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Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzler

Remember the old “conspiracy theories” (that turned out to be true) about how the CIA had plotted to kill Fidel Castro using exploding seashells or cigars that would blow up in his face? Well, they had more than that in their bag of tricks, including a literally poisoned pen and bacterial powders dusted in the wet suit Castro used for scuba diving. They even worked up a plot to use a pathogen in Castro’s scuba breathing apparatus. The plot to assassinate Castro started under Eisenhower, gained steam under Kennedy, and was headed at the Centra Intelligence Agency (CIA) by a relatively obscure man, Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the tame-sounding group within the CIA known as the Technical Services Division. The bizarre life of Gottlieb is chronicled in a fast-paced book for people willing to take a deep dive into the abyss of humane evil. Authored by Stephen Kinzler, the Gottlieb story is chronicled in Poisoner in Chief.

If you ever want another good reason to hate to pay taxes, this book is a must-read. You’ll see what they’ve done and may still be doing with our money. Gottlieb is dead now, but he worked 22 years in the CIA, and we funded his activities. Not that Gottlieb was unique in doing nefarious things—some of this started with Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany.

And has author Stephen Kinzler says chillingly in the Acknowledgements at the end of this book, “Everything in this book is true, but not everything that’s true is in this book.” The reason for this is partly some authorly omissions but mainly it’s the fact that nobody knows the entirety of what the evil Dr. Gottlieb and those like him were up to.

The bulk of Poisoner in Chief is about Gottlieb’s work on a notorious program known as MK Ultra (and various subsets of this program that had other code names). Before Gottlieb retired from the CIA, his last official act was to destroy all the files of MK Ultra. Well, that’s what he meant to do. Fortunately for history, Gottlieb’s order did not result in the destruction of everything relevant, and an intrepid author named John Marks filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to round up any stray documents, on which he based his 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

The Manchurian Candidate was a novel and movie about a CIA-controlled assassin who was more or less a human robot. If an unimportant and disposable person could be controlled to the point that they would commit crimes or other acts on command and not remember them, they could be used for spy missions and assassinations. Even if they were caught, they would divulge no information, because they would have no memory of their misdeeds.

A good example of this may be Sirhan Sirhan, the man who has served over 50 years in a California prison for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan has said he does not remember what happened and there is some pretty compelling evidence that while Sirhan was on the scene that night with a gun, somebody else committed the murder and let Sirhan play the patsy. When I say compelling, I mean that the evidence has convinced both Robert Kennedy, Jr. (the Presidential candidate and Robert Kennedy’s son) and Douglas Kennedy to petition for Sirhan’s parole. Even the parole board wants to release Sirhan, but Gavin Newsom just vetoed it. Sirhan is shown below.

Was Sirhan Sirhan under mind control at the time? The whole MK Ultra scheme was far more sinister than one potential political assassin. Gottlieb was a mad scientist who wanted to know how the human mind could best be controlled (he was a firm believer that such mind control was possible).

Sidney Gottlieb, shown below, thought drugs were the answer, which led to the infamous LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Gottlieb frequently gave LSD, sometimes massive doses, to people who had no idea they were being dosed. He also ran other experiments intended to break down the human psyche, often performed on people who had no idea that they were submitting to mind-control experiments. One of his better known, albeit indirect, subjects was Ted Kaczynski, also known at the Unabomber. A psychology professor named Henry A. Murray conducted some aggressive mind-control experiments on Kaczynski and other students. While there is no link that Murray worked for Gottlieb or even knew Gottlieb’s program, he was enamored of the idea of mind control.

Sometimes Gottlieb experimented on international prisoners taken by the U.S. military, people who were thoroughly expendable and even untraceable. These prisoners rounded up, flown to one of Gottlieb’s secret labs, where they were subjected to brutal experiments and their inevitable subsequent deaths covered up. Gottlieb found that trauma-based dissociation could be induced, most easily in children, by subjecting them to torture. The extreme panic and excruciating pain inflicted on confused children who had no source of help or control caused the mind to dissociate or fragment. This means that such children and the adults they might become could compartmentalize information and experiences. They could be controlled (torture makes for compliant subjects) and do bad things without remembering what happened. The person who controlled the subject could use code words or other cues to “access” specific mind compartments that would compel the subject to act as directed while expunging all recollection of doing so.

One of the alleged subjects of MK Ultra protocols is Cathy O’Brien who wrote about her experiences in TRANCE Formation of America. If you pick this book up, note that it is actually two separate stories: the first (and less interesting to me) is the story of the controversial Mark Phillips, the man who helped O’Brien psychologically rebuild her personality. The second part is O’Brien’s autobiography and the trauma-based programming inflicted on her from her earliest memories. O’Brien is still alive and speaks publicly, but the mainstream is quick to label her a “conspiracy theorist” despite the fact that O’Brien was credible enough to testify before Congress in 1977 on the MK Ultra program. She describes her old life as being a “CIA mind-controlled slave.” Cathy O’Brien speaks frequently and one of her most recent appearances was as a guest on the Roseanne Barr podcast. Roseanne has long been a big supporter of O’Brien, shown below.

Poisoner in Chief is not about Cathy O’Brien, but it is about how the many Cathy O’Briens in the world were created.

Sidney Gottlieb could have given notorious concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele some pointers in being utterly evil. And, indeed, Mengele shared the same vision as Gottlieb, namely that the human mind could be controlled by outside forces. In 1973, one of the very first acts of incoming CIA Director James Schlesinger was to fire Gottlieb in a strange kabuki theater—Gottlieb received some accolades and even got a medal he was not permitted to keep; it was announced that he “retired,” but Schlesinger fired him. He was honored and rushed out the door. It is not clear (as most things with the CIA are not clear) if Gottlieb knew what was coming, but in January 1973, in one of his last official acts, Gottlieb had the MK Ultra files destroyed, saying that his boss Richard Helms gave the order and he was just relaying the message. The point is we don’t know all the damage he did. Among some of the things we know were destroyed were seven file boxes of “progress reports” on human LSD experiments from 1953 to 1976. Some of Gottlieb’s victims may never have known what happened to them.

Gottlieb was strangely creative in his pursuit of evil. He engaged the services of magicians to help agents learn techniques of misdirection and distraction with the goal that they might better be able to slip poison into a target’s drink that way. After Gottlieb had grown tired of secretly sneaking LSD to CIA agents, then prostitutes and their clients, and finally to American citizens, he thought it would be fun to do this to foreign leaders, so he needed CIA agents who could get close enough to these people to slip them a powerful mickey. That’s why he wanted to instruct them in the trickery of professional magicians. So sinister and secretive was Gottlieb’s desire to feed LSD to unknowing subjects that his bosses were constantly monitoring American politicians for signs of personality change that might indicate that they had been doped by Gottlieb’s minions.

Inspired by Gottlieb’s work, researchers got permission in 1962 to give a massive dose of LSD to an elephant, who died within minutes. Although nobody knows what dose of LSD is appropriate for an elephant, but figure an elephant weighs about as much 100 times what a human weighs. They mainlined this innocent animal with 3000 times the human dose.

Gottlieb’s work in part was fueled by the CIA’s urgent need to keep secrets. The CIA was gravely fearful that agents under torture or duress or even volitionally might reveal secret information. This had happened once already when an agent underwent surgery and under anesthesia said things that he should not have revealed. While the breach was no big calamity for the agency, it scared them. Gottlieb was trying to find ways to make even CIA agents into Manchurian Candidates, spies who could be ordered to do specific spy work, but who would never have any memory of these acts. This would be convenient for things like political assassination.

Poisoner in Chief is gripping, chilling, and profoundly disturbing. You might wonder how on earth Gottlieb was allowed to get away with this stuff. The answer is that even in his heyday, very few people knew about Gottlieb. He worked openly for the CIA, but he was an obscure person in a boring-sounding department and nobody really knew what he did. He was an odd and disagreeable man anyway, so his coworkers generally avoided him. He had odd beliefs, such as an evangelistic conviction that goat’s milk was the ultimate super food. He hid in plain sight, and his work on MK Ultra and other spinoffs was so secretive that only a handful of people within the CIA knew these programs existed, fewer still knew that Gottlieb was involved, and next to no one knew exactly what Gottlieb was doing. He had been described as a “little gray man” in a big bureaucracy. Kinzler rightly labeled him as one of the most powerful unknown men in American history. He was in deep cover within the world’s preeminent spy organization. (Imagine being such a great spy that you can work on sinister things in a den of spies who never know what you’re doing, including sometimes secretly slipping these super-spies dangerous drugs.)

Ironically, among the things Gottlieb did after his forced retirement at 55 years of age was work among lepers in India, whom he apparently did not poison. In his later years, he wrote poetry and studied Buddhism. Nevertheless, his family had fragmented and his children were estranged. After Gottlieb came home from his time in India, he lived as quiet a life in a rural Virginia as was possible for a man who faced numerous lawsuits and other legal entanglements. Investigations into MK Ultra dragged him out of his retired pursuits. He died in 1999 at the age of 80, and the investigations into MK Ultra lost momentum.

The CIA portrayed Gottlieb as a lone actor, a rogue, an out-of-control mad scientist driven by misplaced patriotism. Maybe he was. Or maybe they chose to look the other way as he delivered or failed on a variety of mind-control projects. The CIA has maintained their plausible deniability. The late Dr. Gottlieb is the patsy.

Oh, and the CIA says that MK Ultra was disbanded and completely stopped. But in the 1980s, nine people sued the CIA for using them without their consent as part of MK Ultra; the CIA reached an undisclosed settlement with these nine individuals but without admitting any guilt. Some of these experiments were done (and funded) by the Canadian government, who reached settlements with 77 former individuals involved in such experiments supported by Canada. And in 2019, a psychiatric hospital affiliated with the prestigious McGill University in Montreal attempted to file a class-action suit against the U.S. government for damages related to patients exposed to MK Ultra techniques. In 2023, the U.S. won, when Americans said their government was immune from Canadian lawsuits for things that occurred in the 1940s to 1960s, but the case is being appealed.