CIA This article is more than 25 years oldObituarySidney Gottlieb obituary
This article is more than 25 years oldThe real Manchurian Candidate
Sidney Gottlieb, who has died aged 80, was everything you have dreamed of in the mad scientist in a pulp novel about the CIA. Except that he was real. He was even, by common account, a rather nice man.
Gottlieb's most notable feat was to introduce the world to lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. What started as a deeply secret programme for Cold War mind control became the sacrament of the 1960s. He did not discover the drug. That honour belonged to Dr Albert Hoffman, who in April 1953 accidentally stumbled on its mind-altering potential. He was looking for a circulatory stimulant when he absorbed some LSD through his fingers and went for the first 'acid trip'.
By then the Central Intelligence Agency had already been experimenting with several drugs, including marijuana, peyotl and caffeine, to make subjects of interrogation give up more information. In that same year the agency set up a project, code-named MK-ULTRA, to develop mind control drugs. On April 18, 1958, Dr Gottlieb, who was head of the chemical division of the CIA's technical services, wrote a memo listing the ways in which the drug could be used. Gottlieb saw that it could be useful in ways that went far beyond interrogation, and included disinformation, the induction of temporary insanity, sometimes in spectacular ways, and public humiliation of political opponents or obstacles.
Before long it was used, or attempts were made to use it, to undermine America's enemies from Cuba to the Congo and beyond. None of that had much effect. But dozens of innocent Americans were subjected, sometimes without their knowledge, to experiments that could have, and sometimes did, end in psychosis or death.
Gottlieb's long-time colleague John Gittinger explained in an interview that the CIA tested mind-controlling drugs because it was in the grip of 'a great fear' that either the Soviet Union or the Chinese would get hold of LSD. He and his boss Gottlieb believed the United States had to fight by any means necessary.
So nice Dr Gottlieb ordered a research programme which ultimately led to 149 mind-control experiments, at least 25 of which involved administering LSD to unwitting subjects - something which put Gottlieb and his colleagues clearly in breach of the standards under which Nazi doctors were convicted and executed in the Nuremberg trials, in the judgment of John Marks, the former CIA officer whose book, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, is the most thorough of several published investigations of MK-ULTRA.
At first the CIA officers experimented mainly on themselves and took it in turn to slip LSD into each other's drinks. The CIA's Office of Security reported severely that it did not 'recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the office parties'.
Next Gottlieb began testing on human guinea pigs such as prisoners, mental patients and prostitutes. MK-ULTRA contracted an officer named George Hunter White to hire prostitutes to pick up men in Washington bars and bring them back to a CIA-owned brothel. White watched the effects through two-way mirrors, sipping the CIA's trademark martinis to calm himself.
Major-General William Creasey, of the US Army's Chemical Corps, saw even more exciting potential. He argued that it would be far more humane to put LSD into a city's water supply than to bomb it. He thought it "absurd" when he was not allowed to see what would happen if he laid down a cloud of acid over a city.
Meanwhile, back at 'the Farm', a CIA facility in the Maryland horse country, Gottlieb's men were giving army officers LSD, and Dr Frank Olson's first acid trip induced deep depression and paranoia. Eventually he jumped to his death from an upper floor of the New York Statler Hilton.
At a time of conscription, it was impossible to keep the LSD experiments inside the army. Among those who first experimented in the army was Ken Kesey, who wrote one of the first best-sellers of the psychedelic age, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, about the LSD experiments of his Merry Pranksters. Soon the knowledge, and the habit, spread to beatnik poets like Allen Ginsberg, and to the Harvard academic Dr Timothy Leary.
The spooks and the military had managed one of history's most spectacular own goals by turning-on a whole generation of pacifists and enemies of militarism who eventually contributed to the intoxication of America's first psychedelic expeditionary force in Vietnam.
LSD was not Sidney Gottlieb's only contribution to the twilight struggle against America's enemies. Under orders from successive CIA directors he used his chemical skills to develop a poisoned handkerchief for an Iraqi, a poisoned dart for a Congolese, and a whole arsenal of poisoned presents for Fidel Castro.
Gottlieb eventually repented, but at leisure. He remained as head of MK-ULTRA for 20 years. When he retired, in 1973, he had come to the conclusion that his experiments were useless. The Agency gave him its Distinguished Intelligence Medal and destroyed most of MK-ULTRA's records, though many documents - including Gottlieb's original 1958 memo proposing uses for LSD - survive and can be read on the internet.
Gottlieb was born in New York City. His parents were orthodox Jews, immigrants from Hungary, but he abandoned Judaism and experimented with many religious positions, from agnosticism to Zen Buddhism. He was educated at the City College of New York, hotbed of socialists and the anti-socialists who became the neo- conservatives of the 1970s. He graduated magna cum laude in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, then got his PhD from the California Institute of Technology. He was kept out of military service in the second world war by a club foot.
After he left the CIA he embarked on a kind of spiritual Odyssey. He ran a leper colony in India for 18 months with his wife, the daughter of American missionaries in the sub-continent. Having suffered from a stutter all his life, he took a degree in speech therapy, then bought a log cabin in the Virginia mountains where he hoped to start a sort of commune and where he could enjoy his two hobbies, folk-dancing and breeding goats. Later he worked in a hospice, looking after dying people. He is survived by his wife Margaret, two sons and two daughters.
Sidney Gottlieb, chemist and intelligence officer, born August 3, 1918; died March 7, 1999
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