1. Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.
27 Facts About Sidney Gottlieb
1. 2.
Sidney Gottlieb was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion.
3.
Sidney Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC.
4.
Sidney Gottlieb decided to transfer to a school that offered an agricultural biology course, and wished to attend the University of Wisconsin.
5.
Sidney Gottlieb met his wife Margaret Moore, daughter of a Presbyterian missionary, while attending CIT, and then they married.
6.
Sidney Gottlieb was living there when he began working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
7.
Sidney Gottlieb's lifestyle was in contrast to that of the Ivy League men the CIA normally recruited.
8.
Sidney Gottlieb later transferred to the Food and Drug Administration, where he developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body.
9.
Sidney Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position.
10.
On July 13,1951, Sidney Gottlieb reported for his first day of work for the CIA.
11.
Project BLUEBIRD was already underway when Sidney Gottlieb was brought on board; BLUEBIRD experimented with "Special Interrogation" techniques on captured prisoners at black sites like Camp King and Villa Schuster, using drugs to attempt to break ego control and elicit information.
12.
BLUEBIRD lacked scientific knowledge and discipline; Dulles wanted Sidney Gottlieb to get it back on course.
13.
Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery.
14.
Sidney Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
15.
Sidney Gottlieb knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve his proposals.
16.
Sidney Gottlieb described the program as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something the CIA was pioneering.
17.
Sidney Gottlieb sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research, including non-consensual human experiments.
18.
Sidney Gottlieb administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything".
19.
Sidney Gottlieb was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later.
20.
Sidney Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE, later known as the U-2 spy plane.
21.
Sidney Gottlieb hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen.
22.
Sidney Gottlieb played a role in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.
23.
Sidney Gottlieb took a vial of poison to the Congo with plans to place it on Lumumba's toothbrush in the summer of 1960.
24.
Sidney Gottlieb provided these "toxic biological materials" to Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, and although Devlin declined the assignment, a military coup soon overthrew and killed Lumumba.
25.
Sidney Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective.
26.
On March 7,1999, Sidney Gottlieb died at his home in Washington, Virginia.
27.
Sidney Gottlieb was reported to have a history of heart problems, but his wife declined to give the cause of death.