Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  “The conclusion from all the activities,” he said, “was that it was very difficult to predictably manipulate human behavior in this way.”

  Gottlieb had been warned that Kennedy would ask about his destruction of MK-ULTRA files. When the question came, he produced a prepared statement and read it. He said that before leaving the CIA in 1973, he had decided “to clean out and destroy files and papers which we felt were superfluous and not useful, relevant, or meaningful to my successors.” His decision to do this, he said, “had absolutely nothing to do with covering up illegal activities.” It was for three other reasons.

  He wanted to contribute to “a continuing and important CIA program of files destruction to handle a burgeoning paper problem.”

  The files were “of no constructive use to the Agency” and were “capable of being misunderstood by anyone not thoroughly familiar with their background.”

  “The prominent scientists, researchers, and physicians who had collaborated with us” should be protected; “I felt that the careers and reputations of those people would be severely damaged—or ruined, for instance—in today’s climate of investigations, if their names and CIA connection were made public.”

  The hearing went well for Gottlieb. No one asked him what kind of experiments he had directed, or whether he had maintained interrogation centers outside the United States, or if any of his subjects had died. He portrayed himself as a victim, not a perpetrator.

  “I feel victimized and appalled by the CIA’s policy wherein someone or some group selectively pinpoints my name by failing to delete it from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act,” he said. “My name is selectively left on released documents where all or most others are deleted.”

  Kennedy asked Gottlieb about documents suggesting that his superiors knew about and approved everything he did. “There was a policy review of this project at least once a year, and more frequently than that later,” he replied. He added that he could “specifically remember briefing the Director of [the] CIA repeatedly on these matters,” and named Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Richard Helms.

  Gottlieb did not have to mention that while MK-ULTRA was at its peak, Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were regularly briefing President Eisenhower at the White House. Years later an academic study concluded that “given the number of informal conversations that Eisenhower had with the Dulles brothers, he almost certainly knew about some of the details of MK-ULTRA … His willingness to choose the CIA for semi-lawless deeds suggests that he at least set the tone.” The senators, however, were content with Gottlieb’s testimony that he had briefed his CIA superiors about MK-ULTRA, and did not ask about Eisenhower.

  Gottlieb gave the senators little help. Whenever one of them approached a delicate matter, his memory failed. He answered questions with classic evasion: “I cannot remember … I do not have that in my head … My remembrance is not that clear … I have no specific knowledge of that … I am a little hazy.”

  Even Gottlieb’s fuller answers were strikingly devoid of substance. When he was asked about experiments with poisonous mushrooms, for example, he replied with meaningless verbiage. “To answer the question precisely,” he said, “I did hear about the mushroom discussion, and my best remembrance of that—and I want to underline this to answer it most accurately—would have to relate it to a particular project from where it was done. But my general remembrance of it: that was a project that was discussing some of the very basic aspects of relating a chemical and a structure to an activity.”

  As the next day’s Washington Star reported, Gottlieb showed “remarkable skill in answering questions … with words so vague that the senators found themselves with very little substance when Gottlieb was finished.” He did, however, offer a bit of historical context that he hoped might help his inquisitors to understand what he had done.

  “There was tangible evidence that both the Soviets and the Red Chinese might be using techniques of altering human behavior which were not understood by the United States and which would have implications of national survival,” he said. Asked about his use of unwitting subjects in drug experiments, he replied: “There was no advance knowledge or protection of the individuals concerned. Harsh as it may seem in retrospect, it was felt that in an issue where national survival might be concerned, such a procedure and such a risk was a reasonable one to take.”

  Testimony was not all that Gottlieb left behind on that day. News photographers managed to take his picture. Lenzner had arranged for this not to happen, but the photographers outmaneuvered him. When they entered the chamber where Gottlieb had testified, he did not protest. Photos of him appeared on many front pages the next day, including that of the New York Times. They showed him balding but fit, with short hair, pronounced features, and intense eyes, wearing a dark suit and a tie with a bold zigzag pattern.

  Although Gottlieb failed to protect the secret of his appearance, he protected all of his others. From his perspective, the 1977 hearing, like the one at which he had appeared under a pseudonym two years before, was successful. No investigator or senator came close to the heart of his mystery. Many of them considered MK-ULTRA to have been a crazy little project that paled in significance beside such transgressions as assassination plots and domestic spying. This allowed Gottlieb and the CIA to keep secrets that might have been the most explosive of all.

  “They steered us away,” a Church Committee lawyer, Burton Wides, concluded years later. “It makes a lot of sense that Frank Olson was one reason. My educated guess is that he was having qualms, they were afraid he might talk, and for that reason he was pushed out the window.”

  One prominent member of the Church Committee, Senator Gary Hart, came to a different conclusion. “My guess is that the program did not receive more extended and detailed attention because of three factors,” he surmised. “First, time and staff resources; two, a sense on the part of moderate/conservative elements of the committee that it was a sideshow that got off the rails; and three, the necessity of maintaining bipartisanship throughout the two years and beyond by not sensationalizing the most extreme, even bizarre, behavior and thus, in the minds of the Republican side, undermining the credibility of the Agency during the Cold War. For the more conservative members, this was an embarrassing side show—boys will be boys—that was a price of confronting the Communists … There very probably would have been a long-range price to pay for a full-scale, sensational focus on MK-ULTRA.”

  Three other former MK-ULTRA officers testified before Kennedy’s subcommittee after Gottlieb was finished. All were equally forgetful and obscure. Robert Lashbrook admitted that he had been Gottlieb’s deputy but insisted that “the details of actually what was being done—that I was not aware of.” The psychologist John Gittinger, who according to George Hunter White’s diary regularly visited the Operation Midnight Climax “safe house” in San Francisco, claimed to have had “not the slightest idea” of what went on inside. In her syndicated column the next day, the sharp-tongued Mary McGrory called them “a rich variety of twits retired from the Company.”

  “The man who was their chief did much to explain their special cast of mindlessness,” McGrory wrote. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was heard but not seen—his health is not equal to the ordeal of television coverage—sat in a back room and his testimony was piped into the hearing room. He was clearly the most muddled of them all. He had insisted on immunity for his covert appearance, but why is a mystery. He remembered next to nothing.”

  15

  If Gottlieb Is Found Guilty, It Would Be a Real First

  “Damn!” Secretary of Defense Harold Brown shouted at an aide one summer morning in 1979. “There may be a book coming out any day on these programs!”

  Brown knew what he and his colleagues in Washington were about to face. The researcher John Marks, who filed the Freedom of Information Act request that led to the release of surviving MK-ULTRA documents, had received more than sixteen thousan
d pages. For nearly two years, he and four assistants combed through and cataloged them. By the time he was ready to publish his findings, he knew more about MK-ULTRA than anyone other than those who had run it.

  Marks was a bearded, thirty-four-year-old Cornell graduate who had volunteered to be a State Department officer in Vietnam in order to avoid the military draft. After eighteen months there, he returned home and went to work for the legendary Ray Cline, a veteran CIA officer who had become chief of the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research. Later, after quitting the State Department, Marks met a renegade CIA officer, Victor Marchetti. In 1974 the two of them published a book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, that revealed much about how the Agency worked. Marks maintained his interest in hidden CIA operations. After reading the Rockefeller Commission report in 1975, he wondered if all MK-ULTRA documents had really been destroyed. That hunch led him to file the search request that ultimately turned up his trove.

  The book that emerged from Marks’s research was called The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. It was the first comprehensive examination of MK-ULTRA. The intelligence historian Thomas Powers wrote in an introduction that it “expresses two dominant attitudes—fascination with the discoveries of psychological researchers, and anger with their misuse by the CIA for purposes that were narrow and morally careless.” He also mused about Gottlieb.

  Sidney Gottlieb (alias “Victor [sic] Scheider”) secured his place in history by his efforts to provide toxins for political murder, but in that effort he played only a pharmacist’s role. More sinister was his sponsorship of research to find a way to make assassination routine, by turning ordinary men into automatons who would kill on command.

  Facing up to the fact of the attempt has been agony enough; the heart quails to think of the catastrophe of success. What if Gottlieb and his researchers had succeeded in their wildest dreams, and no secret, nor the life of any “enemy,” had been safe from the CIA? The Agency’s masters have been prey to lethal daydreams about many opponents for the last forty years—Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Lumumba, Qadaffi, De Gaulle, Nasser, Chou En Lai, Khomeini. How could the United States have resisted the temptation to “remove” these inconvenient figures, if it could only have been done in confident secrecy? Owning agents body and soul, attractive in theory, would have given us much to regret, to deny, and to hide. But Providence is kind, and blessed us with failure.

  The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” clearly identifies Gottlieb as the director of MK-ULTRA. It includes dozens of references to his life and work. The appearance of this book in 1979 ensured that he would not be forgotten.

  “Only 33 years old when he took over the Chemical Division, Gottlieb had managed to overcome a pronounced stammer and a club foot to rise through Agency ranks,” Marks wrote. “Greatly respected by his former colleagues, Gottlieb, who refused to be interviewed for this book, is described as a humanist, a man of intellectual humility and strength, willing to carry out, as one ex-associate put it, ‘the tough things that had to be done.’”

  As Marks was publishing his book, a two-man “Victims Task Force” was at work inside the CIA. Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner had created it after receiving what one internal memo called a “surge of letters” from people who had heard descriptions of MK-ULTRA experiments and suspected that they or their loved ones had been victims. The task force could not satisfy them. Each received a simple answer: “Unfortunately, the files available to date do not contain the names of any test subjects.” Turner reported to Attorney General Griffin Bell that “fragmentary records and amnesic recollections” made the task of identifying MK-ULTRA victims “well-nigh impossible.”

  Although the Victims Task Force did not find lists of victims’ names, one of its members, a CIA officer named Frank Laubinger, extracted a bit of new testimony from Gottlieb. As his task force was ending its work in 1979, Laubinger sent Gottlieb a letter asking eight questions about MK-ULTRA. They were broadly framed and hardly threatening. Ten days after receiving them, Gottlieb answered by telephone. Laubinger took notes.

  “Unwitting testing was performed to explore the full range of the operational use of LSD,” he wrote. “Both interrogation and provoking erratic behavior were of interest … [Gottlieb] remembers no breakdown of tests and no accurate count of tests. As he recalls, the number was probably about 40. He recalls nothing which would identify any specific tests or test sites.”

  Publication of John Marks’s book interrupted Gottlieb as he was settling into what he hoped would be a new life. “I didn’t read that book, and I make it a practice not to read books like that,” he later testified. “I did see some galley proofs about that book that Mr. Marks sent me. I felt it was so inaccurate and outrageous that I sent it right back. He wanted me to make whatever corrections I felt were called for. I made no corrections, and I told him in a letter I sent him that rather than make corrections in the book, in order to make the book more accurate I would have to rewrite it, and I did not want to do that.”

  Around the time this unwelcome book appeared, Gottlieb made a decision that took him further away from his former life. At the age of sixty, he enrolled to study for a master’s degree in speech therapy at San José State University. Having stuttered for his entire life, he wanted to spend his later years helping children who faced the same challenge. Service would be part of a continually active life.

  “Sid is going to school in San Jose two days a week and getting all A’s,” Margaret wrote in a letter to relatives. “He is going to start sailing lessons today, and gracious knows what that will lead to. We go to various kinds of dances four or five times a week and, to top it off, we got a 5' by 9' rug which we are hooking together but he is doing most of … We go wine tasting in the Santa Clara Valley. We have been hiking with the Sierra Club once or twice, we have been down to Monterey and Carmel a couple of times, we drove up to the Napa Valley, and we have friends from our college days in San Francisco whom we visit once in a while.”

  Gottlieb maintained this gentle pace for two years. In 1980, after receiving his degree in speech therapy, he and Margaret decided to return to Virginia, where they had spent most of their married life. Their new home was a five-thousand-square-foot eco-home in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, near the end of a long, winding gravel path called Turkey Ridge Road.

  “The entire place was powered by the sun, and there were large doorways for wheelchairs,” one of Gottlieb’s CIA colleagues recalled years later. “Gottlieb was fascinated by the concept of building a place to die. He spent a lot of time with mechanical and physical puzzles. There was lots of area for arts projects. The homestead was essentially a duplex where there were two identical homes, one for the Gottlieb couple and one for a younger couple who would take more and more responsibility for the older couple as they neared their death. There was a common room where the couples would dine together. But the concept didn’t work out in practice. Even though Gottlieb gave the younger couple a deed to part of the house, they did not get along.”

  Gottlieb called his new estate Blackwater Homestead, after a stream that ran through it. He and his wife, along with a younger couple with whom they lived, raised goats and chickens. They grew vegetables, fruit, and herbs. Gottlieb built a sundial. The figurine of an Oriental warrior guarded it all. Blackwater Homestead, by one account, “became a kind of spiritual retreat and the focal point of a growing community who found in Gottlieb a charismatic soul mate.”

  Gottlieb enjoyed the pleasures and demands of life on the land. He spent early mornings meditating while kneeling on pillows and burning incense. Then he would ride his bicycle into town to buy newspapers and collect his mail. He drove a used car and wore sandals. One of his friends described him as “an old hippie.”

  “The transformation was complete,” according to a profile that the Washington Post published years later. “It was as if Gottlieb had lost his former self, walking bac
kward, sweeping his trail clean with a branch. In his first life, he had explored how to control the minds of others. In his second, he had gained sway over his own recollections, granting himself immunity and a fresh start … Most people in Rappahannock County had no idea Gottlieb had ever worked for the CIA. His virtue was unquestioned, his counsel sought after, his company prized.”

  Rather than retreat into his memories, Gottlieb embraced community life. He joined the planning board and the arts council, acted in Christmas plays, and helped organize town festivals. Margaret was just as active.

  “Since suburbia had taken over our former haunts and since our oldest and dearest friends still lived in and around that same area, we found a place within driving distance but out in the country, and I hope far enough out so that suburbia won’t catch up to us again before we die,” she wrote in a letter to relatives. “I have never been comfortable living in a city, so our quite isolated country home fills me with peace and quiet. We are in a very rich and close community with all kinds of things to do. I teach with the Literacy Volunteers people who have not finished high school, or non-readers. I go to the county jail once a week for this, and I work in the elementary school too. Sid spent three years in a local middle and high school being a speech pathologist. He also works with the hospice, and in our spare time we raise a good deal of the food we eat.”

  In 1982 Gottlieb’s older brother David died, giving him a chance to muse about paths not taken. David Gottlieb had been riveted by a childhood visit to the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers, New York, and built a lab in the family’s basement to study plant biology. His interest was decisive in attracting Sidney to the field. He attended City College, as Sidney did, and went on to join the faculty of the University of Illinois. Over the course of an illustrious career, he co-founded the university’s Department of Plant Pathology, discovered new antibiotics, lectured around the world, served on the editorial boards of professional journals, and mentored budding agricultural biologists.