In the decades after Sidney Gottlieb’s death, cultural references to MK-ULTRA became steadily more explicit. A character played by Jesse Eisenberg in the film American Ultra discovers that his memory was wiped away after he became an unwitting subject in the CIA’s “Project Ultra.” MK-ULTRA was mentioned by name in episodes of several television drama series, including Fringe, The X Files, and Stranger Things. In the film Conspiracy Theory, a character played by Mel Gibson tells another, played by Julia Roberts, about his past.
“Years ago I worked for the CIA, on the MK-ULTRA program. Are you familiar with it?”
“It was mind control. Manchurian Candidate kind of stuff.”
“That’s a vulgar generalization. But yes, you take an ordinary man and turn him into an assassin. That was our goal.”
In the 1990s a rock band called MK-ULTRA emerged in Chicago, but it encountered legal troubles and changed its name. The British band Muse had better luck. Its Grammy-winning album The Resistance contains a song called “MK-ULTRA” that asks: “How much deception can you take? How many lies will you create? How much longer until you break?”
In 2003 the Cannabis Cup, given in Amsterdam for the world’s best marijuana, went to a hybrid called MK-ULTRA. “The indica cannabis strain named MK-ULTRA derives its name from the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA, which aimed to influence mental manipulation through strategic methods,” one reviewer wrote. “MK-ULTRA produces extreme cerebral effects, which is how it relates to the CIA’s project.”
A remarkable Canadian artist, Sarah Anne Johnson, is the granddaughter of Velma Orlikow, the Winnipeg woman whose lawsuit against Dr. Ewen Cameron made her one of the best-known MK-ULTRA victims. Johnson has devoted herself to telling her grandmother’s story. One of her sculptures depicts her grandmother hooded and gloved, as patients were in Cameron’s “psychic driving” experiments. Another tribute is a web of dreamy images drawn onto the page of a newspaper that recounts her grandmother’s ordeal. The headline says INSIDE MONTREAL’S HOUSE OF HORRORS: CIA-FUNDED PSYCHIATRIST TURNED PATIENTS INTO BRAINWASH VICTIMS.
That work hung alongside wildly imaginative images of Lee Harvey Oswald, J. Edgar Hoover, and Martin Luther King Jr. in a 2018 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy.” MK-ULTRA has entered and come to permeate popular culture. It not only exists in history but richly nurtures the creative imagination. This is Sidney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy.
* * *
THE CLOSING OF Villa Schuster, Camp King, and other sites where CIA officers interrogated and experimented on prisoners did not pull the United States out of the torture business. Quite to the contrary, Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK-ULTRA produced rich progeny. Gottlieb’s work contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.
In the early 1960s, as the Vietnam War intensified and leftist insurrections erupted in Latin America, the CIA set out to produce a manual for interrogators. It emerged in 1963, entitled KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation—KUBARK being the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. This 128-page manual, not fully declassified until 2014, codified everything that the CIA had learned about what it calls “coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources.” It includes references to academic papers and “scientific inquiries conducted by specialists,” including those directed by Ewen Cameron, the enthusiastic MK-ULTRA contactor at the Allan Memorial Institution in Montreal. During the 1960s it was the essential text for CIA interrogators and their partners in “allied services” around the world. It shaped the Phoenix program in Vietnam, under which suspected Communists were interrogated and at least twenty thousand killed. Most of the techniques it describes, and most of its insights into how prisoners react to various forms of abuse, come from MK-ULTRA.
A man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations either others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links.
Control of the source’s environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern and other fundamentals. Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disoriented, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.
The chief effect of arrest and detention, and particularly of solitary confinement, is to deprive the subject of many or most of the sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed.
Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as a water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.
Drugs can be effective in overcoming resistance not dissolved by other techniques.
The principal coercive techniques are arrest, detention, the deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, and drugs.
The usual effect of coercion is regression. The interrogatee’s mature defenses crumble as he becomes more childlike.
The electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers and other modifying devices will be on hand if needed.
The profound moral objection to applying duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage has been stated. Judging the validity of other ethical arguments about coercion exceeds the scope of this paper.
In 1983, twenty years after the KUBARK manual was written, the CIA produced a new version called Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual. It was intended specifically for use by military-dominated governments in Latin America. Among the first police forces to receive it were those in Honduras and El Salvador, both then known for extreme brutality. Green Beret trainers later brought it to other countries where torture was commonly practiced. It became the basis for seven texts tailored to individual countries, all based on the principle that interrogators should “manipulate the subject’s environment” in order to create “intolerable situations to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception … The more complete the deprivation, the more rapidly and deeply the subject is affected.” Techniques described in the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual are strikingly similar to those in the KUBARK manual.
“While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques,” the manual says, “we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.”
One CIA officer who trained Latin American interrogators in techniques described in these manuals—his name has not been declassified—went on to become chief of interrogations for the CIA Rendition Group, which was formed after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 and charged with kidnapping suspected terrorists and sending them to secret prisons for interrogation. His presence personified the continuity between interrogation techniques that the CIA used in Latin America during the 1980s and those that became notorious in the twenty-first century. Among them were shackling, sleep deprivation, electroshock, cramped confinement, and hooding for sensory deprivation. Psychologists who helped design these techniques emphasized the need to reduce a prisoner to a state of dependence on the interrogator—precisely what the overseers of MK-ULTRA and the authors of the KUBARK manual recommended.
When American leaders decided after the 9/11 attacks that “the gloves come off,” as CIA counterintelligence chief Cofer Black put it, they were able to draw on a full store of experience. Designing a set of techniques for “extreme interrogation” of Muslim prisoners required nothing more than pulling old manuals out of the drawer, tweaking their recommendations, and passing them on to interrogators. The handoffs are clear: from Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii to the directors of the Bluebird project, later renamed Artichoke; from Artichoke to Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA; from MK-ULTRA to
KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation; from there to the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual; and from those manuals to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and CIA “black sites” around the world. Gottlieb is an indispensable link in this grim chain.
* * *
HISTORY AND MORALITY loom like threatening clouds over any attempt to assess Sidney Gottlieb’s life and work. He can be fairly praised as a patriot, and just as fairly abhorred as demonic. Judging him requires a deep dive into the human mind and the human soul.
Gottlieb was, as is everyone, a product of his world. His parents and the parents of most of his schoolmates were Jews who fled oppression in Europe. America saved them from the Holocaust. To them it was a country where, as one son of Jewish immigrants wrote, “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Gottlieb could not help being caught up in the patriotic fervor that followed the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, or being crushed when he was deemed unfit to join the army. The CIA gave him a chance to serve. Many of America’s “very best men” jumped at that chance, so Gottlieb cannot be judged harshly for doing the same. On the contrary, he may be admired for choosing to join a secret elite dedicated to defending the United States against what seemed a fanatic and pitiless enemy.
Nor can Gottlieb rightly be censured for his seven years as chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. If nations need spies, someone must make the tools that spies use. Gottlieb had the array of talents to excel at that strange job.
Another aspect of Gottlieb’s work, the preparation of poisons to kill foreign leaders, led to his brief burst of notoriety in the 1970s. This was the dirtiest of jobs. Presidents may be harshly condemned for their decisions to seek the assassination of foreign leaders. All CIA officers who participated in those plots, including Gottlieb, moved in dubious moral territory. They share responsibility with Eisenhower and Kennedy.
The weightiest case against Gottlieb is his work running MK-ULTRA. Under someone else’s leadership, it might have been far less extreme. Gottlieb not only refused to limit its work but pushed his contractors to reach and exceed every limit they could imagine. His gruesome “subprojects” and his work directing “special interrogation” at secret prisons around the world resulted in immense human suffering. He was a talented scientist and a faithful civil servant, but also his generation’s most prolific torturer.
One especially arresting aspect of Gottlieb’s ethical calculation was his willingness to work with Nazi scientists who he knew were connected to the torture and murder of Jews in concentration camps. Many of the Americans who worked with those scientists had only general or theoretical reasons to detest Nazism, and easily put their doubts aside as soon as World War II ended and Communism emerged as the new enemy. Gottlieb, though, was not simply Jewish but just one generation removed from the shtetl. If his parents had not left Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he might well have been forced into a ghetto as a young man and then arrested, sent to a concentration camp, and killed during a lethal experiment. Nonetheless he worked with the scientists who conducted those experiments.
Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might as well have been. MK-ULTRA gave him life-or-death power over other people’s minds and bodies. He was a master manipulator, enthralled by the role he played and what it allowed him to do. Carried away by forces from within himself as well as by those that swirled around him, he justified every sort of brutality. He developed an extraordinary level of psychic tolerance for the violent abuse of other human beings. Death squad leaders in Latin America sometimes tucked their children tenderly into bed before leaving for nighttime missions of torture and murder. In much the same way, Gottlieb’s cheerfulness and community spirit were a façade that covered his day-to-day work overseeing experiments in which human lives were destroyed.
Cold War historians now agree that America’s fear of Soviet attack was greatly exaggerated. At the time, though, it seemed vividly real. Some intelligence officers have argued that the perceived imminence of that threat justified the CIA’s excesses. “What you were made to feel was that the country was in desperate peril and we had to do whatever it took to save it,” one said. Another recalled being “totally absorbed in something that has become misunderstood now, but the Cold War in those days was a very real thing with hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops, tanks, and planes poised on the East German border, capable of moving to the English Channel in forty-eight hours.”
Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts. Patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes. It posits the nation as a value so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous. This brings into sharp relief what the essayist Jan Kott called the “discrepancy between the moral order and the order of practical behavior.”
“He hears the voice of conscience,” Kott wrote about a murderer, “but at the same time realizes that conscience cannot be reconciled with the laws and order of the world he lives in—that it is something superfluous, ridiculous and a nuisance.”
Gottlieb faced a question that cuts to the human heart: Are there limits to the amount of evil that can be done in a righteous cause before the evil outweighs the righteousness? Even if he believed that such limits might exist in theory, or in other cases, he never observed them in his own work. He persuaded himself that he was defending nothing less than the survival of the United States and human freedom on earth. That allowed him to justify grave assaults on human life and dignity. He assumed the role of God, freely destroying the lives of innocents for what he believed were good reasons. That sin was deep. Gottlieb lived with it uncomfortably in his later years.
The great mechanism in which Gottlieb was a cog gave birth to MK-ULTRA and nurtured it through waves of suffering. Something like it would have existed even if Gottlieb, Helms, Dulles, and Eisenhower had never been born. Behind it lies a quintessential moral trap. Most people are able to distinguish right from wrong. Some do things they know are wrong for what they consider good reasons. No one else of Gottlieb’s generation, however, had the government-given power to do so many things that were so profoundly and horrifically wrong. No other American—at least, none that we know of—ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely invisible.
Gottlieb saw himself as a spiritual person. By most definitions, though, true spirituality means that a measure of compassion and mindfulness informs every aspect of a person’s life. That was not the case with Gottlieb. Neither his scientific curiosity, his sense of patriotism, or his acts of private charity justify his years of heinous assaults on the lives of others.
The last quarter century of Gottlieb’s life was exemplary. He became what he liked to believe was the true Sidney Gottlieb: a caring, selfless community leader always ready to help the needy or afflicted. But although he refused to speak about MK-ULTRA, he could not pretend it had not existed. Memory would have plagued him even if he had not faced investigations and lawsuits. Anyone who believes in divine judgment or karmic payback would be disturbed to look back on a career like his.
Gottlieb searched relentlessly for inner peace while just as relentlessly laying waste to other people’s minds and bodies. He was a jumble of contradictory archetypes: a creator and destroyer, an outlaw who served power, a gentle-hearted torturer. Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.
Notes
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed. Please also note the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.
1. I Needed More of a Challenge
“I was in contact with Dr. Death himself”: Terry Lenzner, The Investigator: Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth (New York: Penguin Random House / Blue Rider Press, 2013), p. 190.
SIDNEY GOTTLIEB, 80, DIES: Tim We
iner, “Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.,” New York Times, April 10, 1999.
“James Bond had Q”: Elaine Woo, “CIA’s Gottlieb Ran LSD Mind Control Testing,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1999.
PUSHER, ASSASSIN & PIMP: Ken Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008), p. 397; Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “Pusher, Assassin & Pimp: US Official Poisoner Dies,” Counterpunch, June 15, 1999.
“takes his place among the Jekyll and Hydes”: Elsa Davidson, “Polarity of Sidney Gottlieb,” Feed, March 18, 1999.
“everything you have dreamed of in a mad scientist”: Rupert Cornwell, “Obituary: Sidney Gottlieb,” Guardian, March 10, 1999.
“living vindication for conspiracy theorists”: Independent, April 4, 1999.
“When Churchill spoke of a world”: “Sidney Gottlieb,” Times, March 12, 1999.
“known to some as the ‘dark sorcerer’”: Gordon Corera, The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6 (New York: Pegasus, 2012), p. 123.
The author gives him grudging credit: Mark Frauenfelder, The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept and Dangerous People, Places, and Things on Earth (Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005), p. 86.
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