Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Urged on by his sister, Glickman began writing letters to the Department of Justice and others he imagined might help. No one did. In 1981 he filed a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act, charging the CIA with invading his privacy and intentionally harming him. He named two officers as defendants: Gottlieb and Richard Helms.

  Lawyers for the CIA managed to delay this suit for years. It might have faded away when Glickman died of heart failure in 1992. His sister, however, refused to let it drop. A judge finally ordered Gottlieb to submit to questioning. On the morning of September 19, 1995, he arrived at the United States District Court in Washington for the first of what would be four full days of intense examination.

  Gottlieb once again insisted that he had forgotten most of his past. When he was asked about Bluebird, the first CIA “special interrogation” project, which was at a peak when he joined the Agency, he replied: “The word Bluebird totally confuses me, I can’t help you with that.” His response to a question about his MK-ULTRA deputy Robert Lashbrook was equally implausible.

  “Was he your deputy?” Gottlieb was asked.

  “I really don’t have a clear memory of who my deputy was,” he replied.

  On the matter at hand—his alleged drugging of Stanley Glickman at Café Select in Paris—Gottlieb was more precise. He said he had never set foot in Paris before 1958, and therefore could not have been involved in poisoning anyone there six years earlier.

  “It never happened,” he insisted. “I’ve given four days of the limited amount of time I have left on a question that is absolutely—absolutely never happened, and it’s incredible to me.”

  That denial did not dissuade Glickman’s lawyers. They continued to press their case, and finally won a decisive victory. In 1998 a federal appeals court ruled that since Richard Helms was not alleged to have been directly involved in the drugging, he could not be prosecuted—but that the case against Gottlieb could proceed.

  “Assuming that a jury would find that Gottlieb had an obligation to preserve the MK-ULTRA documents that he ordered to be destroyed, the jury would be entitled to draw an adverse inference against Gottlieb,” the court’s opinion read. “The possibility that a jury would choose to draw such an inference, along with plaintiff’s other circumstantial evidence that he was drugged by the CIA—specifically, by Gottlieb—is enough to entitle the plaintiff to a jury trial.”

  Something almost unthinkable lay ahead. For the first time in Gottlieb’s life, it appeared that he would be prosecuted. He would have to testify about MK-ULTRA in public, under oath, and as a defendant.

  “If Gottlieb is found guilty, it would be a real first,” wrote one reporter who was covering the case. “The Agency has protected its own very well—not only Gottlieb, but others who were part of MK-ULTRA. The trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 3.”

  * * *

  GOTTLIEB WON A postponement of his trial for drugging Stanley Glickman. In the first weeks of 1999, as he waited for the trial to begin, detectives in New York began a new push to reopen the Frank Olson investigation. No peace lay ahead. Around this time Gottlieb met one of his old college friends. He remembered that he had once ridiculed this friend’s admiration for Matthew Arnold’s wistful poem “Dover Beach.” He said he had not only changed his view of the poem but had committed it to memory.

  … the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Even as Sidney and Margaret aged, they remained active in the community around them. “Money is tight these days,” Margaret wrote to her family. “Sid is working two days a week in the Culpeper schools doing speech pathology and loving his contact with the kids. Right at this moment he is with a Hospice client, trying to be of help as he passes from this life … I volunteer with the adult reading program and I also go to the elementary school and the jail. It’s a variety. Other than that we are waiting winter out and we are eager to have it be time to dig up the garden.”

  The journalist Seymour Hersh, who never stopped trying to uncover secrets, visited Gottlieb during this period. “It was very strange,” he later recalled. “Gottlieb was living as if he was in an ashram in India. The place had no electricity and no running water. There was a peat moss toilet outside. He was trying to absolve himself, to expiate. If he’d been Catholic, he would have gone to a monastery. He was a destroyed man, riddled with guilt.”

  Others who knew Gottlieb in his final years came to similar conclusions. “A lot of Sid’s later life was spent atoning, whether he needed to or not, for how he had been exposed publicly as some sort of evil scientist,” said a teacher at the Child Care and Learning Center, a preschool where Gottlieb volunteered. A rabbi with whom he became friendly, Carla Theodore, who shared his adventurous spirit—she had been a union organizer in the South before becoming a rabbi—said that Gottlieb had told her that his own children refused to speak to him, and had added: “I too have done things I really regret, but I am learning to keep it to myself.”

  “I felt that he was on a path of expiation, whether consciously or unconsciously,” Rabbi Theodore remembered. “There were enough cries of horror from near and far. It was an extremely big fact of his past. Somehow he was living around it. It was there like a pink elephant. I once asked him if I could talk to him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, not many people asked.’ But the thing was, his answers were so defended that I gave up after a few minutes. It was a barrier. I wasn’t going to get the truth. He was a delightful person to interact with, but at the same time I feel he grieved and suffered, and that that was always there. Maybe, in retrospect, he was as puzzled by what he had done as we were who heard about it.”

  Gottlieb died on March 7, 1999, at his home in Virginia. He was eighty years old. Margaret did not announce the cause of death.

  Obituaries published over the next few days recounted all that was known about Gottlieb’s work with MK-ULTRA. In one of them, the CIA psychologist John Gittinger called Gottlieb “one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known” and said he was “willing to try anything to discover something.”

  “We were in a World War II mode,” Gittinger said. “During that time of the Cold War, the attitude we had and the Agency had was, we were still fighting a war. And when you are fighting a war, you do things you might not ordinarily do.”

  The CIA officer who had been Gottlieb’s boss during his two years in Munich, William Hood, was equally forgiving. “I do think he was entirely out of line with some of the stuff they were doing,” Hood said. But he added: “It’s the kind of thing I don’t think anyone could understand unless they had been involved in it. Intelligence services should not be confused with the Boy Scouts.”

  John Marks, whose book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” brought MK-ULTRA to broad public attention for the first time, struck a similar note.

  “He was unquestionably a patriot, a man of great ingenuity,” Marks told one obituary writer. “Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons. He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. And in the context of the time, who could argue? But with his experiments on unwitting subjects, he clearly violated the Nuremberg standards—the standards under which, after World War II, we executed Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity.”

  Every one of Gottlieb’s obituaries grappled with the apparent contradiction between his evidently compassionate nature and the harsh work he did for the CIA. Most tried to find a unifying thread to his life. “Given his altruistic hobbies,” one concluded, “some may not know quite what to make of the bizarre biochemist who waged America’s Cold War battles in the cerebellums of the unsuspecting. But it was his patriotic faith in the rewards of experimenta
tion and progress that somehow reconciles the communalistic homesteader with the psychedelic Mengele he was in earlier days.”

  Soon after Gottlieb died, Eric Olson visited Sidney Bender, the New York lawyer who had pursued the Glickman case. They drank a toast to the death of a man they considered a monster. Both had arrived at the same conclusion: Gottlieb died by suicide.

  “Besides the case I was pursing, the New York District Attorney’s office was investigating Gottlieb for the possible murder of Frank Olson,” Bender reasoned. “That was a very serious concern of his. If he was found guilty, what would that mean to the whole CIA? He was the instrument through which it could all be poisoned. Any jury trial would expose the CIA and what he had done, which was criminal in nature. Gottlieb was a guy who always had to be in control, and at the end he decided that he wanted to control his own fate. His death was a way of protecting the CIA, so it wouldn’t be tainted by a civil or criminal case. He had been successful in fooling Congress, but the whole thing could have been opened up if there was either a trial in my case—which was about to start—or a murder indictment in the Olson matter. Under no circumstances would he take full responsibility for what he had done. The alternative was to fall on his sword.”

  The Washington lawyer who defended Gottlieb during his last years of legal entanglements, Tom Wilson, would not go that far. He did, however, say that the prospect of being tried for drugging Stanley Glickman had “greatly dispirited” his client. “He was concerned that he might never find any sense of peace of mind in this life,” Wilson told an interviewer, “and just didn’t have enough fight left.” Another of Gottlieb’s friends recalled that he “gradually became depressed, and it’s hard to say how much was due to his heart ailment and how much was due to the endless lawsuits. He was not the same man the last few years of his life.”

  Gottlieb’s body was cremated. Margaret asked the funeral home not to disclose what became of the ashes. On a cloudy Saturday afternoon several weeks later, about a hundred people gathered in the gymnasium of Rappahannock High School to remember him. “Gottlieb’s two worlds came together,” one reporter wrote afterward. “Most who spoke were neighbors and friends from his second life, but there were also white-haired men from Langley who did not speak publicly but mingled afterward.”

  Friends from Gottlieb’s “second life” shared their memories. One praised poems that Gottlieb had composed in his later years. Another recalled the wisdom he brought to their Zen Buddhist study group. A young man in a parka asked the grieving widow if he could say a few words. She did not recognize him, but she nodded in assent. He stepped to the microphone.

  “Anyone who knew Sid knew he was haunted by something,” he said. Then he asked mourners to join him in reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the hope that it would “get rid of this something, so Margaret and the family can live in peace.”

  With Gottlieb gone, the already sluggish pace of investigations into MK-ULTRA slowed even further. The few other CIA veterans who knew its secrets remained silent until death. A final chapter in the long cover-up could now unfold. It might be entitled, “Everything Was Sidney’s Fault.”

  Gottlieb had long understood that his former colleagues wanted to absolve themselves and the CIA of responsibility for the excesses of MK-ULTRA. All swore to investigators that they knew little or nothing about MK-ULTRA. None hid more than Helms, who had the most to tell but said the least. He feigned ignorance of all but the broadest outlines of MK-ULTRA.

  “Helms was a liar, but a charming and skillful liar,” recalled the Church Committee’s chief counsel, Frederick Schwarz. “He lied about everything that was important.”

  Portraying Gottlieb as having been unsupervised and out of control was a sensible strategy. It obscured the fact that senior CIA officers like Dulles and Helms approved and encouraged his work. Just as important, it deflected attention away from the institutional responsibility of the CIA, the White House, and Congress.

  “Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years,” one obituary reported, “say the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program.”

  16

  You Never Can Know What He Was

  A seven-thousand-pound bull elephant named Tusko was the most substantial victim of a Gottlieb-inspired LSD experiment. The assailant was “Jolly” West, the portly, bearded psychiatrist who, under MK-ULTRA Subproject 43, had conducted experiments on “suggestibility” and ways to induce “dissociative states.” On an August morning in 1962, after making arrangements with the director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, West shot a dart containing 300,000 micrograms of LSD into Tusko’s flank. Five minutes later, according to West’s report, the elephant “trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated and went into status epilepticus.” West administered a cocktail of other drugs, but to no avail. Tusko died an hour and forty minutes after being drugged.

  Although LSD did not turn out to be good for elephants, West continued to believe that it could be used to reshape the human psyche. He was among several of Gottlieb’s scientific collaborators who continued the work he had set in motion even after MK-ULTRA was shut down. They could not accept his conclusion that mind control does not exist.

  For several years West ran a clinic in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, where he gave LSD to volunteers and monitored their reactions. In 1969 he became chairman of the Psychiatry Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the university’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. While holding those posts, he set off an intense controversy by proposing to create a “securely fenced” facility at an abandoned missile site in the Santa Monica Mountains that would become “the world’s first and only center for the study of interpersonal violence.” Governor Ronald Reagan supported it, but it was blocked after what West called “an outcry against it based on arguments that to study violence was essentially to experiment on underprivileged people, doing brain operations, putting electrodes in their heads, or making guinea pigs out of them.” Nonetheless West went on to a successful career studying techniques of behavior modification. Between 1974 and his retirement in 1989, he received more than $5 million in grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, which the CIA has sometimes used as a conduit.

  Another of Gottlieb’s favorite researchers, Carl Pfeiffer, who ran no fewer than four MK-ULTRA “subprojects,” also maintained a lifelong interest in psychoactive drugs. During the 1960s Pfeiffer served on a Food and Drug Administration committee that allocated LSD to researchers. He became prominent for his research into schizophrenia. In 1971 he destroyed records of the LSD experiments he had conducted on prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. If he thought that would wash away all evidence, he was mistaken.

  Buried in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report, but headlined in the Atlanta Constitution, was the revelation that Pfeiffer’s prison experiments with LSD during the 1950s were not aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia, as he had told his prisoner subjects, but were part of a covert CIA program. This news reached one of Pfeiffer’s victims, the Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. When John Marks’s book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” appeared in 1979, Bulger read it and, according to one biographer, “was enraged to learn how the covert program had destroyed many lives.” Once he realized that Pfeiffer had tormented him in the interests of the CIA, not science, he decided to take revenge. He told a member of his gang that he planned to find Pfeiffer and kill him.

  “I sleep with the lights on 24 hours a day because I have psychological problems (horrible nightmares) due to my being on a medical project called MK-ULTRA,” Bulger wrote. “Until 1979 I thought I was insane.”

  Pfeiffer never learned that Bulger had spoken about killing him, and he died a natural death. Bulger disappeared after being tipped off that the FBI was about to arrest him for his other crimes, and he was captured in 2011. Two years later he was sentenced to consecutive life terms
for crimes including eleven murders. At the trial, no one mentioned LSD, MK-ULTRA, or the CIA. One Boston lawyer with experience representing gangsters, Anthony Cardinale, later asserted that if he had defended Bulger, he would have concentrated on that theme and “would have got him off.”

  “It’s a simple defense,” Cardinale told an interviewer. “Nearly two years of LSD testing fried his brain. You bring in expert witnesses, psychiatrists, and others who detail the history of how people who took part in this secret CIA program committed suicide or became institutionalized. I’d have had Bulger sit there doodling and drooling. He’s a victim, driven insane by his own government … He delusionally believes there’s no difference between right and wrong, that he can kill … I’m telling you, I could have had a jury feeling sorry for Whitey Bulger. ‘He’s a victim, ladies and gentlemen, and they—the government—are the reason he did all this. He truly believed he could get away with it. He did not know the difference between right and wrong. They put all this in his head. They damaged and manipulated him to the point they turned him into a psychotic killer.’”

  The only American doctor who conducted MK-ULTRA prison experiments as relentlessly intense as Pfeiffer’s, Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, went on to an equally stellar career. In 1962 Attorney General Robert Kennedy presented him with the U.S. Public Health Service Meritorious Service Award and praised him as “an outstanding investigator.” Soon afterward he left the addiction center to become a professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Kentucky.