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10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sidney Gottlieb.md

@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Alongside his professional life - which included managing some of the most extre
 
 ### MKULTRA Authorization and Scope
 
-On April 13, 1953, CIA Director [[Allen Dulles]] authorized Project MKULTRA on the basis of a proposal Gottlieb had drafted. The program's stated rationale was defensive: Soviet and Chinese interrogation techniques, apparently effective in producing false confessions from American prisoners during the [[Korean War]], suggested an enemy capability in "brain warfare" that the United States needed to match and counter. Gottlieb used this framing to obtain authorization for an extraordinarily broad research mandate covering drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, surgery, and psychological manipulation.
+On April 3, 1953, Richard Helms, a senior Clandestine Services officer and Gottlieb's longtime patron, formally proposed a program for the "covert use of biological and chemical materials" to be run under Gottlieb; on April 13, 1953, CIA Director [[Allen Dulles]] approved it as Project MKULTRA with an initial $300,000 budget exempt from normal financial controls, payable blindly on the signatures of Gottlieb and TSS chief [[Willis Gibbons]]. The program's stated rationale was defensive: Soviet and Chinese interrogation techniques, apparently effective in producing false confessions from American prisoners during the [[Korean War]], suggested an enemy capability in "brain warfare" that the United States needed to match and counter. Gottlieb used this framing to obtain authorization for an extraordinarily broad research mandate covering drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, surgery, and psychological manipulation.
 
 MKULTRA was divided into approximately 150 research subprojects funded through cut-out academic and private institutions, primarily the [[Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology]] (a CIA front foundation) and the [[Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation]]. The use of cutouts was deliberate: it distributed the research across enough institutions that no single investigator could piece together the program's full scope, and it provided a layer of deniability between CIA funding and individual experiments.
 
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ The program was illegal under constitutional protections against unreasonable se
 
 ### Ewen Cameron and the Canadian Subprojects
 
-Among the most damaging of MKULTRA's international operations was the collaboration with [[Ewen Cameron]], chairman of psychiatry at [[McGill University]] in [[Montreal]] and director of the [[Allan Memorial Institute]]. Cameron was conducting research into "psychic driving" - a theory that psychiatric patients could be remolded by erasing existing behavioral patterns through sensory deprivation and electroconvulsive therapy and then implanting new ones through repeated auditory suggestion.
+Among the most damaging of MKULTRA's international operations was the collaboration with [[D. Ewen Cameron]], chairman of psychiatry at [[McGill University]] in [[Montreal]] and director of the [[Allan Memorial Institute]]. Cameron was conducting research into "psychic driving" - a theory that psychiatric patients could be remolded by erasing existing behavioral patterns through sensory deprivation and electroconvulsive therapy and then implanting new ones through repeated auditory suggestion.
 
 Gottlieb funded Cameron's research under Subproject 68 beginning in 1957. Cameron's methods included:
 - Continuous sleep induction lasting up to 65 days ("depatterning")
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ Cameron died in 1967 before the program was publicly disclosed. A class action l
 
 On November 18-19, 1953, Gottlieb convened a working retreat of approximately ten Technical Services Staff officers and scientists at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, [[Maryland]]. After two days of meetings, Gottlieb spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD - a dose sufficient to produce extended psychedelic effects - without informing the attendees. [[Frank Olson]], a bacteriologist who worked on the CIA's biological weapons programs at [[Fort Detrick]], was among those dosed.
 
-Olson had a severe adverse reaction. In the days following the retreat he exhibited paranoid behavior, disturbed sleep, and what witnesses described as mental collapse. CIA supervisors arranged for him to see a New York psychiatrist. On the night of November 28, 1953 - nine days after the dosing - Olson fell from a tenth-floor window of the Hotel Statler in [[New York City]], through a shade and a closed window. He died on impact. The death was ruled a suicide.
+Olson had a severe adverse reaction. In the days following the retreat he exhibited paranoid behavior, disturbed sleep, and what witnesses described as mental collapse. CIA supervisors arranged for him to see a New York psychiatrist. On the night of November 28, 1953 - nine days after the dosing - Olson fell from a tenth-floor window of the Hotel Statler in New York City, through a shade and a closed window. He died on impact. The death was ruled a suicide.
 
 CIA Director Allen Dulles was briefed on the circumstances and the program was concealed. Olson's family was told only that he had fallen from a window during a mental breakdown. Gottlieb was not prosecuted.
 
@@ -79,12 +79,16 @@ Olson's son maintained until his own death that his father was murdered because
 
 ### Congo: Biological Assassination Materials
 
-In August 1960, following the election of [[Patrice Lumumba]] as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]]'s National Security Council authorized covert operations to remove Lumumba from power. CIA Director [[Allen Dulles]] interpreted the authorization as including assassination. He directed Gottlieb to develop a biological assassination capability.
+In August 1960, following the election of Patrice Lumumba as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]]'s National Security Council authorized covert operations to remove Lumumba from power. CIA Director Allen Dulles interpreted the authorization as including assassination. He directed Gottlieb to develop a biological assassination capability.
 
-Gottlieb personally traveled to [[Congo|Leopoldville]] (now [[Kinshasa]]) in September 1960, carrying biological materials - including lethal bacteria prepared at Fort Detrick - intended for introduction into Lumumba's food or toothpaste. Station chief [[Larry Devlin]] received the materials from Gottlieb but declined to use them, reporting that operational circumstances (Lumumba was under UN protection) made the plot infeasible.
+Gottlieb personally traveled to Leopoldville (now [[Kinshasa]]) in September 1960, carrying biological materials - including lethal bacteria prepared at Fort Detrick - intended for introduction into Lumumba's food or toothpaste. Station chief [[Larry Devlin]] received the materials from Gottlieb but declined to use them, reporting that operational circumstances (Lumumba was under UN protection) made the plot infeasible.
 
 Lumumba was subsequently captured by Congolese security forces loyal to [[Mobutu Sese Seko|Mobutu]], transferred to Katanga province, and executed on January 17, 1961, by Belgian officers and Katangan soldiers - with CIA knowledge and without direct CIA execution. The biological materials Gottlieb had brought were returned or destroyed. The Church Committee documented Gottlieb's travel and the biological materials; the episode is among the clearest documented cases of a senior CIA officer personally transporting assassination materials for use against a foreign leader.[^1]
 
+### Assassination Schemes and MKSEARCH
+
+Beyond the Congo, Gottlieb's office devised an array of methods to kill foreign leaders in the tradition of [[Stanley Lovell]]'s wartime OSS schemes, targeting [[Fidel Castro]], [[Kwame Nkrumah]] of [[Ghana]], and others. Against Castro his team developed an LSD-laced aerosol for his radio station, a thallium compound to make his beard fall out before a public appearance, botulinum-toxin cigars (one batch of which retained 94 percent of its toxicity when tested seven years later), and a ballpoint pen concealing a hypodermic needle. For U-2 pilot [[Francis Gary Powers]] and other agents at risk of capture, Gottlieb designed a suicide device: a hollowed silver dollar concealing a needle coated with saxitoxin, a paralytic shellfish poison. The lethal agents for these operations came from the [[Special Operations Division]] at Fort Detrick under the CIA-Army project [[MKNAOMI]]. When MKULTRA's paperwork grew unwieldy, Gottlieb carried its work on under the successor program [[MKSEARCH]] (chartered 1964), which he terminated in June 1972 on the conclusion that the materials and techniques were "too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings ... to be operationally useful." All told he presided over funding for some 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, and 185 private researchers.[^4]
+
 ### Records Destruction
 
 In January 1973, with Watergate investigations expanding and congressional scrutiny of CIA activities intensifying, Gottlieb ordered the destruction of essentially all MKULTRA records. He was about to retire, and the destruction was carried out with Director [[Richard Helms]]'s knowledge and implied authorization. Helms was simultaneously ordering the destruction of [[Operation CHAOS]] operational records.
@@ -99,6 +103,8 @@ Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee in 1975 and before the Senate Hea
 
 He confirmed under oath that he had personally administered LSD to unconsenting subjects, that the Midnight Climax safe houses had operated as described, and that he had ordered the records destruction with his superior's knowledge.
 
+In his October 1975 Church Committee sessions (under the staff alias "Joseph Scheider") and his 1977 immunized testimony, Gottlieb disclosed two military LSD interrogation operations run alongside MKULTRA, [[Operation DERBY HAT]] and [[Operation THIRD CHANCE]]; acknowledged administering LSD to CIA employees for "defensive pharmacology"; and described his role on the [[Health Alteration Committee]] that authorized plots against foreign leaders, including the botulinum cigar scheme. He also gave a 174-page deposition in *Orlikow v. United States* (May 17, 1983) that evaded most specific questions about Cameron's experiments. The full transcripts of his 1975 testimony, classified Top Secret at the time, were released through FOIA and published by the [[National Security Archive]] in October 2025.[^4]
+
 ### Post-CIA Life and Death
 
 Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973 at age 55. He traveled to India, where he spent approximately a year working at a hospital for leprosy patients and the rural poor. He returned to the United States and maintained a farm in rural Virginia, practicing folk dancing, playing the recorder, and doing hospice and social work. He gave few interviews and made no public apologies for MKULTRA.
@@ -111,4 +117,5 @@ Stephen Kinzer's biography *Poisoner in Chief* (2019) provides the most comprehe
 
 [^1]: Kinzer, Stephen. *Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.* Henry Holt and Company, 2019 (the essential biography). Marks, John. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979 (uses surviving MKULTRA documents; the foundational investigative account). Church Committee (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). Final Report, Book I ("Foreign and Military Intelligence"), S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976.
 [^2]: "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977. Available: intelligence.senate.gov.
-[^3]: Starrs, James E. Report of forensic examination, Olson exhumation, 1994. New York County District Attorney investigation files (partial public record). Albarelli, H.P. *A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.* Trine Day, 2009.
+[^3]: Starrs, James E. Report of forensic examination, Olson exhumation, 1994. New York County District Attorney investigation files (partial public record). Albarelli, H.P. *A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.* Trine Day, 2009.
+[^4]: Kinzer, Stephen. *Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control*. Henry Holt, 2019; John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 4; National Security Archive, "Top Secret Testimony of CIA's MKULTRA Chief, 50 Years Later," October 30, 2025; Deposition of Sidney Gottlieb, *Orlikow v. United States*, Civil Action No. 80-3163, May 17, 1983.