Like other troubling figures of C.I.A. history, for instance the paranoid mole hunter James Jesus Angleton, Gottlieb played a seminal role in shaping the agency in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also an outlier. Gottlieb, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bronx, didn’t fit into the Georgetown set that dominated the C.I.A. in those years. But he was valued and protected, particularly by Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, who believed deeply in mind-control experiments. Gottlieb was someone who could do the agency’s dirty work. And dirty it was.

In 1952, Gottlieb led a team of scientists to a safehouse in Munich — one of the agency’s “black sites” — where prisoners of war were pumped full of drugs, interrogated and then allowed to die. These were ideal operating conditions. “One of the luxuries that Gottlieb’s interrogators enjoyed was the knowledge that if any ‘expendables’ died during their experiment, disposing of their bodies would be ‘no problem.’” The experiments failed to control any minds, except perhaps for Gottlieb’s, since he was convinced his research would yield results. “Gottlieb and his chemical warriors believed they could transform a persistent legend into reality,” Kinzer writes.

The unit eventually expanded its research, changed its name to MK-ULTRA and shifted to the United States, where Gottlieb worked with a sadistic narcotics officer in opening a “national security whorehouse” to dose unwitting victims being serviced by prostitutes on the C.I.A. payroll. (Proving that even spies have a sense of humor, the brothel “research” was informally called Operation Midnight Climax.) Drugging johns was easy, but when Gottlieb started dosing unwitting government colleagues the research hit turbulence. In what would give the program its lasting black eye, Frank Olson, an Army scientist working with MK-ULTRA who had been given LSD without his knowledge, jumped, or was possibly pushed, out of a hotel room window in New York in 1953.

Kinzer’s retelling of the MK-ULTRA story is unsparing in its gruesome details, but not overwrought. Those looking for entirely new revelations, however, won’t find them here — in part, because information from the surviving records has already come to light, first through the investigations of the Senate committee headed by Frank Church of Idaho in the mid-1970s, and then a few years later, in 1978, thanks to John Marks’s book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.” (Kinzer draws liberally from Marks and other secondary accounts, and occasionally one wishes he had cited more original source material.)

Gottlieb has previously been treated as a historical footnote, but Kinzer elevates him to his proper place as one of the C.I.A.’s most influential and despicable characters. Along with mind control, he was involved in a series of schemes to poison Fidel Castro. Kinzer also goes far beyond the story of Frank Olson, which is well-worn territory, covered most recently in Errol Morris’s docudrama “Wormwood.” Whether murdered or driven to suicide, Olson was a reluctant soldier in Gottlieb’s mind-control army. Yet his death has overshadowed the “expendables.” We just don’t know most of their names since Gottlieb destroyed the records.