(Mystery) Stephen Kinzer ”Sidney Gottlieb: The CIA’s Poisoner in Chief” pt. 2

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

[00:00:16] John Williamson Welcome to From The Void. I'm your host, John Williamson, and we're back with the conclusion to my interview with Stephen Kinzer on his incredible book, Poisoner in Chief, Sidney Gottlieb, and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

[00:00:28] Stephen is an author, journalist, and academic who has written multiple books, including Bitter Fruit, The Story of the American Coup of Guatemala, All the Shah's Men and American Coup, and The Roots of Middle East Terror, The True Flag, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and The Birth of the American Empire, and of course, the book we talk about on today's episode, all about the mysterious man behind the CIA's mind control studies.

[00:00:52] John Williamson So welcome to this week's episode, part two of Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's Poisoner in Chief on From The Void.

[00:01:12] John Williamson That's so, that's such a fascinating part of the book too. And the other interesting thing too is sort of the precursor to MKUltra are all these studies because as you mentioned in the book, Gottlieb, you know, there are some other techniques or tactics that were being experimented with like hypnosis and some other things.

[00:01:30] But as you said, he was really interested in the use of drugs. He thought that was really the key.

[00:01:36] And so they, excuse me, they start out with trying some other ones. They tried marijuana and cocaine and even heroin. The marijuana results were, I had a good chuckle in your book about that.

[00:01:49] Mostly made their, lowered their inhibitions and made them laugh a lot. Yeah, that's pretty accurate.

[00:01:54] Major breakthrough in scientific discovery.

[00:01:58] John Williamson So like, obviously they go through these other drugs that clearly did not achieve the results that they were looking for.

[00:02:04] But he really focused in on LSD and noticed that LSD had been around.

[00:02:09] As you mentioned, Sandoz, who if I remember correctly, is also the company that largely supplied the Nazi army with amphetamines during the war.

[00:02:20] Largely produced LSD at the time.

[00:02:23] And they really sort of didn't really dive too much more deeply into LSD and the uses of LSD.

[00:02:30] And so as you mentioned in the book, he buys up all of the stock that they have and then tasks a local or I should say US-based pharmaceutical company with trying to crack the code and figure out how this is made.

[00:02:44] And so Eli Lilly sort of takes this over.

[00:02:47] Not only Eli Lilly, but of course, a lot of amateur chemists out in California were able to do the same thing.

[00:02:54] And the next thing you know, LSD was an international phenomenon.

[00:02:59] So all of this was based on a false assumption.

[00:03:06] This is why was there an MKUltra?

[00:03:09] Why did the CIA want to do this?

[00:03:12] It was for a particular reason.

[00:03:15] So I asked myself, and in the book I talk about this question of what made the CIA believe that there's such a thing as mind control?

[00:03:24] I think there are two reasons.

[00:03:26] There's one long cultural reason, which I think has to do with all the books and all the movies and all the stories that these people would have grown up with.

[00:03:34] There's Sherlock Holmes stories about people being hypnotized and there's so many movies you see of someone drop a pill into someone's drink.

[00:03:42] And the next thing you know, that person is kind of a zombie and does everything you say.

[00:03:45] So there was a kind of cultural conditioning.

[00:03:48] They didn't stop to think that actually these people are all fiction writers.

[00:03:52] OK, they're screenplay writers.

[00:03:53] That's not science.

[00:03:55] But in their mind, I think maybe not consciously, but slowly it came to their belief that this was real.

[00:04:04] What fiction writers could fantasize, scientists could make real.

[00:04:09] So that was the background.

[00:04:10] But then there were two particular cases right after the end of the Second World War that terrified the CIA because, as far as CIA officers understood, they proved that the Soviets or the communists, the Chinese maybe, had cracked that code and figured out the secret of mind control.

[00:04:33] If that's true, it's a huge weapon in anybody's hands.

[00:04:37] If you know how to control the minds of other people and make them do what you want, then the prize would be nothing less than global mastery.

[00:04:46] So this terrified the CIA.

[00:04:49] What led them to believe this?

[00:04:51] There were these two episodes.

[00:04:53] First was a show trial that was carried out in Budapest in Hungary.

[00:04:57] The Roman Catholic bishop, who was fiercely anti-communist, had been arrested.

[00:05:02] And after several months in prison, he was put on trial.

[00:05:06] During the trial, he confessed to crimes which he obviously had not committed.

[00:05:12] And it unfolded like a normal Soviet show trial.

[00:05:16] But back at the CIA, when they watched that video, that's not what they focused on, what he said.

[00:05:23] It was how he looked.

[00:05:25] They said he had a glazed look in his eyes and that he spoke in a monotone.

[00:05:31] It later turned out that he had been abused with the same techniques that jailers have been using forever, like sleep deprivation and intense questioning and that kind of thing.

[00:05:42] But the CIA didn't believe that.

[00:05:44] They thought somebody else is talking through the mouth of this cardinal.

[00:05:51] And that shows you they are way ahead of us.

[00:05:55] Next thing you know, they're going to take over the minds of U.S. senators and presidents.

[00:06:01] So that was episode number one.

[00:06:03] Then it came to the episode about the U.S. prisoners of war who had been held in Korea during the Korean War.

[00:06:11] After the war ended and the armistice was signed, those prisoners were released.

[00:06:16] It later turned out that a number of them had written declarations, first of all, criticizing life in the United States, especially racism in the United States,

[00:06:26] and described a lot of troubles that the United States faced.

[00:06:29] And secondly, several of them confessed to committing war crimes in Korea while they were fighting for the Americans,

[00:06:36] including carrying out biological warfare by dropping poison insects and things like that into North Korea.

[00:06:44] Now, the United States has always denied that it ever did those kind of things.

[00:06:47] So the conclusion that came back at the CIA was these guys had been brainwashed.

[00:06:56] A word, by the way, that was coined by a writer who was a CIA contractor.

[00:07:01] That concept sounded great.

[00:07:03] It fit right in with what the CIA stereotype was.

[00:07:07] As a number of these prisoners were being brought back to freedom, many of them went by rail through China.

[00:07:15] They went through northern China.

[00:07:17] That's the province of Manchuria.

[00:07:19] And the CIA got this idea that maybe it was during that trip that some kind of drink or some kind of sprays,

[00:07:26] whatever techniques they had developed for mind control, was administered to these soldiers.

[00:07:30] And that's where we get this concept, the Manchurian candidate.

[00:07:34] It's because these soldiers who were thought to have been brainwashed had gone through Manchuria.

[00:07:40] And at the CIA, they made some kind of a connection.

[00:07:42] So they believed that these episodes proved that the Soviets were on the brink of achieving this spectacular breakthrough.

[00:07:52] That made them all the more panicky and all the more willing to support what Gottlieb was doing.

[00:07:59] But another interesting fact is that they didn't want to know what Gottlieb was doing.

[00:08:05] The higher ups at the CIA, like Alan Dulles, the director of the CIA, I don't think ever wanted to hear about what Gottlieb was doing.

[00:08:14] And that was true for others at the CIA.

[00:08:16] They all understood that he was torturing a lot of people.

[00:08:19] He was doing awful things and he was probably killing people.

[00:08:21] And that's exactly what they don't want to hear.

[00:08:24] You know, in the CIA culture and in the culture of all secret services, ignorance can be an asset.

[00:08:32] There's a lot of things you just don't want to know.

[00:08:34] So you don't have to say it.

[00:08:37] And the other benefit of not knowing is that you could at some later date say, I had no idea what he was doing.

[00:08:47] He went crazy.

[00:08:48] And actually, that's exactly what they did.

[00:08:52] Later on in the 1970s, the family of one of the victims of MKUltra was granted an audience with William Colby, the CIA director.

[00:09:02] And he told them, some of our people were out of control in those days.

[00:09:08] There was a lack of supervision.

[00:09:11] That's completely true.

[00:09:12] But the lack of supervision was intentional to allow him 20 years later to say, well, we didn't know what he was doing.

[00:09:20] That's the easiest way not to know what someone's doing is to tell them, don't tell me what you're doing.

[00:09:25] And that's exactly how MKUltra was compartmentalized within the CIA.

[00:09:30] And it also shows you the total control that Gottlieb exercised over that project.

[00:09:36] If they had hired someone else, it might have been a very different project.

[00:09:39] But Gottlieb took it to these bizarre, extreme lengths, which perhaps some other chemists might not have done.

[00:09:48] Yeah, and you point out something in the book that I think also obviously contributed to it.

[00:09:53] There was this perfect storm politically of Eisenhower getting elected, who was sort of an advocate,

[00:10:01] and then also placing certain people in certain positions that allowed sort of this free reign,

[00:10:05] with Dulles ascending to the top of the CIA, and then his brother being placed as Secretary of State,

[00:10:12] which sort of allowed them to continue to carry out these experiments abroad.

[00:10:16] And so really it's like this cocktail that just allowed him to increase his reach

[00:10:23] and his ability to conduct even more wide-reaching experiments.

[00:10:27] So talk about that a little bit.

[00:10:29] And as you mentioned, too, you touched on the fact that they sort of outsourced a lot of the actual experimenting itself.

[00:10:37] And so you have prisoners and you've got the, quote, expendables abroad.

[00:10:43] But then you also have people being unwittingly dosed here in the States.

[00:10:48] You've got Gottlieb even taking LSD himself.

[00:10:51] And so a lot of just dosing happening all around.

[00:10:56] So talk about that a little bit.

[00:10:58] It's true.

[00:10:59] Gottlieb, by his own account, took LSD more than 200 times.

[00:11:04] Maybe he was a spiritual voyager.

[00:11:06] Maybe he wanted to know what the effects were.

[00:11:10] I wondered if maybe he came up with the idea for some of these bizarre extreme experiments

[00:11:18] while he was dripping on acid.

[00:11:20] And even after I finished that book, when I did my Poisoner-in-Chief book tour,

[00:11:26] somebody asked me in an interview when I said that,

[00:11:28] what about was he using LSD while he was watching the people squirming and dying?

[00:11:35] And this is almost too much to contemplate.

[00:11:39] You're quite right about the confluence of forces at that moment.

[00:11:44] President Eisenhower was a pretty tough guy behind that smile.

[00:11:47] He was a great believer in covert action and had no problem ordering the assassination of foreign leaders,

[00:11:55] which he did.

[00:11:57] As far as we know, no other president before him had done that.

[00:12:03] And there was also this wonderful connection between the CIA and the State Department,

[00:12:08] because the head of the CIA was Alan Dulles,

[00:12:12] and the Secretary of State was his older brother, John Foster Dulles.

[00:12:16] So you could be sure if you were running the CIA that there was never going to be any interference

[00:12:20] or any problem coming from the State Department.

[00:12:24] You mentioned unwitting victims.

[00:12:28] This is another thing that Gottlieb did, an extreme of MKUltra inside the United States.

[00:12:35] Gottlieb actually set up a bordello in San Francisco

[00:12:39] and hired a number of girls to bring their clients to this apartment

[00:12:45] that he had decorated in a kind of sexy French style.

[00:12:51] And then the girls would give their clients a drink.

[00:12:55] And in that drink would be whatever combination of chemicals

[00:12:58] that Gottlieb wanted to test that week.

[00:13:01] And then there would be somebody sitting behind a two-way mirror

[00:13:06] watching what was happening.

[00:13:08] So who was that guy?

[00:13:09] It was not a psychologist or a medical doctor.

[00:13:13] It was an overweight drug agent who sat on a portable toilet

[00:13:19] while drinking martinis out of a pitcher

[00:13:22] and trying to write down what he saw.

[00:13:25] So to call that science would really be quite a stretch.

[00:13:29] And then there's a kind of a footnote to him.

[00:13:32] So Gottlieb established this national security whorehouse in San Francisco.

[00:13:40] And as I was researching the book, I found some depositions by the guy who was sort of the number

[00:13:48] two person running that operation in San Francisco.

[00:13:51] And he was very forthcoming.

[00:13:53] And one of the things he said was that every time Sidney came out to look at the operation,

[00:13:59] he wanted to get a girl.

[00:14:01] He wanted to get girls right away.

[00:14:02] And I always supplied him with some of my girls.

[00:14:05] And the girls were so nice.

[00:14:07] They never charged him.

[00:14:08] They all did this as a favor to me.

[00:14:10] But he was sexually crazed, said the guy in his deposition.

[00:14:17] So this made me think that maybe the whole reason for setting up that project in San Francisco

[00:14:23] was just to give Gottlieb a place to get off.

[00:14:26] And maybe it certainly worked if that was the purpose.

[00:14:29] So again, he would have then flown back to Washington, gone off to his cabin in Virginia,

[00:14:35] hugged his wife and worked on his little proto-solar panels and made sure that his vegetables

[00:14:41] were pure.

[00:14:42] It shows the disconnect.

[00:14:45] And so I had to ask myself as I was completing this book a question that I guess you asked

[00:14:51] at the beginning.

[00:14:52] And it's one of the first questions you ask when you understand who is Gottlieb and what

[00:14:56] is MKUltra?

[00:14:57] How could you put the two of them together?

[00:15:00] How could Gottlieb, this creative, compassionate human being, have justified to himself a career

[00:15:10] in brutal torture?

[00:15:13] We don't know.

[00:15:14] Well, he never spoke about it.

[00:15:17] He refused interviews after he retired.

[00:15:20] So I decided while I was writing Poisoner in Chief that I would try to locate one of his

[00:15:26] surviving adult children.

[00:15:28] And I found the guy, his son, who had a fine career.

[00:15:33] I think he became state archivist in Wisconsin.

[00:15:35] And so I wrote him an email and I told him, I want to talk to you about your father.

[00:15:40] I didn't hear back.

[00:15:42] So I began using other channels.

[00:15:45] I tried Facebook.

[00:15:46] I tried registered mail.

[00:15:48] I tried FedEx, everything that I could do to get to him.

[00:15:52] Never any reply.

[00:15:53] So I decided I'm just going to go out and doorstop him, as we say in journalism.

[00:15:58] Just go sit out there and grab him.

[00:15:59] And I was going to fly to Madison, Wisconsin and just go grab him.

[00:16:02] But then I, in the course of my interviewing, came across somebody who was very close to

[00:16:08] the family, although not a member.

[00:16:10] And this person said to me, forget about trying to get Gottlieb's son to talk because after

[00:16:18] Gottlieb died, his widow called the four children together and made them promise never, as long

[00:16:26] as they lived, ever to speak to anyone about their father or what he did.

[00:16:32] So she said, don't expect ever to hear back from him.

[00:16:35] So that at least saved me a trip out to Wisconsin.

[00:16:39] Nonetheless, it didn't give me the material that I needed to definitively say how he dealt

[00:16:45] with this contradiction.

[00:16:46] So I was left to my own speculation.

[00:16:50] So I essentially lived with Sidney Gottlieb for a couple of years while I was writing this

[00:16:55] book in the very same room, actually, from which I'm doing this interview.

[00:16:59] It was it's pretty intense.

[00:17:00] And I got to know him probably as well as anybody outside his own family.

[00:17:05] So here's one possible explanation for how Gottlieb might have justified in his own mind

[00:17:15] carrying out these horrific projects while still remaining a true humanist in his own eyes.

[00:17:23] Gottlieb might have thought this.

[00:17:27] I'm an unconventional person.

[00:17:29] I don't live like most people.

[00:17:31] But because this is America, that's possible.

[00:17:34] We have a free society in which people like me can go off and live the way they like and

[00:17:41] be different.

[00:17:42] It's the opposite in the Soviet Union.

[00:17:45] Everyone is an automaton.

[00:17:47] There is no possibility of meaningful life in that system.

[00:17:51] If the Soviets take over the United States, which seems quite likely unimminent, the possibility

[00:17:58] that a person like me could exist will disappear.

[00:18:01] We'll all be automatons.

[00:18:03] So in order to defend the possibility of individual expression and fulfilling life, you have to carry

[00:18:13] out these experiments to protect ourselves against the devastation of our society and our

[00:18:21] lives that would result from a Soviet takeover.

[00:18:24] That might be the way that he justified it to himself.

[00:18:27] The odd thing, of course, is that at the very end, Gottlieb admitted that there's no such

[00:18:34] thing as mind control.

[00:18:35] He had psychologists telling him this during the 1950s.

[00:18:39] But he threw those letters out because of what we call confirmation bias.

[00:18:44] You always want to listen to the people that confirm what you already believe.

[00:18:47] And you scorn those who want to contradict you.

[00:18:52] So I think Gottlieb was right.

[00:18:56] Certainly nobody knew more about the possibility of mind control around 1960 in the world than

[00:19:02] Sidney Gottlieb.

[00:19:03] So I take his word for it.

[00:19:04] There's no such thing as mind control.

[00:19:06] You cannot make someone do something that's fundamentally against their inner nature.

[00:19:12] That's imagination.

[00:19:13] He was right.

[00:19:14] But he was right 60 years ago.

[00:19:20] Now, when we think about the tremendous advances that have been made in neuroscience, artificial

[00:19:28] intelligence, cyber technology, I wonder if that's still true.

[00:19:34] And I'm not going to live to see it, but I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years there's

[00:19:38] another Stephen Kinzer who writes a book that rips the veil away from horrific experiments that

[00:19:45] were going on back in the 20-teens or 2020s.

[00:19:48] It's very possible.

[00:19:49] The idea that nobody in the American or Russian or French or Chinese Secret Service is trying

[00:19:59] to figure out how to use these techniques to control people's minds seems a little far-fetched.

[00:20:04] So Gottlieb was right.

[00:20:06] There's no such thing as mind control.

[00:20:08] As long as we're in 1960.

[00:20:09] Well, we're not in 1960 anymore.

[00:20:12] So I close Poisoner in Chief with a reflection on whether there might now be going on experiments

[00:20:21] or research projects into mind control that are just as secret and would be just as shocking

[00:20:26] as the ones I write about in Poisoner in Chief.

[00:20:30] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:20:31] And what's interesting is the last days or years of his life, he seems to almost be living

[00:20:40] a life of trying to make up for his sins, so to speak.

[00:20:48] You know, it's interesting because he does get called back.

[00:20:50] You mentioned in the book, he gets called back, I believe, by Congress to sort of testify.

[00:20:56] And he does to some degree, but he never really is held accountable for anything that he did

[00:21:02] during his career with the CIA.

[00:21:04] So talk about that.

[00:21:05] What was he doing?

[00:21:06] Because he seemed like almost like, oh, this guy's a Boy Scout.

[00:21:09] You know, he's this is a decent human being who's working with the poorest of the poor,

[00:21:13] the sickest of the sick, and does not seem to jive with what we now know about his prior career.

[00:21:19] Really, Gottlieb's post-CIA life is another piece of the mystery of his story.

[00:21:29] So after Gottlieb was essentially pushed out of the CIA in the mid-70s as a result of scandals

[00:21:37] that started with Watergate and led to various investigations of the CIA, he didn't do what

[00:21:44] a normal federal bureaucrat would do because he wasn't like that.

[00:21:48] He had a completely different mindset.

[00:21:50] So his wife had been brought up in India where her father was a missionary.

[00:21:58] So they decided to sell their house in Virginia, sell everything they own, and just set off

[00:22:04] to help people in the world.

[00:22:06] They traveled on tramp steamers and they wound up in India where they went to work in a hospital

[00:22:12] where they were treating the poorest of the poor.

[00:22:15] And that was what Gottlieb wanted to do because he was such a decent human being.

[00:22:20] Then one day, he got a message that he probably was dreading, and it said, we've got bad news

[00:22:28] for you.

[00:22:29] Somebody here in Washington has figured out that you exist and they want to talk to you.

[00:22:35] So Gottlieb had to go back to Washington.

[00:22:37] He had a series of secret testimonies, some under other names.

[00:22:42] And he was only questioned about his involvement in assassination plots.

[00:22:50] The senators did not know much about MKUltra and also probably didn't want to go into it.

[00:22:59] What they did know about it led them to believe that that was not a subject they wanted to go into.

[00:23:04] So Gottlieb was never held accountable.

[00:23:07] He was never questioned about MKUltra.

[00:23:10] But a couple of his victims, after the first revelations in the 1970s that there had been

[00:23:19] such a thing as MKUltra, came after him.

[00:23:24] There was one case in particular of a guy who had been an art student in Paris, and he had

[00:23:33] been brought into a cafe, and a guy with a limp, who seems to have been Gottlieb, brought

[00:23:39] him a drink.

[00:23:40] And he drank it.

[00:23:42] And after that, he went crazy.

[00:23:45] It later turned out that this guy had hepatitis, and he was being treated in the American hospital

[00:23:50] in Paris, which had a relationship with the CIA.

[00:23:53] And it also later turned out that the CIA was interested in knowing whether LSD could be

[00:23:59] especially powerful for people that had hepatitis.

[00:24:02] So they might have asked the people in the hospital, tell us someone.

[00:24:05] They found this guy, an American arts student.

[00:24:08] They fed it to him.

[00:24:09] And he had a complete mental breakdown.

[00:24:11] He never worked again.

[00:24:13] He had to spend months locked up in his apartment.

[00:24:15] He told his girlfriend never to call him, never to see him again.

[00:24:18] Finally, the relatives came to rescue him.

[00:24:21] He lived the rest of his life as a street person in New York.

[00:24:24] He never had another romantic relationship.

[00:24:26] He never had a job.

[00:24:28] But in the mid-70s, his sister called him and said, you won't believe what I just saw on

[00:24:33] TV.

[00:24:33] There was a program.

[00:24:35] And she went on to talk about the few things that had been revealed.

[00:24:39] About MKUltra.

[00:24:39] And she said, this is what happened to you.

[00:24:42] And they figured out that, yes, he had been a victim of MKUltra.

[00:24:46] So they hired a lawyer and they started a lawsuit.

[00:24:50] This was in the 1970s.

[00:24:54] And the lawsuit was dragged out and dragged out.

[00:24:57] And then the guy died.

[00:24:59] However, his sister continued the lawsuit.

[00:25:04] And it got to the point where Gottlieb was going to be put on trial.

[00:25:10] And he was going to be asked, perhaps not simply, did he put LSD in somebody's drink in Paris?

[00:25:17] But what was MKUltra?

[00:25:19] What did you do?

[00:25:20] And just as he was about to go to trial, he died.

[00:25:26] Now, when I was writing Poisoner in Chief, I figured out that that lawyer was still alive well into his 90s.

[00:25:32] I found him on Long Island.

[00:25:34] I went out to see him.

[00:25:36] He has a garage full of documents, some of which were very helpful to me.

[00:25:40] And we talked about Gottlieb's death right before the trial.

[00:25:44] And he said, I think he killed himself.

[00:25:47] I think that he did not want to be the instrument by which all of this would become public,

[00:25:55] that would devastate the image of the CIA in the United States all over the world.

[00:26:00] Of course, there was nobody anywhere in the world who could invent poisons better than Gottlieb that could never be detected.

[00:26:07] Gottlieb died.

[00:26:08] There was no funeral.

[00:26:10] We don't know where he was buried.

[00:26:11] There was no autopsy.

[00:26:14] He was cremated immediately.

[00:26:16] So nobody knows.

[00:26:18] But I've spoken to other people, including his former chief of staff, who now lives in retirement in South Carolina,

[00:26:24] who tell me it sounds logical.

[00:26:27] You don't know, but maybe it was true that in the end, Gottlieb killed himself so that he would take the secrets of MKUltra to his grave.

[00:26:37] And there they remained until I wrote Poisoner in Chief.

[00:26:40] Now, I should finish by saying this.

[00:26:42] My book, Poisoner in Chief, definitely tells more about Gottlieb and more about MKUltra than any book that's ever been written.

[00:26:50] And there's a very small number of others that are on the subject.

[00:26:53] But even my book, I'm sure, contains only a small percentage of what MKUltra was and what Sidney Gottlieb did.

[00:27:05] I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg.

[00:27:07] When Gottlieb and his boss, Richard Helms, at the CIA were both being forced out together, they agreed that the records from MKUltra should be destroyed.

[00:27:22] And Gottlieb called the CIA Records Center out in Maryland and ordered the destruction of these files.

[00:27:29] Now, that is a federal crime, destruction of federal property.

[00:27:33] It's a felony.

[00:27:33] So the archivist wouldn't do it.

[00:27:36] He refused.

[00:27:37] So Gottlieb got in his car and he drove out there.

[00:27:40] And using his rank, he ordered that guy to carry out the destruction.

[00:27:47] And in the guy's log, that archivist, he said, I destroyed five crates of documents regarding MKUltra over my stated objections.

[00:28:01] So almost everything that MKUltra did, including the protocols of all the experiments and what kinds of drugs and who was doped and where, will never be known.

[00:28:14] So on the one hand, my book is the absolute last authority on MKUltra.

[00:28:19] On the other hand, it doesn't even scratch the surface because most of what MKUltra was, I fear, will never be known.

[00:28:27] I received a number of communications and emails after I published my book from people who thought they or their relatives had been victims.

[00:28:36] And they want to know, what can I do?

[00:28:37] How can I find out if I really was a victim?

[00:28:40] And I had to write back to them saying, I don't know.

[00:28:43] I don't think there's anything you can do because Gottlieb was successful.

[00:28:48] Although he committed a crime by ordering the destruction of those documents, that's nothing compared to what he might have been charged with if the documents had ever become public.

[00:28:58] So he made a calculation.

[00:28:59] I think it was the smart move and took all those secrets with him.

[00:29:04] Wow.

[00:29:05] It's one of the most fascinating mysteries I've ever encountered.

[00:29:09] And the book is absolutely fascinating and such an interesting read.

[00:29:14] Highly recommend people go out and get it.

[00:29:16] I'll put it in the show notes.

[00:29:17] Where can people get a copy of the book and stay up on top of whatever project you're up to next?

[00:29:24] Well, I suggest you contact your local independent bookstore.

[00:29:28] If they don't have a copy, they'll be happy to order it for you.

[00:29:32] I have a website where I put my newspaper columns and other stuff.

[00:29:35] It's stephenkinzer.com.

[00:29:38] So if you want to see some contradictory views from somebody who's usually the skunk at the foreign policy garden party, check out stephenkinzer.com.

[00:29:48] And enjoy Poisoner in Chief if enjoy is the right word.

[00:29:54] Well put.

[00:29:55] Well, thank you so much again for coming on.

[00:29:57] This is an absolutely fascinating conversation.

[00:29:59] Really appreciate some of your time today.

[00:30:01] That was great.

[00:30:02] Good to be with you.

[00:30:12] At the end of the day, we may never know all the details when it comes to the full extent of the horrors inflicted by Sidney Gottlieb during his time with the CIA.

[00:30:21] It may be decades until any additional details are released, if ever.

[00:30:25] Sidney may have taken the darkest secrets to the grave with him when he passed away back on March 7th, 1999.

[00:30:33] We'll be back next week with a brand new mystery.

[00:30:35] So until then, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review and tell a friend.

[00:30:39] It helps us get noticed.

[00:30:41] So until next time, I've been your host, John Williamson, and you've been listening to From the Void.