The Real Story Of MK Ultra

A US army scientist investigating biological warfare, Frank Olson, died from the Manhattan Statler hotel's tenth story on November 28, 1953. He jumped or was pushed? A CIA operator surreptitiously dosed Olson, who spoke about quitting his position and informed his wife he had made “a terrible mistake” nine days before his death.

Twenty years later, President Gerald Ford apologized to Olson's family in person. Olson's sons think he was killed to keep him from revealing secrets, not a mental breakdown caused by the secret LSD dose.

The murder of Frank Olson remains unsolved, despite Errol Morris' Netflix series. Olson had met Sidney Gottlieb, leader of MK-Ultra, who would poison him.

Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control recounts the amazing tale of a wonderful patriot and explorer who destroyed Americans and foreigners.

Gottlieb was born in 1918 to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. Gottlieb, a scientist, was hired for covert US chemical warfare research. During WWII, the US began investigating germs and chemicals for military application, according to Kinzer.

Gottlieb wanted to help with this study, Kinzer says. His club foot prevented him from joining the military effort. Kinzer said Gottlieb felt thankful to the nation that gave his parents a secure home and allowed him to study.

Countries other than the US researched new combat methods. Nazi chemical weapons researchers notoriously experimented on captives. The Nuremberg standards should have convicted such scientists for crimes against humanity after 1945, but an unknown number gained knowledge and a new life in the US.

Kinzer notes that US authorities routinely removed “references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers and experiments on human subjects” from the biographies of scientists with “blemished” pasts. Operation Paperclip was called after the paperclips used to mark the files of over 700 scientists transferred to the US.

US information came from more than Nazi war criminals. Secret trades also benefitted Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 chemical and biological weapons researchers. Unit 731's history is much murkier than Nazi's. What we know is nightmares. Unit 731 studied illness effects on people via vivisection and organ removal without anesthesia on convicts.

Kinzer tells how Cold War US authorities believed such research may “prove decisive in a future war.” The US biological and chemical research initiative expanded after the war. US policymakers believed the Soviets were ahead in creating new warfare.

Experiments on US people were justified. In 1950, scientists unleashed innocuous but traceable germs into a US metropolis in a big test. The continuous fog in San Francisco would hide germ clouds, so they picked it. Operation Sea Spray included a Navy ship spraying microorganisms into the air near San Francisco's shoreline for six days. In the days that followed, eleven individuals were hospitalized and one died.

Although it wasn't as innocuous as expected, the researchers considered the experiment a success. It satisfied them that “effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas.”

Gottlieb had a different passion. He was more interested in mind-controlling substances than poisoning huge masses.

Gottlieb's studies focused on LSD in subsequent years. Originally produced in 1938, scientists discovered its psychedelic qualities in the 1940s. Gottlieb believed LSD might influence people, make caught spies confess, and even change their personalities.

Not only Gottlieb thought this. US troops defecting to North Korea and reporting US war crimes stunned US establishment circles during the Korean War. US intelligence believed only Communists had mastered brainwashing. The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate popularized this theory with its Communist plan and indoctrinated US soldier.

US intelligence officials broke the law out of fear of Communist indoctrination, as they did of Soviet breakthroughs in bacteriological and chemical warfare. Korean prisoners of war and alleged Communist agents supplied few human test pigs for the CIA. Gottlieb used his resources to discover victims.

Gottlieb met Harris Isbell, head of research at the Lexington Addiction Research Center, shortly after initiating MK-Ultra. This drug addiction hospital, run by the Bureau of Prisons and the Public Health Service, “functioned more like a prison.” Most detainees were weak, downtrodden African Americans.

Not content with Kentucky research, MK-Ultra expanded. The mid-1950s CIA noted Ewen Cameron's activities as president of the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychiatric Association.

Cameron's studies with patients in confined cells, drug-induced comas, and unending repetition of recorded utterances caught their interest. Cameron sought ways to “re-pattern” people's attitudes and ideas. Cameron unknowingly tested patients who sought his treatment.

Cameron was CIA-funded and shielded, and a decades-later evaluation found his tests to have “no therapeutic validity whatsoever” and were “comparable to Nazi medical atrocities.” Misguided patriotism and Cold War anxieties do not explain Cameron's conduct. He was a sadist who traumatized individuals under a scientific veneer.

CIA funded prominent psychologists and psychiatric-pharmacologists' research. Many didn't know their financial source. Research was done at MIT, Stanford, and John Hopkins. Many test volunteers were unaware of what they were about to undergo, violating research ethics.

Some trials were harmless and appealing. Some tests gave student participants LSD. The participants' psychedelic experiences captivated physicians and nurses, who tried it themselves. Ironically, the CIA popularized the sixties counterculture drug.

The medicine that could manipulate minds was still a fantasy for Gottlieb. He undertook secret drug distribution operations in New York and San Francisco, observing residents' responses. Gottlieb and FBI agents established a San Francisco safe house in Operation Midnight Climax.

According to Kinzer, Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White “assembled a group of prostitutes whose job it would be to bring their clients to the ‘pad’ and dose them with LSD while he watched and recorded their reactions.” White used the covered operation to gratify his desires. Near death in 1975,

MK-Ultra failed Gottlieb's expectations. The CIA started winding down the experiment in the late sixties and ended it a few years later. It became known because of a short time of democratic scrutiny of CIA activities in the mid-1970s.

The New York Times uncovered unlawful domestic CIA actions in 1974. The legendary Frank Church panel was one of numerous US Congress commissions investigating similar charges. Kinzer outlines the conflict between authorities who wanted to use such investigations as an alibi and others who wanted serious inquiries into unlawful activities.

Gottlieb withdrew from the CIA in the early 1970s. After being named MK-Ultra's leader a few years later and called before a Senate Commission, he negotiated a bargain to avoid punishment. Gottlieb quietly raised goats in his rural Virginia home for the remainder of his life. He died 1999.

Poisoner in Chief, individuals rather than societal forces dominate. The consequence is a history of weird criminals like Gottlieb and George Hunter White and their deeds.

Some of the novel is bizarre. In one experiment, mentally handicapped children were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium. CIA operatives supposedly implanted a listening device in a cat, but forgot that cats don't listen to instruction (it walked away during a park test).

What enabled Gottlieb and others? Kinzer only partially explains Gottlieb's reasoning. The book reveals that years of expensive testing never suggested Manchurian Candidate–style brainwashing. Instead of conceding they were pursuing a white rabbit, CIA scientists continued.

Given his alleged success, Gottlieb's untouchability seems especially bizarre. Kinzer uses Gottlieb's prestige initiatives to illustrate his CIA influence. Gottlieb's "success stories" were mostly failures, such as his unsuccessful efforts to kill Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, and Patrice Lumumba (Lumumba was slain before Gottlieb's plot could be implemented). Gottlieb's career of harming people shows how hidden programs may take off without democratic control.

Kinzer credits CIA director William Colby (1973–76) for partially exposing this craziness. However, the Anti-War Movement, Watergate, and the Pentagon Papers impacted Colby's actions. Public skepticism of the CIA and calls for accountability were pervasive. Accountability was again reduced in the late 1970s when these movements declined.

During the “war on terror,” the CIA and other intelligence organizations had unparalleled latitude. In Trump's presidency, there have been efforts to rebrand the CIA as a logical, intelligent, and beneficent US state agency. Kinzer's book on Gottlieb and MK-Ultra shows how corrupt imperial spymasters were.

References

https://jacobin.com/2020/10/cia-brainwashing-program-mk-ultra-sidney-gottlieb

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/brainwashed-mkultra/

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief