(Mystery) Stephen Kinzer ”Sidney Gottlieb: The CIA’s Poisoner in Chief” pt. 1

[00:00:02] From the darkest reaches of space to the deepest corners of your mind. Welcome to From The Void.

[00:00:17] Winston Churchill once said,

[00:00:19] History is written by the victors. Meaning that our view sitting from the position of the ones in power isn't always objective.

[00:00:26] It's human nature to paint ourselves in the best light and our enemies in dark tones.

[00:00:31] This is certainly the case we're going to talk about today.

[00:00:34] The story we're about to tell really starts during World War II and continues to this very day.

[00:00:40] This is more than just a story about the secrets the American government kept during a time of war and later throughout the Cold War.

[00:00:47] It's about the man who has largely been erased from our history. A man who was at the center of it all.

[00:00:53] Many listening have no doubt heard of Project MKUltra,

[00:00:57] the U.S. government's top secret project to study mind control.

[00:01:00] But few have heard the name of the man in charge of it.

[00:01:03] Sidney Gottlieb.

[00:01:05] This week I welcome author Stephen Kinzer whose book, Poisoner in Chief, Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control,

[00:01:12] talks all about the mysterious CIA chemist who brought LSD to America and led experiments on human beings that rivaled anything our Nazi or Japanese counterparts had done during World War II.

[00:01:25] So welcome to this week's mystery.

[00:01:27] Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's Poisoner in Chief on From the Void.

[00:01:41] All right. Welcome to the podcast, Stephen Kinzer.

[00:01:44] Thank you so, so much for coming on the show.

[00:01:46] Always a pleasure. Good to be with you.

[00:01:48] Absolutely. So, so the book that we're here to talk about today, I think is absolutely fascinating and it's called Poisoner in Chief.

[00:01:55] And it's about a really fascinating individual that a lot of people didn't really know a whole lot about.

[00:02:00] And for good reason that we'll, we'll talk about, but how did you first become interested in this subject?

[00:02:06] And how did you first even figure out who this guy was?

[00:02:10] Well, you're right that Sidney Gottlieb, the subject of my book, lived in complete anonymity.

[00:02:19] Nobody knew that he even existed.

[00:02:21] In fact, when I was writing the biography of him, I thought, really, I was writing the biography of a person who didn't exist in many ways.

[00:02:31] I concluded through my research that Sidney Gottlieb was probably the most powerful, unknown American of the 20th century.

[00:02:42] He actually had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government.

[00:02:45] And I don't think many people have that.

[00:02:47] We'll get into that a little later.

[00:02:49] So how did I get into this story?

[00:02:53] I had written another book in which I discuss the CIA plot against Patrice Lumumba, who was the prime minister of the Congo in 1960.

[00:03:07] That plot involved the CIA sending poison from the United States to the Congo to be delivered to the CIA station chief so he could use it to kill the prime minister of that country, Lumumba.

[00:03:22] So this was a story that had turned up a few times.

[00:03:26] I didn't discover that this happened.

[00:03:29] But I started asking myself after I wrote that little paragraph or two, who would have brought the poison?

[00:03:36] Who would have carried it?

[00:03:38] I don't think there's ever been any other time in American history where an official of the U.S. government carried poison to another country for the purpose of killing the leader of that country.

[00:03:52] Who would they have sent?

[00:03:53] Probably some kind of a courier.

[00:03:56] But actually, that's not true.

[00:03:58] They sent the guy who actually made the poison, Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of the CIA chemical division.

[00:04:05] He made the poison.

[00:04:07] He flew to the Congo.

[00:04:09] He sat down with the CIA station chief and explained to him that he's supposed to use this to kill Lumumba.

[00:04:18] And in fact, in the memoir of the CIA station chief, he said, I looked at Gottlieb and said, Jesus H. Christ, who ordered this operation?

[00:04:27] And he said, President Eisenhower.

[00:04:30] So I began becoming a little bit intrigued with Gottlieb.

[00:04:35] He had a brief moment of notoriety after he left the CIA.

[00:04:40] It was determined that as the head of the chemical division of the CIA, he was the person who made the poisons that were used to try to kill Fidel Castro,

[00:04:52] Zhou Enlai, various other world leaders.

[00:04:54] Maybe they were used in other cases as well.

[00:04:58] So Sidney Gottlieb probably knew more about poison than anybody in the world.

[00:05:02] He had people extracting poisons from Alaskan butter clams and the innards of crocodiles.

[00:05:10] He was researching toxic plants.

[00:05:13] He was that's why I called my book Poisoner in Chief.

[00:05:16] He was the chief U.S. poisoner.

[00:05:18] So this is all that was really known about him.

[00:05:22] And the more I started to research, the more I realized that actually his job of making poisons to kill foreign leaders was just a detail.

[00:05:32] That's a job for a pharmacist.

[00:05:35] If Sidney Gottlieb was not there and the CIA needed poison, they would have found someone to do it.

[00:05:41] That's not such a big deal.

[00:05:42] But then I found out that Gottlieb was the conceiver and the director of the CIA project called MK Ultra.

[00:05:53] This was a project through which the CIA sought to find the secret of mind control.

[00:06:01] And in the search for mind control under Gottlieb's direction, MK Ultra was responsible for destroying a lot of lives and killing an undetermined number of people.

[00:06:14] So I began to realize that making the poisons was just a kind of a distraction.

[00:06:19] If you think you're mad at Gottlieb or you think he did something wrong because he made the poisons, you're missing the point.

[00:06:25] Now, MK Ultra was the complete child of Gottlieb's brain.

[00:06:31] It would have been completely different had he not been there.

[00:06:35] He ran it from the beginning to the end.

[00:06:38] And that is a much bigger story than just the fact that he knew which poisons to put into the vial to make a pill to kill Castro.

[00:06:46] That could have been done by plenty of people.

[00:06:48] But MK Ultra is a much bigger story.

[00:06:52] And as so is so often the case, the much bigger story got obscured by kind of a distraction.

[00:07:00] And I try to rebalance the story of Gottlieb's life and try to tell who was he and what was MK Ultra.

[00:07:11] And I can tell you, this is my 10th book.

[00:07:16] I've discovered and written a lot of things that surprised me and that may have shocked a lot of readers.

[00:07:23] But this is the first time I have been shocked.

[00:07:25] I still cannot wrap my mind around the idea that there was such a person as Sidney Gottlieb and there was such a project as MK Ultra.

[00:07:35] Yeah, I could not agree more.

[00:07:37] It's an absolutely fascinating book.

[00:07:39] And the meticulous level of research that you did to even write it, there were, I mean, countless moments where I was like, I can't believe these are things that, you know, that occur in horror movies or things that, you know, we can believe that the Nazis did this, but surely not the Americans.

[00:07:56] You know, like our hands are clean, but not so much.

[00:08:00] So before we dive into it, tell people about Sidney Gottlieb in and of himself, like was an interesting character, was not the typical sort of scientist or CIA man, as it were.

[00:08:12] So talk a little bit about who he was and what made him such an unusual character.

[00:08:17] Well, this really is a very interesting piece of the story.

[00:08:20] And when writing Poisoner in Chief, I was writing about MK Ultra, but also about Gottlieb and the way they fit together is very strange.

[00:08:29] So Sidney Gottlieb was the most accomplished torturer of his generation.

[00:08:37] He was responsible for ordering experiments that resulted in permanent damage or death to many people.

[00:08:44] So what was he like in his private life?

[00:08:46] Not what you would have expected.

[00:08:49] This guy was a family man, a community leader.

[00:08:54] He was interested in Zen Buddhism.

[00:08:57] He meditated.

[00:08:58] He wrote poetry.

[00:09:00] He grew his own vegetables.

[00:09:02] He got up before dawn to milk his goats instead of living in a ticky tacky development like a lot of federal civil servants in the 1950s.

[00:09:10] He lived in an eco cabin way out in the Virginia woods, even had an early version of solar power.

[00:09:19] He didn't want to use running water because he felt that was not ecologically sound.

[00:09:23] He's already thinking this in the 1950s, kind of a proto hippie.

[00:09:29] And so I used to ask myself, how can it be?

[00:09:33] How do you fit this together?

[00:09:35] What he was doing as his day job and the way he behaved in the rest of his life.

[00:09:41] I began to wonder if maybe there was some kind of a cloud over the bridges that connected Virginia to Washington, D.C.

[00:09:50] And that as he passed through this cloud, he left one identity behind and he assumed the other one.

[00:09:59] So one of the reasons that I think he was chosen for this job has to do with the unusual aspects of his background.

[00:10:08] So at this point in the early history of the CIA, almost all the senior officers came from the same closed aristocratic group.

[00:10:17] They were all people who came from rich families.

[00:10:20] They went to the same prep schools, the same colleges.

[00:10:23] They played at the same golf courses.

[00:10:25] They were in the same yacht clubs.

[00:10:27] They dated the same girls.

[00:10:28] They worked at the same investment banks or law firms in New York.

[00:10:32] That was the top of the CIA.

[00:10:35] Now, in the early 50s, when the CIA decided it should launch a no holds barred project to discover the secret of mind control, knowing that whoever directed this project was going to be drenched in blood and have to do a lot of terrible things.

[00:10:53] They didn't choose somebody from their own group.

[00:10:57] They chose somebody totally different.

[00:10:59] Sidney Gottlieb was Jewish.

[00:11:01] He had a limp.

[00:11:02] He stuttered.

[00:11:04] His parents were immigrants from Central Europe.

[00:11:07] He grew up in the Bronx, went to public schools.

[00:11:11] This was completely different from everybody else that ran the CIA.

[00:11:15] And I think that this had to do with why he was chosen for this job.

[00:11:21] They didn't want one of their own people to be soiled this way.

[00:11:25] And they may also have figured out that this could cause a lot of problems for the CIA in the future.

[00:11:32] And they might have to blame it all on the director of the project and say, we didn't know anything about it.

[00:11:37] Therefore, if you're going to throw somebody under the bus like that, it shouldn't be one of us.

[00:11:43] So Gottlieb being so much of an outsider, in addition to being a highly qualified chemist, was the ideal figure for that job.

[00:11:52] And he really did develop what you could call a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

[00:12:00] He loved to go folk dancing when he was in other countries.

[00:12:05] I have a letter of his where he writes to his wife, I've been in the Philippines and I got the great costumes and I learned some new Filipino dances.

[00:12:13] It sounds great. But at the same time, what was he doing in the Philippines?

[00:12:17] He was a requisitioning human bodies from the CIA station there that he could experiment on, including experimenting them to death.

[00:12:27] So he somehow managed to balance these in his mind.

[00:12:32] And I think that's what makes him such an interesting character.

[00:12:36] And it underlies Poisoner in Chief, my book. It's who he was and what he did and how did these fit together?

[00:12:45] Yeah, it's a fascinating study of compartmentalization, you know, and this ability of his to to live two completely different lives.

[00:12:55] And then you even highlight and we'll get to this later, but sort of his his life after his career in the CIA, which is you would not expect based on that biography, you know, that this was his career.

[00:13:09] So what's also interesting is sort of like the different sort of shifts that the CIA took in those early days.

[00:13:17] So there's this guy that you talk about named Ira Baldwin, who was really the guy who built the foundation of the program, but it had a very different direction at that point.

[00:13:24] And Baldwin's another guy that you mentioned has this sort of feeling of like I need to do my part for the for the war movement or for the government.

[00:13:34] And and of course, all this is taking place post World War Two, where we immediately launch into the Cold War with the Soviets.

[00:13:41] And there's it seems like a lot of this is sort of driven by paranoia because we don't really know what the Soviets know.

[00:13:48] They don't really know we know, but we're all sort of assuming that we're much further advanced than we actually are.

[00:13:53] And so it sort of propels us to to really launch into creating a bio biological sort of weapons program that eventually leads to what became ultimately this program that got Libra.

[00:14:07] So talk a little bit about the initial days in sort of gathering scientists post war, because you talk about Project Paperclip, which some people may be familiar with.

[00:14:17] But really was a fascinating study in sort of ethics in the sense that we have these scientists on both the German and Japanese side.

[00:14:28] And I learned some things from your book about the Japanese side that I was not aware of that are horrific.

[00:14:33] But the scientists who are operating during World War Two with no boundaries in terms of morality, you know, they're using, you know, prisoners and and and human beings to experiment on and advance their scientific discovery.

[00:14:52] And that way, these U.S. scientists are trying to grab them before the Soviets do.

[00:14:57] And so talk about like just that effort post war to sort of get these scientists first and sort of whitewash their their their their history in a way that, you know, we could sort of justify keeping them alive and keeping them out of prison, essentially.

[00:15:14] First of all, you have to understand the climate of the times in the early 1950s.

[00:15:20] Americans were told to believe and did believe that the Soviets could be at any moment ready to launch an attack that would destroy America and essentially in the prospect for meaningful life on Earth forever.

[00:15:36] This was really a widely held belief.

[00:15:40] Newspapers used to publish a little diagram of a clock that would show how long it was going to take for a nuclear missile to get to the United States from some base in the Soviet Union.

[00:15:52] And it would be like 70 minutes.

[00:15:54] It would go down to 60 minutes.

[00:15:56] And later it was 55 minutes.

[00:15:57] It was a real feeling of terror.

[00:15:59] There were air raid drills all the time and it was legally required to participate.

[00:16:03] You had to run off the street into your air raid shelter, which, of course, just furthers this impression that you're under imminent danger.

[00:16:10] So in this climate, the CIA, which had been created right after the Second World War, felt that the stakes were so high, unimaginably high.

[00:16:24] The whole future of humanity was at stake.

[00:16:27] Therefore, the loss of a few lives or even a few hundred lives would be a small price to pay if you could defend yourself against something like that.

[00:16:37] So commitment to some kind of a great cause is one of the best reasons to commit immoral acts.

[00:16:45] Patriotism is one of the most persuasive causes of all.

[00:16:49] And I think that's part of what motivated Gottlieb.

[00:16:52] He had not been able to serve in World War II because of his physical handicaps.

[00:16:57] I think this left him with a feeling that he wanted to contribute in some other way.

[00:17:02] And when he took over MKUltra or founded MKUltra, really, he joined the CIA as head of the chemical division.

[00:17:12] But that was just a kind of a cover for what the main work of the chemical division was, which turned out to be MKUltra.

[00:17:20] So Gottlieb began his work the way a scientist would.

[00:17:25] The first thing he decided was that before you can figure out how to place a new mind into someone's brain,

[00:17:37] you first have to destroy the mind that's in there.

[00:17:41] So the first phase of any research into this subject should be trying to figure out how to destroy a human mind and a human body and a human soul.

[00:17:52] What kinds of techniques could you use to do this?

[00:17:56] What kinds of poisons, what kinds of other tortures would result in that kind of horrific result?

[00:18:05] That brings him to step number two.

[00:18:08] As any good scientist would do when launching a research project,

[00:18:13] Gottlieb looked around to figure out what other research was already out there on which he could build.

[00:18:19] So who in the world is out there that knows how to torture people, how to destroy them and how to kill them?

[00:18:30] Who would have had any experience with this?

[00:18:32] Because, of course, the United States was not able to carry out experiments figuring out ways to kill people.

[00:18:39] And then that would have resulted in a lot of deaths if they were successful.

[00:18:42] So who would we have found that knows about these macabre subjects?

[00:18:48] The obvious answer was the Nazi doctors who had worked in the concentration camps.

[00:18:53] They were famous for their so-called medical experiments, which were actually just grotesque tortures.

[00:19:00] And as you pointed out, there was also a parallel project in Japan, which in some ways was even more horrific than anything the Nazis did in Germany.

[00:19:12] So it was Gottlieb's idea to hire these Nazi scientists and these Japanese scientists and get all their files, all their information.

[00:19:24] Some of them were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip.

[00:19:30] And they went through a process known as bleaching.

[00:19:33] So that meant that all the nasty things on their resume were taken out.

[00:19:37] If they were members of the SS, that was eliminated.

[00:19:40] And they would add things about how they were a great family person and loved their dog and so forth.

[00:19:45] So a number of scientists who had been working in Nazi concentration camps and in the big Japanese torture center in Manchuria were brought in to the CIA.

[00:19:57] And of course, those people who ran those projects in Germany and in Japan were subject to war crimes trials.

[00:20:07] The General Ishii in Japan who ran that project would have been hanged.

[00:20:11] They essentially told him either dig up all those documents that you've hidden with all the reports of your research and give them to us and come work for us or we're going to hang you.

[00:20:24] So it was a pretty easy choice.

[00:20:27] Now, while I was researching Poisoner in Chief, I found what I think may be the first ever CIA secret prison.

[00:20:38] It's a lovely chalet outside of Frankfurt in Germany.

[00:20:43] And it was there that the MKUltra scientists, so-called, brought their victims for these extended torture sessions.

[00:20:55] I went over there.

[00:20:56] I found, located the building.

[00:20:58] I wasn't the first one to notice this.

[00:21:00] There had been an article in the Spiegel, the German news magazine, about this place.

[00:21:05] They called it the CIA torture house.

[00:21:07] And in that article, it said there were deaths, but the number is unknown.

[00:21:12] So I was able to locate the house.

[00:21:14] And sure enough, the guy that now owns it is a young German entrepreneur who had bought the house and he was cutting it up into condos at that time.

[00:21:22] He was very open.

[00:21:23] And he took me down into the basement where he has his storage rooms.

[00:21:28] And he said, these rooms were the cells where the Nazi doctors with their MKUltra partners carried out medical experiments that were actually just continuations of the experiments they had been doing just a few years earlier down the road a few miles in the Nazi concentration camps.

[00:21:52] And then he told me, older people in this neighborhood, they all know what this house was.

[00:21:59] They know what happened here.

[00:22:00] And they have told me that the bodies of people who were experimented to death were buried in the forest right around here in places that are now covered over with apartment blocks and shopping malls.

[00:22:13] So Gottlieb was able to go to Germany, among other countries, go to the CIA station and ask for a certain number of bodies.

[00:22:23] And they would bring him what they called expendables.

[00:22:28] Maybe people who they suspected of being enemy agents or refugees who had fled and had no known connection to anybody or whoever they decided to send.

[00:22:36] It wasn't interesting to Gottlieb who they were.

[00:22:38] And then he would subject them to these horrific experiments, which amounted to extreme torture.

[00:22:45] And the whole idea behind that was to try to find out how to destroy human beings.

[00:22:53] For example, one of the Nazi scientists who came to lecture at CIA headquarters in Washington had as the subject of his lecture sarin gas.

[00:23:05] It's one of the most toxic poison gases.

[00:23:08] And he lectured about exactly how much sarin it takes to kill a person and at what strength and what kinds of sarin would not kill someone, how much sarin would kill someone.

[00:23:21] He even had a section on infants.

[00:23:24] If you wanted to kill children, do you still have to use as much sarin as it would be to kill an adult or would it be a lower dose?

[00:23:32] So they knew all this because they carried out all these experiments.

[00:23:36] And this was now information that was being delivered at a lecture to so-called scientists at the CIA.

[00:23:43] So there's no doubt that MKUltra was built on the foundation of the so-called medicine, which was really medical torture,

[00:23:53] that was practiced in Nazi concentration camps and in similar installations run by the Japanese.

[00:24:01] Yeah. And I think the interesting point to note there is that they did this.

[00:24:06] They set these places up intentionally outside of the United States, both in areas of Asia and in Europe for a particular reason.

[00:24:14] You know, they weren't bound by the laws of the United States.

[00:24:17] And so they could continue to carry out these atrocities without, you know, any repercussion.

[00:24:24] Yeah. So Gottlieb's experiments could really be broken down into two categories, as you suggest.

[00:24:31] The ones that he carried out inside the United States, which had some limitations,

[00:24:36] and then the ones that were carried out outside the United States.

[00:24:39] We don't know of any cases inside the U.S. where people were killed as a result of MKUltra experiments.

[00:24:46] But there were certainly cases like that in other countries.

[00:24:50] So what kinds of tortures did Gottlieb devise?

[00:24:56] First of all, he was mainly interested in chemicals because he was a chemist.

[00:25:00] And he mastered all sorts of chemical substances that could be toxic in one way or another.

[00:25:10] And he would mix them in new ways.

[00:25:13] He would try different combinations of drugs.

[00:25:16] Plus, he would use sensory deprivation, extreme heat and cold, extreme noise, bright lights.

[00:25:25] For example, we have a protocol of one experiment that was carried out in that safe house in Germany,

[00:25:32] in which, so far as we can tell, the victim was given an overdose of sedatives to place him in a comatose state.

[00:25:43] Once he was in a coma, he would be given an overdose of amphetamines to get him into a hyperactive state.

[00:25:50] While he was in the transition phase from coma to hyperactivity, he would be given heavy doses of electroshock,

[00:25:59] then locked inside a deprivation cabin, which was something like a coffin, and left there for a while.

[00:26:06] And the idea would be then take him out the next day and see if he has really degenerated into a blabbering vegetable.

[00:26:14] That which was, of course, the purpose of the experiment, to find out how do you destroy a mind?

[00:26:19] We'll get later to the question of how you put a new mind in.

[00:26:23] But first, we have to figure out how to destroy a mind.

[00:26:26] And those are the kinds of experiments that Gottlieb conducted in Europe and in East Asia.

[00:26:33] Now, in the United States, he conducted a whole other series of investigations, probably not as murderous, but also quite horrific.

[00:26:45] One of the things that Gottlieb did while running MKUltra was make contact with prison wardens and prison doctors.

[00:26:54] Of course, prisoners are a good source of experiment subjects.

[00:27:00] They're 100 percent under the control of the jailers.

[00:27:05] So we have one protocol about an experiment that happened at the U.S. prison in Lexington, Kentucky, which was one place where MKUltra was quite active.

[00:27:19] In this experiment, seven African-American inmates were segregated and placed into a cell.

[00:27:27] And then, without being told anything about what was happening, they were fed what was described as double or triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days.

[00:27:40] Now, we don't have the result.

[00:27:43] Did that really destroy their minds?

[00:27:45] We don't know.

[00:27:46] But my amateur guess is yes.

[00:27:49] I bet it did.

[00:27:50] And I've asked myself, what would have happened to those seven guys?

[00:27:55] Did they die?

[00:27:57] Did they ever have any idea of what had happened to them?

[00:28:01] We have another interesting case that happened in Georgia.

[00:28:05] That's the famous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger.

[00:28:09] In the 1950s, he was sent to a federal prison in Georgia for truck hijacking and other crimes that he committed in the Boston area.

[00:28:18] And there, he was approached by the prison doctor and told that there was an experimental project underway to try to find the cause of schizophrenia and a cure for it.

[00:28:30] And in order to help humanity in this way, Whitey Bulger might reduce his sentence or get better treatment if he would agree to volunteer to try to find this cure for schizophrenia.

[00:28:44] But as he later figured out, all they wanted to do was pour large amounts of LSD into him to find out how someone would react.

[00:28:53] And he certainly wouldn't have been the only person in that prison who was subject to those.

[00:28:59] But later on, Whitey Bulger wrote about this.

[00:29:02] And he's serious.

[00:29:03] He never got over it.

[00:29:05] Like he said, for the rest of his life, he was never able to sleep in the dark.

[00:29:08] He had to keep the lights on all the time.

[00:29:10] He describes the horrible things that he saw while he was in that cell and being given these massive LSD doses.

[00:29:16] And he even wrote that he was afraid to tell what he was seeing because he thought, they're going to think I'm so crazy.

[00:29:23] I'll never get out of here for the rest of my life.

[00:29:26] So those were some very horrific experiments.

[00:29:30] Gottlieb was working with doctors in a number of places who participated willingly in his medical torture projects.

[00:29:39] But there was another side to Gottlieb's fascination with chemicals, and it focused on LSD.

[00:29:47] He was fascinated with LSD.

[00:29:50] He was really the first LSD maven.

[00:29:53] In 1953, Sidney Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD from the chemical manufacturers in Switzerland.

[00:30:05] Actually, Sandoz Company was happy to get rid of it.

[00:30:08] It was a problem for them, and they shipped their entire inventory to Washington.

[00:30:14] So it was on Gottlieb's laboratory.

[00:30:16] He used LSD alone and in overdosing and in combination with other drugs in many experiments.

[00:30:23] But he also wanted to know how ordinary people would respond to LSD knowing what it is and being in a clinical setting.

[00:30:34] And so since the CIA does not have clinics and hospitals all over the country, it had to find some.

[00:30:43] Gottlieb established a couple of bogus medical foundations with their own letterheads.

[00:30:50] He would then write to various hospitals and clinics around the United States offering them what was actually a pretty good deal financially.

[00:30:57] He said very openly, there's this new psychoactive drug.

[00:31:01] It's called LSD.

[00:31:02] Our foundation is interested in learning about its effects.

[00:31:07] And if you would like to participate, we send you the LSD.

[00:31:13] And all you'll have to do is advertise in the newspaper, tell people exactly what it is,

[00:31:18] and then administer the LSD to them in a clinical setting and write us reports.

[00:31:23] And we pay you handsomely for this.

[00:31:26] So overnight, a whole new market grew up for these kinds of LSD experiments.

[00:31:32] Now, who were among the very first people to sign up in California to go in and try this new drug?

[00:31:40] One of the first was Allen Ginsberg, the radical poet who later went on to become a great guru of LSD.

[00:31:48] Another one was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for The Grateful Dead, who then, of course, brought the LSD home,

[00:31:56] turned on the rest of The Grateful Dead and everybody that followed them.

[00:32:00] Another one of the very first volunteers for these experiments was Ken Kesey, who wrote that counterculture Bible,

[00:32:08] One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

[00:32:10] In fact, when I was researching my book, Poisoner in Chief, I found an interview with Ken Kesey in which he said,

[00:32:18] it's true that I got the material for writing my book while working in this mental hospital,

[00:32:24] but that's not the reason that I got that job.

[00:32:27] The reason I wanted that job was to go into that hospital and steal the LSD so I could bring it home to all my friends.

[00:32:36] So essentially, Sidney Gottlieb was the person who introduced LSD into the United States.

[00:32:44] I found an interview with John Lennon in which he was asked about LSD.

[00:32:49] And he said, we must always remember to thank the CIA.

[00:32:54] Now, he had never heard of Sidney Gottlieb.

[00:32:57] Nobody had.

[00:32:58] But if he had, he would have said, we must always remember to thank Sidney Gottlieb.

[00:33:04] So the irony of the whole story is that the drug that Gottlieb and the CIA hoped would give them the power to control the world

[00:33:15] actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion which was aimed at destroying everything the CIA stands for.

[00:33:29] Thank you for listening to From the Void.

[00:33:30] We'll be back next week with the conclusion of Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's Poisoner in Chief.

[00:33:35] But until then, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and tell a friend.

[00:33:39] And until next time, you've been listening to From the Void.