For two decades he ran a CIA programme aimed at nothing less than control of the human mind . Its tools were mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD. Its subjects, almost all of them unwitting, were society's outcasts: prostitutes and their clients, mental patients, convicted criminals - people, in the words of one of Gottlieb's colleagues, "who could not fight back" . At the end of it all, just as the conspiracy theorists would have predicted, Gottlieb himself pronounced that the entire exercise had been a waste of time.



The project, called MKUltra, began in 1953, two years after Gottlieb had joined the agency as chief of its technical services division. It was a period when paranoia ruled at Langley, the Virginia headquarters of the CIA. At home, McCarthyism was at its apogee. Abroad, the Soviet Union and increasingly China were regarded as mortal threats. America had lost its nuclear monopoly, while field operations against Moscow would soon be thrown into turmoil by the obsession of James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, that the agency had been penetrated by a mole at the highest levels.



Its leadership was also fixated by the fear that the great Communist powers were perfecting techniques of mind control - The Manchurian Candidate made real. The CIA, therefore, had to get its blow in first. Enter Sidney Gottlieb.



Gottlieb's contribution was to oversee MKUltra. From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. In all the agency conducted 149 mind-control experiments. At least one "participant" died as a result of the experiments and several others went mad .



Gottlieb's inventiveness also ran to a variety of assassination plots against various foreign targets. He perfected a contaminated handkerchief for use against an Iraqi colonel, poisoned presents that were to eliminate the troublesome Fidel Castro, and a poisoned dart designed to get rid of Patrice Lumumba, Communist sympathiser and leader of the Congo. Needless to say, none of the devices worked.



Gottlieb retired in 1972, having concluded that all his work had been useless. That however did not deter the CIA from awarding him its highest honour, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, before it destroyed the bulk of the MKUltra files.



