Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  For Gottlieb the autumn of 1975 was most unpleasant. He had been abruptly pulled away from his new life and back into a world he thought he had escaped forever. After a lifetime of the deepest anonymity, his name was appearing in newspapers. Often it was connected to frightening-sounding CIA projects.

  Despite this rude shock, Gottlieb could count himself fortunate. He avoided what might have been a more troublesome fate. Protected by immunity, he had been able to confess to possible crimes. That prevented the Department of Justice from prosecuting him. He even managed to keep his name out of the official record—if not the press—and to be remembered as “Joseph Scheider.” Once again, for the second time in as many years, he resolved to drop out of sight and spend the rest of his life in simplicity and service. Fate did not cooperate this time either.

  14

  I Feel Victimized

  After the brief burst of publicity that upset his life in 1975, and his attendant brush with the law, Gottlieb retired to northern California. His mother-in-law and one of his daughters lived nearby. He immersed himself in the anonymity to which he was so well accustomed.

  In Washington, meanwhile, investigations of the CIA reached a climax. Over a fifteen-month period the Church Committee held 126 public hearings, interviewed 800 witnesses, and reviewed more than 100,000 documents. It focused on spectacular abuses like domestic spying and assassination plots. Senators finished their work without coming close to understanding what MK-ULTRA had been or what Gottlieb had done.

  “Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens,” the Church Committee concluded in its final report, issued in April 1976. “There is no inherent constitutional authority for the President or any intelligence agency to violate the law.”

  Tucked away in the committee’s six-volume final report was a section entitled “Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community.” It included a methodical recounting of the Frank Olson story: Olson was conducting “biological research for the CIA,” attended a retreat at which a colleague spiked his drink with LSD, suffered “what appeared to be a serious depression,” and “leapt to his death” from a New York hotel window. The report also summarized what the committee had discovered about CIA mind control programs.

  The earliest of the CIA’s major programs involving the use of chemical and biological agents, Project Bluebird, was … investigating the possibilities of control of an individual by application of special interrogation techniques.

  In August 1951 the project was renamed Artichoke … Overseas interrogations utilizing a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis, after physical and psychiatric examination of the subjects, were also part of Artichoke.

  MK-ULTRA was the principal CIA program involving the research and development of chemical and biological agents … LSD was one of the materials tested in the MK-ULTRA project.

  Because MK-ULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MK-ULTRA materials by the CIA overseas.

  For a quarter century, MK-ULTRA had been the cryptonym that dared not speak its name. Even within the CIA few had heard of it. Now it was appearing in public print. The Church Committee’s account of MK-ULTRA was superficial and uninformed, though, and none of its conclusions touched Gottlieb in any direct or dangerous way.

  In the months after the Church Committee issued its report, public interest in CIA misdeeds began to fade. The murder of the CIA station chief in Athens after anti-CIA campaigners had published his name and address contributed to a backlash against further investigation. A spasm was ending. Gottlieb seemed to be home free.

  Senators also believed they were finished with MK-ULTRA. Nearly two years had passed since “Joseph Scheider” testified about it in secret. With documents destroyed and the few people who knew the truth resolved to stay silent, the case had gone cold.

  A sudden discovery reopened it. In 1977 the newly installed director of central intelligence, Stansfield Turner, whom President Jimmy Carter had appointed with a mandate to bring transparency to the CIA, received a Freedom of Information Act request for any MK-ULTRA files that might have escaped destruction. He passed it on to an archivist and encouraged him to make a thorough search. The archivist, as Turner later put it, “did a very diligent job of Sherlock Holmesing.” In a depot where CIA financial records were stored, he found a collection of MK-ULTRA expense reports. Among them were references to various “subprojects.” The Washington-based researcher whose FOIA request had led to the discovery, John Marks, released a batch of the documents at a press conference.

  “Central Intelligence Agency documents released yesterday revealed new details of experiments on unsuspecting citizens designed to control their behavior through exotic drugs, electroshock, radiation and other means,” the Washington Post reported. “More than 1,000 pages of documents obtained from the Agency under the Freedom of Information Act provided the details on the super-secret project, code-named MK-ULTRA.”

  These newly discovered documents brought MK-ULTRA to public attention for the first time. Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had succeeded the Church Committee, and of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, summoned the director of central intelligence to a joint hearing to ask him what he had learned about this “super-secret project.”

  Turner had been running the CIA for five months when, on the steamy morning of August 3, 1977, bathed in television lights, he took his place before the senators. MK-ULTRA, he began, was “an umbrella project under which certain sensitive subprojects were funded.” He said that newly discovered documents described several of these “subprojects,” including one that aimed to produce “exotic pathogens” and another to test “hypnosis and drugs in combination.” They also revealed that MK-ULTRA experiments had been carried out on unwitting subjects in prisons and at “safe houses in San Francisco and New York City.” Others had been conducted by researchers at eighty colleges, universities, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, many of whom were unaware that they were working for the CIA.

  As soon as Turner finished, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addressed him sharply.

  “Admiral Turner, this is an enormously distressing report,” Kennedy said. “I did not get much of a feeling in reviewing your statement here this morning of the kind of abhorrence to this type of past activity, which I think the American people would certainly deplore and which I believe that you do.”

  Turner was quick to reply. “It is totally abhorrent to me to think of using a human being as a guinea pig and in any way jeopardizing his health, no matter how great the cause,” he said. “I am not here to pass judgment on my predecessors, but I can assure you that this is totally beyond the pale of my contemplation of activities that the CIA or any other of our intelligence agencies should undertake.”

  Having secured Turner’s agreement that MK-ULTRA had been “totally beyond the pale,” Kennedy turned to the question of personal responsibility. His investigators had learned the name of the CIA officer who ran MK-ULTRA, but this had not helped them.

  “The overall agent, Mr. Gottlieb, has indicated a fuzzy memory about the whole area,” Kennedy said. “Is it plausible that the director of the program would not understand or know about details of the program? Is it plausible that Dr. Gottlieb would not understand the full range of activities?”

  “Let me say it is unlikely,” Turner replied. “I don’t know Mr. Gottlieb.”

  “Has anybody in the Agency talked with Mr. Gottlieb to find out about this?”

  “Not since this revelation has come out.”

  “Not since this revelation? Well, why not?”

  “He has left our employ, Senator.”

  “Does that mean that anybody who leaves is, you know, covered for lifetime?”

  “No, sir.”

  Kennedy became agitated. “It is amazing to me,” he told Turner. “Every single document that the staff reviews has M
r. Gottlieb’s name on it, and you come to tell us that we don’t have to worry any more, we have these final facts, and Mr. Gottlieb has not been talked to.”

  Turner insisted that he had never claimed to have “final facts” about MK-ULTRA. He added that “if the committee has no objection,” his officers would try to locate Gottlieb. That left Kennedy partly satisfied.

  “I don’t see how we can fulfill our responsibility in this area, and the drug testing, without our hearing from Gottlieb,” Kennedy said. “One thing is for sure: Gottlieb knows.”

  As the hearing drew to a close, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who was presiding, sought to reassure Kennedy and his other colleagues. “As part of the ongoing investigation, we had intended to call upon many dozens of others,” Inouye said. “One of those will be Dr. Gottlieb.”

  The work Gottlieb had done during his MK-ULTRA years was still deeply secret. Even the fact of his existence was closely held. He had been pulled out of anonymity during the Church Committee inquiry, but his exposure had been brief and obscure. Two years later the director of central intelligence pronounced his name in public—and the name of MK-ULTRA. Senators were tantalized.

  “The word went out to the subcommittee staff,” the New York Times reported. “Find this man Gottlieb.”

  * * *

  AS SOON AS Gottlieb learned that he was being summoned to Washington for a second round of testimony before congressional inquisitors, he called Terry Lenzner. Lenzner recommended that they dust off the plan that had worked for them before. Three days before Gottlieb was scheduled to testify, Senator Kennedy, who was to preside, abruptly postponed the hearing. Gottlieb had sent him an ultimatum: no testimony without immunity from prosecution.

  “Because the drug testing programs involved were carried out between 1950 and 1973, most of what took place is beyond the scope of the five-year statute of limitations for prosecuting federal crimes,” the New York Times reported. “Terry F. Lenzner, Mr. Gottlieb’s lawyer, could not be reached for comment on his reasons for demanding immunity, but one source familiar with Mr. Gottlieb’s activities said that the five-year limitation does not apply in some criminal cases where a conspiracy exists.”

  Kennedy faced a choice. If he accepted Gottlieb’s demand for immunity, he might hear valuable testimony. That would also, however, make any future prosecution of Gottlieb difficult or impossible.

  While Senate lawyers were weighing their options, investigators found a trove of MK-ULTRA tidbits in an unexpected place. The widow of George Hunter White, who had died two years earlier, had donated his papers to Foothill Junior College, south of San Francisco. Among them was White’s diary. Entries provided rich new details about not only Operation Midnight Climax, but also the roles that Gottlieb and Lashbrook had played in directing it.

  White’s excesses had undone him. In 1963, the year MK-ULTRA drew to a close, doctors diagnosed him with cirrhosis of the liver. He was fifty-seven years old. His once intimidating frame had shrunk to 135 pounds. For a time he served as the fire marshal of Stinson Beach, California, where according to one researcher he “continued to drink and surround himself with adoring deviants until his death in 1975.” Toward the end he wrote a letter to Gottlieb, thanking him for the chance to serve the United States while feeding his own appetites. His words are a unique tribute to MK-ULTRA.

  “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White wrote. “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!”

  Senators were already intrigued by the mass of MK-ULTRA documents that the CIA had found in response to John Marks’s FOIA request. White’s diary added more details. Kennedy decided that the best way to find out more about MK-ULTRA would be to accept Gottlieb’s demand that he be immunized against prosecution. Lenzner then pressed for another concession.

  “I insisted that the hearing be held in executive session behind closed doors, and that the witness be protected from exposure to the press and the public,” he wrote in his memoir. “I told them that Gottlieb had a heart condition and a crowd of spectators would be too much for him. Sid’s cardiologist helped us out with a note warning against over-excitement. Most important, I said, for the safety of his family, it was imperative that Gottlieb’s name not be leaked nor a picture of him taken.”

  When Gottlieb appeared before the Church Committee in 1975, senators knew almost nothing about MK-ULTRA. By 1977 they had learned a bit more. Anticipation grew as it became clear that Gottlieb would soon appear and speak. On September 20, to mark “the first public emergence of the distinguished-looking scientist since he left the CIA in 1973,” the New York Times published a “Man in the News” profile.

  “Sidney Gottlieb has been found,” the Times reported, “and if he does indeed know the details of the drug experiments, which were part of a CIA program called MK-ULTRA that was under his direction, he will have a chance to say so tomorrow when the Kennedy subcommittee convenes to hear him testify.”

  The Times profile described Gottlieb as a biochemist who had spent years running the Technical Services Division, “the ‘gadget shop’ where wristwatch radios, exploding tie clips and poison darts—the hardware of the trade—are produced.” It said that during his years at the CIA, his official biography had listed him as a consultant to the Defense Department. Most intriguingly, it quoted several of Gottlieb’s former associates. One remembered that he always followed orders, “never made a decision on his own,” and was “not a guy who would make waves with authority.” Another said: “Sid’s an honest man, but he’s a tinkerer. He likes to fiddle with things.” The last line was wounding: “One former CIA official went further, saying that in his opinion Dr. Gottlieb, who he described as a scientist who sometimes failed to see the effects of his work in human terms, should never have been permitted to run the division.”

  Almost every “Man in the News” profile that ran in the Times was accompanied by a photograph. Gottlieb’s was not. The text explained that no image of him was known to exist.

  On the day the profile was published, Gottlieb arrived as scheduled to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. He slipped into a closed room. Waiting reporters clamored in vain.

  “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a key but shadowy figure in the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret drug testing program, told his story to a Senate subcommittee today, but he managed to elude the lights and microphone and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate hearing room,” the Times reported. “Dr. Gottlieb asked for privacy on the ground that his health prohibited his testifying before a crowd. He got his wish. Only his voice, occasionally seeming to break with tension or with anger, came out by loudspeaker from the closed chamber next door where he was questioned.”

  Gottlieb spoke for most of the morning. He began with a few sentences about MK-ULTRA, which he said was a CIA project “of the utmost urgency” that aimed “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” Then, without admitting to any specific abuse or even mentioning that he had directed MK-ULTRA, he said he was pained by some of what he had done.

  I would like this committee to know that I considered all this work—at the time it was done and in the context of circumstances that were extant in that period—to be extremely unpleasant, extremely difficult, extremely sensitive, but above all to be very urgent and important. I realize that it is difficult to reconstruct those times and that atmosphere today, in this room … The feeling that we had was that there was a real possibility that potential enemies, those enemies that were showing specific aggressive intentions at that time, possessed capabilities in this field that we knew nothing about, and the possession of those capabilities—possible possession—combined with our own ignorance about it, seemed to us to pose a threat of the magnitude of national
survival.

  Gottlieb became reflective at one other point in his testimony: when Senator Kennedy asked him if Frank Olson’s death gave him “any cause to rethink the testing program.”

  “That was a traumatic period as far as I am concerned,” Gottlieb replied. “It was a great tragedy … It caused me a lot of personal anguish. I considered resigning from the CIA and going into other work, because it affected us that way. Our final conclusion was to go ahead with the work on the basis [that] the best advice we could get medically was that the causal connection between LSD and the actual suicide was not absolute at all.”

  “The decision was, ‘Don’t change anything’?” asked Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island.

  “Well,” Gottlieb replied, “the best I can respond to that, that seems to be the case.”

  During this hearing, Gottlieb also publicly asserted the conclusion he had reported to his CIA superiors when he ended MK-ULTRA more than a decade earlier: there is no such thing as mind control. Painstaking research, Gottlieb told the subcommittee, had taught him that the effect of drugs on human beings is “very variable, very unpredictable,” and that neither drugs nor other tools could be used “in a finely tuned way to alter behavior.”