Book: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer.
Discover the shocking true story of Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s infamous “Poisoner in Chief” and architect of the MK-ULTRA mind control project. This explainer video delves into Gottlieb’s hallucinatory career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action, where he served as the chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Explore how, under the patronage of Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, Gottlieb intensified the Bluebird and Artichoke programs into the most systematic and widest-ranging search for techniques to manipulate the human psyche, believing that mastery over mind control could decide the Cold War.
The video exposes the chilling breadth of MK-ULTRA‘s 149 “subprojects”, which investigated everything from the psychoactive drug LSD, mescaline, and hypnosis to electroshock and sensory deprivation. Gottlieb pioneered the controversial use of unwitting human subjects in domestic “safe houses” like Operation Midnight Climax (Subproject 42) in New York and San Francisco, run by agent George Hunter White. It details the extreme outsourcing of experiments to institutions using vulnerable populations, including the work of Dr. Harris Isbell (Subprojects 73, 91, 147) testing LSD on prisoners at the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer (Subproject 47) at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and the devastating “de-patterning” work of Dr. Ewen Cameron (Subproject 68) in Montreal. Learn how the CIA acquired biological warfare knowledge from former Nazi director Kurt Blome and Japanese Unit 731 General Shiro Ishii via Operation Paperclip, linking these wartime atrocities to the research performed at Camp Detrick (Fort Detrick) and CIA “black sites” like Villa Schuster in Germany.
Furthermore, the explainer details Gottlieb’s role as the CIA’s chief poison maker, leading the secretive “Health Alteration Committee”. As chief of the Technical Services Division (TSD), Gottlieb designed assassination plots, including efforts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro (using poisoned cigars and thallium salts intended to make his beard fall out), and his 1960 mission to the Congo to deliver lethal botulinum toxin intended for Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb was also responsible for creating lethal escape tools, such as the concentrated saxitoxin (paralytic shellfish poison) suicide pin concealed in a silver dollar given to U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Finally, the video investigates the mysterious death of CIA chemist Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in 1953, which occurred just days after Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert Lashbrook, unwittingly dosed Olson with LSD, and the subsequent, systematic destruction of nearly all MK-ULTRA records by Gottlieb in 1973.
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