Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
(Holt, $30) “How intelligent is national intelligence?” asked Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Stephen Kinzer’s new book offers a troubling answer, because it revisits MK-Ultra, a failed Cold War effort to develop mindcontrol techniques that was born of a mistaken belief that Communist regimes had already done the same. With the program’s eccentric chief scientist playing antihero, the book is “a Tarantino movie yet to be made: It has the right combination of sick humor, weird tabloid characters, and sheer American waste.” Yet “it is also frightening to read,” because the experiments Sidney Gottlieb and his team carried out were not just bizarre but also cruel.
Gottlieb, in previous books on MK-Ultra, has been treated as a footnote, said Sharon Weinberger in The New York Times. But
the Bronx-born chemist, hired by the CIA in 1951, “played a seminal role in shaping the agency.” He was tasked with developing poisons for assassinations and devising mindcontrol techniques, and the second mission empowered him to conduct experiments on prison inmates here and enemy suspects overseas. The captives were subjected to shock treatment and drug dosages robust enough to potentially erase their egos, and if some people died, they died. Gottlieb saw particular promise in LSD. At one point, he created a CIA-funded brothel to determine how the combination of LSD and sex affected users’ willingness to divulge secrets.
Gottlieb’s odd project “did not emerge in a vacuum,” said Kelley Beaucar Vlahos in TheAmericanConservative.com. “In the primordial ooze of moral justification following World War II,” many U.S. security agencies showed less interest in punishing German and Japanese torturers than in learning how to apply their enemies’ findings. The CIA just went further than most. “So how do we digest this today?” We should recognize, if nothing else, that our government has been and will always be capable of great crimes. During the Cold War, the American way had many faces; “thanks to Kinzer, Sidney Gottlieb’s is one you shouldn’t forget.”