CIA’s ‘black sorcerer’ scientist Sidney Gottlieb was a master of poisons and mind control
THE balding, silver-haired man in a white lab coat, with a Germanic name, club foot and speech impediment could have been a Bond villain invented by Ian Fleming. But American chemist Sidney Gottlieb was actually one of the good guys.
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THE balding, silver-haired man in a white lab coat, with a Germanic name, club foot and speech impediment could have been a Bond villain invented by Ian Fleming. But in the 1950s and ’60s, American chemist Sidney Gottlieb was fighting on the side of the “good guys”.
Born a century ago today, Gottlieb was a chemist hired by the CIA for his expertise on poisons, but who later ran project MKUltra, looking for ways of using drugs to extract information and control minds. Known as the “black sorcerer”, Gottlieb sparked dozens of conspiracy theories, and his schemes inspired episodes of TV shows such as The X Files and Stranger Things. Matthew Modine plays the fictional character Dr Brenner, resembling Gottlieb, who also worked on MKUltra.
The real Gottlieb was a mysterious figure who emerged from the shadows during a 1977 Senate hearing into the CIA’s mind-control experiments.
He was born Joseph Scheider or Schneider (later changing his name to Sidney Gottlieb) on August 3, 1918, to Louis, a tailor, and his wife Fanny, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Hungary, in the Bronx.
Teased by other children because of his foot deformity, as well as the leg braces and built-up shoes he had to wear, he developed a stutter. However, he was a brilliant student who was particularly good at science.
But he also had other interests. He eschewed Judaism and read voraciously on eastern religions and philosophies such as Zen Buddhism. Despite his foot he also developed a love for folk dancing.
In 1940 he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Science in agriculture. While working on a doctorate in organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, in 1942 he married Margaret Moore, who had been born in India to missionary parents. He earnt his PhD in 1943. Later that year Gottlieb tried to enlist in the military but was rejected because of his club foot, instead taking a job with the US Department of Agriculture. He also bought a farm where he and his wife raised goats.
From 1945 he worked at the Food and Drug Administration looking at ways of detecting drugs in the human body. He later moved to the National Research Council where, in 1948, he worked on plant diseases and fungicides, having his first exposure to hallucinogens.
Recruited to work on a research project at the University of Maryland in 1949, in 1951 he was lured away to work at the CIA where he consulted on undetectable poisons useful in assassinations. In 1953 CIA director Allen Dulles appointed him head of a secret research project into uses for lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) particularly for mind control, codenamed MKUltra.
The CIA hoped to use LSD as a truth serum to extract information, or to reshape a subject’s mind to program them as an assassin. People in the CIA believed that the Chinese had used similar brainwashing techniques on captives during the Korean War.
Gottlieb authorised experiments on university students, prisoners and even set up an experiment where LSD was secretly administered to men visiting brothels and the results were observed through a two-way mirror. Among those subjected to experiments under Gottlieb’s direction was gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, who submitted to a drug trial in prison to get a lighter sentence.
Another was a brilliant young Harvard student Ted Kaczynski who took part in a stress control experiment that left him so damaged it most likely contributed to his criminal career as the Unabomber.
One tragic victim was CIA operative Frank Olson who raised objections to CIA experiments in airborne toxins (see Netflix series Wormwood). In 1953 Olson was invited to a weekend retreat, hosted by Gottlieb, at a CIA facility at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland. On Gottlieb’s orders Olson’s drink was spiked with LSD. A week later Olson fell to his death from a 10th-floor window in a Manhattan hotel. Agents tried to make it look like suicide and it would take years for the truth to come out.
In the 1960s Gottlieb was also consulted on ways to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. His schemes included poisoned or exploding cigars and a poisoned wetsuit, none of which worked.
Gottlieb left the CIA in 1972 frustrated that it had all been a waste of time. He was given a distinguished service medal by the agency and tried to become inconspicuous. He and his wife spent 18 months in India working in a leper colony in what seemed to be an effort to atone for past sins, but returned to their Virginia farm.
A commission into CIA abuses in 1975 saw the Olson case resurface. The family would later have Olson’s body exhumed and provide proof he was murdered, although no evidence could be found of who killed him. In 1977 Gottlieb (using the name Schneider) was brought before a Select Committee on US Intelligence to explain some of his research. He escaped any retribution and died in 1999.