When CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb died in 1999 at the age of 80, the New York Times described him as ‘a kind of genius.’

Others were less circumspect. He was ‘a mad scientist,’ a ‘twentieth century Jekyll and Hyde.’ One obituary writer noted starkly that when Winston Churchill spoke of a world, “made darker by the darker lights of perverted science,” he was referring to experiments conducted on human beings by Nazi doctors in concentration camps, ‘but his remarks might with equal justice have been applied to the activities of the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb.’

The truth is that Gottlieb wasn’t meant to be remembered at all.

Over a period of twenty years as a scientist with the agency, Gottlieb ran the largest systematic search for mind control techniques in history; he became the agency’s Poisoner in Chief and earned the dubious distinction of ‘the most prolific torturer of his generation.’

Over a period of twenty years as a scientist with the agency, Sidney Gottlieb ran the largest systematic search for mind control techniques in history. He headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies

Gottlieb is pictured in a room near the Senate subcommittee on health hearing room in 1977

He presided over medical experiments and ‘special interrogations’ on human subjects, shattering the minds and lives of an ever-widening class of ‘expendables:’ prisoners, addicts, mentally and terminally ill patients, unwitting citizens and even children.

According to biographer Stephen Kinzer in his newly published book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, ‘Gottlieb justified it all in the name of science and patriotism.’

His patriotism had been thwarted in 1943 when Gottlieb tried to enlist. He had just completed his doctorate in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology and wanted to serve. But he was rejected.

The Bronx born son of Orthodox Jews of Hungarian extraction had been born with two club feet. As a child his mother had carried him everywhere and he didn’t walk without braces until he was 12.

Gottlieb was crushed by the rejection and, according to Kinzer, ‘dreamed of finding a special way to prove his patriotism.’

Nearly a decade later it found him.

By then Gottlieb was living and working as a research scientist at the University of Maryland. Home was a primitive cabin in Vienna, Virginia where he, his wife Margaret and their two small daughters, Penny and Rachel, lived without electricity or indoor toilets.

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Gottlieb had been mentored by a scientist named Ira Baldwin, whose own war effort had been as director of a secret program to develop biological weapons in 1941.

By 1950 priorities had changed. Baldwin was back in academia, nuclear weapons had usurped biological ones and the new area of interest was the human mind.

Military scientists who made psychoactive and convulsive drugs were already working with CIA interrogators who applied them to prisoners. But the program needed a boost. They wanted ‘an imaginative chemist’ whose ambition was not fettered by conscience or legal niceties.

Baldwin recommended Gottlieb.

‘Gottlieb justified it all in the name of science and patriotism,' writes Stephen Kinzer in Poisoner in Chief

On July 13, 1951 he started work at the CIA. He was given control of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff – the department that built the tools of espionage – and tasked with coming up with drugs and methods to control the human mind.

One month later the Artichoke project was born.

As recounted by Kinzer the ‘Artichoke Work’ over which Gottlieb presided was little short of medical torture.

Unwilling patients were dosed with potent drugs, subjected to extremes of temperature and sound, high and low pressure, oxygen, food and sleep deprivation, strapped to electroshock machines.

Researchers worked to develop new chemicals or drugs to use in ‘special interrogations’ that had already been taking place on prisoners in Germany and Japan after the end of the war.

By 1952 there were four active teams consisting of a ‘research specialist,’ ‘a medical officer’ and ‘a security technician’ working in France, West Germany, Japan and Korea.

While Gottlieb and his researchers looked into hypnosis and physical privation and brutality the area that interested him most was drugs.

The compounds his chemists created were produced in a one-million-liter test sphere designed by Baldwin. It stood more than four stories high and weight 131 tons and was built at Camp Detrick, near Frederick, Maryland.

Some of the early experiments – conducted primarily by researchers on themselves – seem almost comical today.

The scientists started with marijuana – given the optimistic code name of TD for ‘truth drug.’ They mixed it into candy and salad dressing, they smoked it and they reached, Kinzer writes, ‘what now seems the obvious conclusion.’ It got them stoned.

Next they tried cocaine – dosing mental patients in various quantities and forms. Then came heroin which researchers paid student volunteers a dollar an hour to ingest. But the one that gripped Gottlieb like no other was Mescaline or LSD.

Gottlieb retired head of Project MKUltra, during his testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in 1977. The Senate Subcommittee, headed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, investigated the testing of drugs on human subjects without their knowledge. With him was his attorney, Terry Lenzner

Gottlieb later estimated that he himself had taken LSD more than 200 times. At first the subjects of experiments with the drug were volunteers, CIA agents and scientists, but later victims were given LSD without their knowledge or forewarning.

Gottlieb destroyed most of his files. What details remain from testimony – including his own before congress – make for truly shocking reading.

In 1951, for example, Gottlieb and fellow CIA scientists, flew to Tokyo where four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians had been secretly brought. They were injected with a host of depressants and stimulants, interrogated then shot and dumped overboard in Tokyo Bay.

The team then flew to Seoul and repeated the experiment on 25 North Korean prisoners of war who refused to denounce Communism and were executed.

In 1952 Allen Dulles, a staunch supporter of Gottlieb’s work, became Director of the CIA and the chemist’s dominion grew.

From 1952 to 1953 Dulles and Gottlieb had scores of ‘expendables’ brought to a safe house in Germany. Some were fed vast quantities of drugs, others subjected to electro-convulsive shocks all with the goal of ‘altering’ their minds.

Memos requesting subjects for new techniques revealed the expectation that the victims would not survive in the instruction, ‘does not, not require disposal problems after application.’

Each experiment failed and at the end the ‘expendables’ were killed and their bodies burned.

After 18 months the researchers had worked their way through barbiturates, sedatives, cannabis extract, cocaine, heroin and LSD. None worked.

But the project only gained momentum and it did so in the most sinister fashion.

Gottlieb proposed a new project that would subsume Artichoke and give him authority over all CIA research into mind control. With this project he would not only be free to test every imaginable drug and technique on ‘expendables’ in prisons abroad. He could also feed LSD to witting and unwitting Americans.

Kinzer writes, ‘Gottlieb was about to launch the most systematic and widest-ranging mind control project ever undertaken by any government. At the same time, he was assuming his other important role: poisoner in chief.’

It was a natural extension of his work on mind control drugs which also afforded him human guinea pigs for his toxins.

He later admitted to having supplied poisons for aborted assassination attempts of foreign powers including the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai.

Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKUltra sub-project on LSD in this June 9, 1953, letter

One bizarre plot to destabilize Fidel Castro involved putting Thallium in his shoes so that his hair would fall out and he would lose his beard – a feature Gottlieb was convinced held the key to his popular sway.

On April 13, 1953 Gottlieb became America’s mind control czar. He was handed permission to ‘launch and conduct experiments at will.’ The project was given a new cryptonym MK- ULTRA and under that dark umbrella myriad gruesome ‘subprojects’ were launched.

Gottlieb’s team consisted of ‘obsessed chemists, coldhearted spymasters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electro-shockers and Nazi doctors.’

A ‘safe house’ was established in New York’s Greenwich village where unsuspecting victims were lured and doped with LSD.

They were a new kind of ‘expendable’ for Gottlieb – mostly drug users and petty criminals who wouldn’t be missed and wouldn’t complain.

In the nine years of MK-ULTRA’s existence Gottlieb sponsored projects in prisons across the country in which inmates would be bribed by the promise of better cells, even heroin, for submitting to hideous tests.

In Atlanta Federal Penitentiary prisoners were told they were part of a study to find a cure for schizophrenia and dosed with LSD every day for 15 months. One of the ‘volunteers’ was James ‘Whitey ‘Bulger. He later told of hallucinations and nightmares that made him think he’d lost his mind.

In another project children between the ages of six and eleven, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, were given LSD every day for six weeks.

Brothels were set up and wired to study how the combination of sex and drugs impacted on men’s willingness to divulge secrets.

Mentally ill children were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium. A secret CIA clinic was set up inside a Washington Hospital and while little is known of the work done there it was all on patients who were terminally ill.

Doctors were paid enormous stipends to administer drugs to their unwitting patients on Gottlieb’s behest.

Doctor’s such as Paul Hoch, the New York psychiatrist visited by professional tennis player Harold Blauer in 1952 for depression following his divorce.

Blauer was injected with a concentrate of mescaline derivative which was without explanation or warning.

The treatment continued despite his protests that it was giving him hallucinations. On January 8, 1953 he was injected with a dose fourteen times more potent than the previous ones. He died eight minutes later.

He reinvented himself as the real-life Q, the MI6 chief played in the Bond movies by Desmond Llewellyn, who designed spy tools

By the mid-fifties CIA-sponsored ‘subprojects’ were being conducted in institutions including, Massachusetts General Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Denver, Illinois, Oklahoma, Rochester, Texas and Indiana as well as Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Baylor, Emory, George Washington, Vanderbilt, Cornell, John Hopkins New York University. At one point the agency attempted to buy the world’s entire supply of LSD.

Gottlieb himself was known to spike colleagues' coffee and drinks with the tasteless, odorless drug. Watching his colleagues get high, Kinzer notes, ‘he would sometimes dance a jig.’

MK-ULTRA’s work was so secretive that only two people really knew what was going on – Gottlieb and his deputy Richard Lashbrook. They wrote as little down as possible and prided themselves on the fact that the right hand, quite deliberately, didn’t know what the left hand was doing.

But at one staff retreat in a lodge in Virginia Gottlieb did something that would comeback to haunt him and play a part in his downfall.

Frank Olson was another brilliant chemist who had been recruited by Baldwin and worked closely with Gottlieb. The two traveled around the world together witnessing ‘special interrogations’ under the influence of drugs often made by Olson.

In the fall of 1953 Gottlieb slipped LSD into Olson’s punch. Nine days later Olson plunged thirteen stories from a Manhattan hotel room. In the intervening days he had asked to leave the program. He had been paranoid and disoriented and depressed.

Gottlieb would always maintain that he sent Olson on his fateful trip to Manhattan, accompanied by Lashbrook to receive psychiatric treatment and that his death was suicide or an accident.

Olson’s family believe that his desire to leave the CIA most clandestine project led to his murder.

Decades later Olson’s son had his father’s body exhumed and a new autopsy performed.

The pathologist noted that although Olson landed on his back the skull above his left eye was disfigured. He changed the manner of death from suicide to misadventure.

That same year that Olson died Gottliebe wrote a CIA handbook on assassination was written. One of the methods he recommended was ‘the contrived accident.’

He wrote, ‘The most efficient accident…is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. A rock or heavy stone will do…

‘Blows should be directed to the temple.’

It is hard to square this calculated killing with the image that Gottlieb presented to the world outside his work.

Because while he signed off studies that saw hundreds of men, women and children tormented and even killed Gottlieb was the very image of a loving husband and father to his four children Rachel, Penny and their younger brothers Peter and Stephen.

He raised chickens and collected their eggs, he kept goats which he milked each morning. He grew vegetables and lived a sort of eco-dream well ahead of the time. He and Margaret were enthusiastic folk dancers.

One of their son’s ex-girlfriends recalls an occasion when the couple emerged to greet her in full Bavarian folk costume.

She also recalls a wall of books in Gottlieb’s den that gave way to reveal a concealed compartment of weapons and guns. If Gottlieb spent his life trying to manipulate the truth out of others, he was every bit as committed to concealing his own.

And for years he was successful, acting with apparent impunity. But in the early sixties, after nearly a decade of work and no closer to a ‘truth serum’ or mind control technique things changed.

In 1961 the CIA’s new director John McClone ordered a report into MK-ULTRA and its work. When it was submitted in 1963 it recommended more oversight. Gottlieb suggested simply letting the project fade away.

He reinvented himself as the real-life Q from the James Bond films, designing spy tools and served as chief of Technical Services for seven years before the Watergate scandal set in motion a series of events and investigations that ended his career and destroyed his anonymity.

Dr. Harry L. Williams (left) administers LSD 25 to Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, chairman of Emory University's Pharmacological Department, to produce effects similar to those experienced by schizophrenics. The drug was used in experiments to find out more about the inner feelings of the mentally ill and to discover whether a chemical disorder is responsible for mental illnesses

Dr. Williams (right) examines the eyes of Dr. Pfeiffer after administering LSD 25

Two of the intruders arrested on June 17, 1972 had false ID papers and various tools created by Gottlieb’s Technical Services.

The CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, had a long history with Gottlieb and had protected him through various administrations.

He was fired for refusing to provide President Nixon with a cover story and before he left, Helms and Gottlieb destroyed all records associated with MK-ULTRA.

On June 30, 1973 Gottlieb retired and was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal one of the agency’s highest orders.

Not long after he and Margaret decided to sell everything, board a freighter from San Francisco to Australia and travel the world doing volunteer work and seeking spiritual fulfilment.

Gottlieb thought he had destroyed all proof of the past. But, ironically for a man who spent his life failing to find a serum to unlock it, the truth caught up to him.

The investigations triggered by Watergate sparked others and turned up a stash of MK-ULTRA expense reports that had not been destroyed. The details they exposed were made public along with Gottlieb’s name.

He was called back to Washington and between 1975 and 1977 testified called in front of two congressional committees. He did so on condition of immunity.

His own lawyer referred to him as ‘Dr Death himself.’

Gottlieb claimed not to remember vast portions of his time at the CIA, but he and the project had been named and soon the ghosts began to rise: the Olson family, former inmates of Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and others who realized that they too may have been victims of a ‘subproject.’

Years of litigation followed and ultimately the possibility of going to trial loomed. By the end, journalist Seymour Hersh who visited Gottlieb in his later life described him as ‘a destroyed man, riddled with guilt.’

He died at his home in Virginia on 7 March 1999. His wife did not announce the cause of death.

She never spoke of him publicly, telling one reporter bluntly, ‘You never get it right. You never can know what he was.’

Perhaps the question of ‘what he was’ – a kind of genius, a monster – would be more easily answered had he not been one of our own.

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer is out now published by MacMillan.