Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  After the MK-ULTRA program was discovered, the nature of Isbell’s experiments on prisoners became clear. In 1975 he was called to testify at a hearing conducted by subcommittees of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, which were investigating “human-use experimentation programs of the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency.” Senators were curious but not outraged. When one asked Isbell if he had given heroin to his heroin-addicted subjects as payment for their participation in experiments, he replied, “It was the custom in those days.”

  “It was a different time,” Isbell said. “The ethical codes were not so highly developed, and there was a great need to know in order to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics … So it was very necessary, and I personally think we did a very excellent job.”

  Sidney Gottlieb’s favorite MK-ULTRA physician, the New York allergist Harold Abramson, also escaped censure for his work. Abramson was one of the few Americans who shared Gottlieb’s fascination with LSD during the 1950s, and the only one—outside the CIA and the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick—who knew the true story of MK-ULTRA. His fascination, unlike Gottlieb’s, never waned. During the 1960s and ’70s he organized several international conferences on LSD. In 1967 he published a book called The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism. He also worked in the fields for which he was trained—he had never studied psychiatry or pharmacology—and co-founded the Journal of Asthma. Shortly before his death in 1980, he was tainted by the revelation that he had treated Frank Olson during his final days. Nonetheless he died with his reputation intact.

  “Anyone closely associated with Harold and his life’s work,” said an obituary in the Journal of Asthma, “can recognize that the passing of this pioneer clinical scientist, humanist, medical educator, profound psychoanalyst and man of letters marks the final stage of an era of intellectual ferment and multidisciplinary probing into the mysteries of human existence, aspirations, and suffering.”

  The physician who conducted what were arguably the most horrific of all MK-ULTRA experiments, Ewen Cameron, died in 1967. According to the Toronto Star, “he was found dead under mysterious circumstances after falling off a cliff.” Cameron remained a celebrated figure until the end—but that was before any outsider had heard of MK-ULTRA. Once its existence and nature were revealed, victims of his “psychic driving” experiments began coming forward. Two appeared in a searing Canadian television documentary broadcast in 1980. Others spoke out. Their accounts led to a stream of newspaper articles with headlines like HOW THE CIA’S MIND-CONTROL EXPERIMENTS DESTROYED MY HEALTHY, HIGH-FUNCTIONING FATHER’S BRILLIANT MIND and “SHE WENT THERE HOPING TO GET BETTER”—FAMILY REMEMBERS WINNIPEG WOMAN PUT THROUGH CIA-FUNDED BRAINWASHING. Faced with public outrage and a series of lawsuits, the Canadian government announced an “Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan” that ultimately provided $100,000 compensation payments to seventy-seven of Cameron’s former patients. In 2004 a Canadian judge ruled that an additional 250 victims were eligible.

  “To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation,” the McGill Daily concluded in a long report published in 2012. “A respected educational and research institution had hosted some truly macabre events and shaped the course of torture methods for many years to come.”

  Gottlieb’s two most important CIA comrades died within weeks of each other in the autumn of 2002. His right-hand man at MK-ULTRA, Robert Lashbrook, was eighty-four when he succumbed to lung disease at Ojai Valley Community Hospital in California. A brief note in the local newspaper said only that he served in the military during World War II and “had been a chemistry professor.” There was no memorial service.

  Far more attention was paid when Richard Helms, who spent a quarter century at the CIA and rose to become its director, died at his home in Washington. He was eighty-nine. The New York Times obituary said he had “defiantly guarded some of the darkest secrets of the Cold War.” It quoted his justification for lying to a congressional committee about his role in overthrowing the government of Chile in 1973: “I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets.”

  Like other CIA officers touched by scandal during the 1970s, Helms had to choose which of two promises to keep. Before testifying to Congress he swore to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Yet like all CIA officers, he had signed a secrecy agreement promising “that I will never divulge, publish or reveal either by word, conduct, or by any other means, any classified intelligence or knowledge.” He made the same choice Gottlieb and Lashbrook made: keep secrets and lie under oath. They saw it as the patriotic alternative. It also happened to be the one most likely to protect them from opprobrium and prosecution.

  Helms was infuriated by the decision of his successor, William Colby, to speak frankly about MK-ULTRA and other covert CIA projects. “I must say Colby has done a startlingly good job of making a total mess,” he told an interviewer after retiring. “He must look to sophisticated Washington as the biggest jerk on the block. It is all terribly sad, and he had brought it all on himself by his mumblings, and other matters about which he should have kept his mouth shut.” The best Helms could say about his old colleague was, “I don’t believe Colby was a KGB agent.” Anger at Colby was so intense that after he died while canoeing in 1996, several people including the author of his biography came to believe that CIA officers had killed him as punishment for his candor or to prevent him from saying more.

  Helms completed a 496-page memoir shortly before his death, but it does not mention MK-ULTRA. When an interviewer asked him about this omission, he replied: “I see no way to handle it in the amount of space I have available.” Later he mused on his old friend’s fate.

  “Ah, poor Sid Gottlieb,” Helms said. “He has been heavily persecuted, but to bail him out of the troubles he’s in would take more than just a few minutes, and I’m not sure I’d be much of a contributor to it. The nation just saw something they didn’t like and blasted it, and he took the blame for it.”

  Revelations about MK-ULTRA helped fuel public anger at the CIA. “In retrospect, it is clear that Gottlieb’s work lit a fuse to a time bomb that was to explode in the 1970s, destroying a good deal of the Agency’s image as a proper defender of American values in the public mind,” the intelligence historian John Ranelagh concluded. “Projects designed to develop methods and devices that could kill or control people at long distances and that, during nearly two decades, involved hundreds of people, some outside the Agency on contract, sooner or later were bound to leak.”

  The explosion of this “time bomb” in the mid-1970s led to the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, charged with conducting “vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States,” and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, with a similar mandate. Then, in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which regulates wiretapping and other forms of surveillance. The era’s last major reform was the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, requiring the CIA and other intelligence agencies to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about their activities. These steps provided the legal basis for monitoring clandestine activities. Congress, however, proved reluctant to delve deeply. Many members continued to believe that closely watching the CIA or firmly restricting its activities would threaten national security. That view became even more appealing after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Congressional oversight of intelligence agencies has not led to deep changes in the way those agencies operate.

  “My sense is that the new oversight procedures adopted in 1975, and strengthened over the next 20 years, have improved the balance between liberty and security in the United States,” wrote Loch Johnson, who worked for the Church Committee. “I would hasten to add in a second breath that the quality and consis
tency of intelligence accountability falls far short of the aspirations advanced by reformers at the time of the Church Committee inquiry.”

  Gottlieb and the few other CIA officers who knew the full MK-ULTRA story guarded their secrets until death. Their passing, coupled with the destruction of MK-ULTRA records, ensured that much of what he did will remain unknown. So did his wife’s discretion.

  Years after Gottlieb retired from the CIA, a lawyer taking his testimony in one of the civil suits he faced asked whether he ever discussed MK-ULTRA with anyone outside the Agency. “I talked to my wife quite a bit about it,” he replied. Margaret never revealed what he told her. A reporter called her two years after her husband died, but she refused to meet him.

  “You never get it right,” she said. “You never can know what he was. I would just as soon it was never talked about again.”

  On November 2, 2011, after more than twelve years as a widow, Margaret Gottlieb died in Virginia at the age of ninety-two. “She was an enthusiastic folk dancer and taught dancing to community groups for many years with Sidney Gottlieb,” the Rappahannock News reported. “Margaret Gottlieb is lovingly remembered for the great sense of adventure she shared with her husband.”

  The Gottliebs’ four children went on to lead creative and apparently fulfilling lives. Rachel lived in Zambia with her husband, a scholar, and then ran a pre-school in California. Penny became an elementary school teacher. Peter wrote a book about African American history—dedicated “To my parents, Sidney and Margaret Gottlieb”—and served as the state archivist of Wisconsin. Stephen, the youngest, was a guitarist and music teacher.

  In 2013, Peter and Penny, along with one of Penny’s children, joined a group of volunteers who spent a week building homes for poor families in El Salvador. Their trip reflected the humanism that evidently animated all four siblings. About their father, however, they would not speak. After he died, their mother asked them to promise that they would never discuss him in public. They kept their word.

  “The family decided some time ago that they would not talk about this with anyone in your position,” one relative told a writer in 2018. “If it were up to me, I’d be willing to talk to you, but that would be breaking an agreement that they made with their mother years ago, so I prefer not to.”

  Sidney Gottlieb’s wife lived longer than any of his other close contemporaries. Once all were gone—and once it became clear that his children would not add to the record of his life—he entered the realm of history. So did the places where he had worked.

  The original CIA headquarters at 2430 E Street in Washington, which became Sidney Gottlieb’s domain after the CIA moved to Langley, was threatened with demolition in 2014. Intelligence officers who had worked there mobilized to save it. They were successful. The stately complex now houses agencies of the State Department.

  Fort Detrick, the Maryland base where Frank Olson and his comrades in the Special Operations Division once produced their toxins, remains the army’s principal center for biological research. Rows of greenhouses stand near sealed chambers where scientists cultivate and study deadly bacteria. Exotic medicines are kept in storage depots for emergency deployment to disaster zones. The giant spherical “Eight Ball,” once used for testing aerosolized gases on human and animal subjects, sits unused, rusting and forgotten.

  The apartment buildings where Gottlieb maintained his New York “safe house” and his San Francisco “pad” have been torn down. So has the Manhattan brownstone where Harold Abramson conducted early LSD experiments—and where he counseled Frank Olson during his final days. The Statler Hotel from which Olson plunged to his death remains standing, towering over Penn Station and renamed the Hotel Pennsylvania, as it was christened in 1919.

  Blackwater Homestead, the Virginia retreat where Gottlieb lived for most of his later life, still sits perched atop a remote hill, looking strikingly modern against the surrounding wilderness. “It was about as solar as you could get back then,” the man who bought it from Gottlieb in the late 1990s told a visitor twenty years later. He said he remembered Gottlieb well, had been friendly with his widow, and considered them “two of the finest people you’d ever want to meet.”

  The installations in Germany where Artichoke and MK-ULTRA interrogators conducted intense experiments either no longer exist or serve entirely different purposes. Camp King, where the “rough boys” abused prisoners alongside Gottlieb’s men and their ex-Nazi advisers, closed in 1993. Villa Schuster remains standing and looks much as it did when suspected spies and other unfortunates were tormented there. It was briefly in the news after two German researchers published a heavily documented study in 2002 entitled Code Name Artichoke: Secret Human Experimentation by the CIA. One newspaper called it “a villa with dark secrets where the CIA once conducted experiments on human beings … a vivid monument to the madness of that era.” The country’s largest news magazine, Der Spiegel, investigated CIA operations in Germany and concluded that “the worst things happened at Villa Schuster, a turn-of-the-century villa in Kronberg … There were deaths, but the number is not known.”

  After the CIA shut its secret prison at Villa Schuster in the mid-1950s, the villa passed into the hands of the West German government. It became a retreat for government employees. In 2016 it was sold to a young German businessman. He renovated it, divided it into rental apartments, and built a gate across the driveway. Basement chambers where victims were drugged and electroshocked are now storage rooms.

  “In this house, the CIA did experiments like the ones the Nazis did in concentration camps,” the new owner said as he showed the house to a visitor. “It’s no secret. People in the neighborhood all know the story. They say that bodies of the victims were buried in fields or forests around here—places where shopping centers and apartment houses have been built since then. A little while after I bought the place, I was doing some yard work and an elderly lady who lives up the road came to see me. She offered to do some kind of cleansing ritual where we would burn herbs or something to chase away evil spirits in the house. I told her I don’t believe in any of that nonsense.”

  * * *

  ONE OF THE most famous fictional assassins of the twenty-first century, Jason Bourne, speaks many languages and knows even more ways to kill. He has no idea, however, how or why he acquired these skills. Slowly and painfully he recalls that he had once worked for Operation Treadstone, a secret CIA project that developed a technique for wiping away memory.

  Around the same time this assassin emerged, another fictional operative was assigned to find Americans who had witnessed alien landings and make them forget what they saw. He cleansed their minds by flashing a burst of light from a pocket-sized gadget into their eyes. Then he implanted false memories to replace the ones he blasted away. His sidekick, the newest recruit for Men in Black, was impressed.

  “When do I get my own flashy memory-messer-upper thing?” he asked.

  When Sidney Gottlieb brought MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them. Later he repeated his conclusion in congressional testimony. That did nothing, however, to stifle the imagination of screenwriters and other purveyors of popular culture. On the contrary, revelations about MK-ULTRA grabbed their attention. Once it became clear that the CIA had spent years searching for mind control techniques, and that it had conducted bizarre experiments as part of its search, creative imaginations began to churn. Plots that would once have seemed over-imaginative became plausible. Mind control experiments, attempts to “brainwash” human subjects, government efforts to create programmed killers, and other plots that emerged from MK-ULTRA appear in the works of writers as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, and Ishmael Reed.

  MK-ULTRA was nourished by fantasies taken from fiction. Decades later the process was reversed. Revelations about MK-ULTRA inspired a new sub-genre of novels, stories, fil
ms, television shows, and video games. They reflect the same fascination with mind control that has gripped imaginations for centuries, but with a twist. Modern incarnations of Svengali and Dr. Caligari were even more terrifying than the originals because they worked for the government.

  In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, one character produces tablets that were “used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.” When he is asked if the experiments were aimed at finding techniques of mind control, he replies, “More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy’s a blood relative, that sort of thing.” Another contemporary novelist, Kathy Acker, portrays the experiments differently in Empire of the Senseless: “Subjects whom the CIA questioned, unfortunately for the CIA, remembered the questions, that they had blabbed, and whom they should tell that they had blabbed. The CIA had to destroy this human memory. Murder, in many cases, was an impractical solution because it tended to be public. The same with lobotomy … MK-ULTRA was designed to find ways to cause total human amnesia.”

  Films brought the idea of mind control even more vividly into America’s consciousness. The Bourne Identity, which starred Matt Damon as the disoriented Operation Treadstone operative, was released in 2002 and quickly followed by two sequels. Men in Black, featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, was equally popular, partly because of its ingenious introduction of the “memory-messer-upper thing,” which could be set to wipe away memories of recent minutes, days, or years, and then implant new ones. Devices like this began turning up regularly on-screen. In an episode of The Simpsons, Vice President Dick Cheney blasted away the memory of a subordinate who was leaving his job. Characters in the animated sitcom Family Guy and the role-playing video game Marvel Heroes worked the same trick.

  A relatively benign use of the “memory-messer-upper” technique is at the heart of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which lovers played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet wipe away memories of their romance. In the trippy 2010 blockbuster Inception, a corporate thief played by Leonardo DiCaprio tries to steal secrets by infiltrating his victims’ subconscious minds. The video game Remember Me allows players to direct the “remixing” of characters’ minds. A corporate consultant played by Ben Affleck in Paycheck commits industrial espionage and subjects himself to a “memory wipe” so he forgets his crimes. Revelations about MK-ULTRA fed the imaginations that produced these works.