervised LSD experiments on more than twenty unsuspecting people. He had experimented with LSD on himself too. When we discussed individual cases—subjects or victims of the program, depending on your point of view—he seemed pained. As an academic exercise, Sid could go on confidently about the rightness of his activities. But he wasn’t so comfortable talking about individual cases or real people whose lives were affected. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t enthusiastic about talking about Olson.

  Lenzner outlined what he saw as Gottlieb’s legal challenges. The Church Committee was investigating assassination plots in which Gottlieb had been involved. In New York, the district attorney was looking into Frank Olson’s death. Gottlieb no longer wielded power at the CIA and had few remaining friends there. Besides, as Lenzner wrote, “with his stutter, club foot and immigrant roots, Sid did not fit into that crowd.” He looked like “a ripe, juicy target.”

  “They could try to pin Olson’s death on you,” Lenzner warned him.

  That sobered Gottlieb. He agreed to present the Church Committee with an ultimatum: no testimony without immunity.

  The committee was consumed with preparations for a momentous season of public hearings probing all manner of “unlawful or improper conduct” by the CIA. At the first hearing, William Colby revealed the existence of MK-NAOMI, the partnership between the CIA and the army’s Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. He produced a summary of its work written in 1967, when Gottlieb was running the Technical Services Division. It said MK-NAOMI had two purposes: to “stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for specific use of TSD,” and to “maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of chemical and biological materials.” Colby testified that despite having spent a quarter century at the CIA, he had not heard of MK-NAOMI until becoming director.

  Distracted by a cascade of hearings and lacking the wherewithal to battle Lenzner, whom one associate compared to “General Patton on steroids,” the Church Committee granted Gottlieb the immunity he had demanded. On October 7, 1975, he began answering questions from senators and staff investigators. Later he recalled providing “forty-odd hours of testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—I do not mean to say that the testimony
was odd.”

  The committee took Gottlieb’s testimony behind closed doors, in a secure Capitol Hill hearing room. It also allowed him to shield his identity by using an alias. He chose “Joseph Scheider.” It was a delightful choice. Joseph Scheider was a nineteenth-century New York tobacconist whose name became a footnote to folk culture for its association with a haunting lithograph that adorned packages of his popular smoking tobacco. The lithograph shows a hooded monk staring out with penetrating eyes. In one hand he displays a set of playing cards bearing portraits of monarchs, and in the other he holds a long pipe from which smoke is billowing. He looks like the priest of a mystic cult or a master of unseen forces. Below the picture, in bold capital letters, is the legend JOSEPH SCHEIDER. The tobacconist’s name became associated with the image of the inscrutable monk. That monk was Gottlieb as he saw himself: a mysterious guardian of esoteric knowledge, alluring but at the same time unsettling, drawing inspiration from a pipe to peer into the human soul.

  As Senate rules require, the Church Committee sealed the “Joseph Scheider” testimony for fifty years. Later committee reports, however, quoted several passages.

  “Joseph Scheider testified that he had ‘two or three conversations’ with Richard Bissell in 1960 about the Agency’s capacity to assassinate foreign leaders,” one report says. “Scheider informed Bissell that the CIA had access to lethal or potentially lethal biological materials that could be used in this manner … After the meeting, Scheider reviewed a list of biological materials available at the army’s Chemical Corps installation at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which would produce diseases that would ‘either kill the individual or incapacitate him so severely that he would be out of action.’ Scheider selected one material from the list which was ‘supposed to produce a disease that was indigenous to that area and that could be fatal’ … The [Congo] Station Officer testified that he received ‘rubber gloves, a mask, and a syringe’ along with lethal biological material from Scheider, who also instructed him on their use.”

  Committee members also asked Gottlieb about drug experiments. Lenzner took notes. Later he wove them into a revealing account.

  “Sid said he was charged with implementing a program code-named MK-ULTRA,” he wrote. “Researchers focused on the psychedelic drug LSD as a potentially powerful tool in espionage … Under MK-ULTRA, funding was provided for these experiments—mostly on prisoners, mental patients, and others who weren’t in positions to object, like the customers who frequented two brothels run by the Agency in San Francisco and New York. The Agency, sometimes working with the military, also conducted experiments abroad, slipping various pills and lozenges into the drinks of strangers and misfits.”

  Questioning was proceeding methodically when Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania leaned forward and handed Gottlieb a heavily redacted document. “Doctor Gottlieb,” he asked, “can you tell me what this memo is about?”

  Gottlieb looked at the memo and recoiled. He had written it in the 1950s for senior CIA officials. Its title was scary: “Health Alteration Committee.” Gottlieb’s discomfort was clear. The room fell silent. Lenzner covered the microphone with his hand and whispered into his client’s ear.

  “What’s up, Sid?” he asked.

  “I need to talk to you about this,” Gottlieb whispered back.

  Lenzner announced that his client was feeling unwell and asked for a recess. They retreated to a private office. Lenzner shut the door. When he turned to face Gottlieb, he was startled. “He was breathing heavily, his face still drained of color,” Lenzner recalled. “He closed his eyes and began what looked like a slow dance, his arms extended. What on earth was this? As if reading my mind, Sid said: ‘Tai chi. Helps me relax.’”

  Here in a Capitol Hill anteroom, during a break in questioning about his involvement in CIA drug experiments and assassination plots, Gottlieb’s eyes slowly closed. His arms swayed in age-old patterns. Past and present were coming together. Lenzner watched for a few moments and then spoke.

  “Sid, help me out here,” he said. “What’s in that memo?”

  “That’s the one,” Gottlieb murmured from his relaxed state. “The one that worked.”

  Lenzner pressed him. Gottlieb said the memo described a plot against “a Communist official in an Arab country whom the CIA wanted to get rid of.” He had made a scarf that the official received as a gift.

  “What kind of scarf?” Lenzner asked.

  “One infected with tuberculosis,” Gottlieb answered. “He died after a couple of weeks.”

  This was more than Lenzner would allow his client to admit. “Sid and I sat down and devised a careful answer to avoid revealing this new information without committing perjury,” he recalled. “When he returned to the hearing room, Sid said that the Agency had sent a handkerchief ‘treated with some kind of material for the purpose of harassing that person who received it.’ The senators didn’t know enough to ask the right follow-up questions, and Sid made it through the hearing relatively unscathed.”

  Setting a pattern that would define all of his post-retirement testimony, Gottlieb repeatedly pleaded bad memory. As one writer observed, he “claimed to have forgotten virtually everything he had spent the last twenty-five years researching.” As the hearing was ending, the committee’s chief counsel, Frederick Schwarz, said he had “one final question.” It was about Gottlieb’s role in the plot against Lumumba, but it also addressed the larger moral conundrum.

  “When you were asked to kill Lumumba, or whatever word was used, did you consider declining to do that?” Schwarz asked. “If not, why not?”

  “My view of the job at the time, and the responsibilities I had, was in the context of a silent war that was being waged,” Gottlieb replied. “Although I realize that one of my stances could have been … as a conscientious objector to this war, that was not my view. I felt that a decision had been made, as we discussed it, at the highest level that this be done, and that as unpleasant a responsibility as it was, it was my responsibility to carry out my part of that.”

  Gottlieb survived his secret testimony without damage. The New York police investigation into the Frank Olson case proved inconclusive. Then a new threat appeared. The Department of Justice became interested in him. A Washington Post article set off its investigation.

  “Sources said Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who headed the CIA’s Technical Services Division and was in overall charge of the Agency’s drug tests until his retirement in 1973, returned here recently and has retained former Senate Watergate Committee counsel Terry Lenzner as his lawyer,” the Post reported. “Gottlieb, 57, was responsible for the destruction of 152 files covering virtually all of the CIA’s drug testing … The destruction of the CIA’s drug files and Gottlieb’s disappearance before the Rockefeller Commission investigation compounded the CIA’s earlier cloak of secrecy surrounding its drug activities and prevented commission investigators from obtaining many specifics about the drug tests, according to a committee source.”

  The day after this article appeared, copies circulated at FBI field offices in Washington and Alexandria, Virginia. Destruction of government property is a felony. If Gottlieb had destroyed CIA files, he might be subject to prosecution. The FBI opened an investigation. It began with a background check on Gottlieb that turned up no record of criminal violations in Washington or any nearby jurisdiction. Then it hit a wall.

  On October 14, 1975, FBI director Clarence Kelley sent a memo to his Alexandria office entitled “Doctor Sidney Gottlieb: Destruction of Government Property.” It brought frustrating news. A lawyer from the Department of Justice had called to report that Gottlieb was giving secret testimony to the Church Committee. “It was indicated that Doctor Gottlieb was granted immunity before testifying,” the memo said, “and that he testified concerning the destruction of records in this matter.”

  That effectively ended an FBI investigation that might have led to Gottlieb’s indictment. Lenzner’s strategy worked: secure immunity for your client, then have
him confess to crimes so he cannot be prosecuted for committing them.

  The FBI tried one last gambit. Agents approached Lenzner and asked if he would make Gottlieb available for voluntary questioning. He agreed, but said the questioning would have to wait until Gottlieb finished his Senate testimony. Once the testimony was finished, he withdrew his offer. An internal FBI memo dated December 8 says Gottlieb “may have returned to India by now” and suggests bringing the case “to a logical conclusion.” Five weeks later, Kelley sent a curt directive to agents in Alexandria.

  “The Criminal Division of the Department of Justice has advised that no further investigation should be conducted on this matter in view of Doctor Gottlieb’s attorney not making him available for interview,” he wrote. “Discontinue further efforts to interview Doctor Gottlieb.”

  Not satisfied with this victory, Lenzner sought one more. He asked a federal judge, Gerhard Gesell, to issue an order forbidding the Church Committee from publishing Gottlieb’s name in its report on CIA assassination plots. Frederick Schwarz, the committee’s chief counsel, resisted. “I argued that no, he is sufficiently high and the office of chief scientist is sufficiently high that he fit within where we would use the actual name,” Schwarz recalled years later. Gesell agreed. Two days later, Lenzner was back in court with an appeal. That happened to be the same day that the Senate met in closed session to discuss the Church Committee’s assassination report—a session Schwarz could not miss. Rather than appear in court to contest Lenzner’s appeal, he backed down and agreed to allow Gottlieb to be identified by his pseudonym. The Senate report, issued a few days later, refers only to “Joseph Scheider,” identified as a former adviser to Richard Bissell who “holds a degree in bio-organic chemistry.”

  Newspapers were less restrained. After Lenzner and his law partner made their courtroom appeal to Judge Gesell, the New York Times reported: “They declined to identify their client in public court session. However, the two lawyers represent Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a retired CIA official who directed the Agency’s Technical Services Division. Dr. Gottlieb was questioned in a closed session of the Senate committee earlier this fall on his role in CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro, prime minister of Cuba, and Patrice Lumumba, a leader in the Congo crisis in 1961 … He has also been questioned about the death in a CIA drug experimentation program of an army scientist in 1953 as a result of an overdose of LSD. Dr. Gottlieb destroyed numerous records of his operation at the CIA shortly before leaving the Agency in 1973. He has also been questioned about this.”