You Don’t Want The Truth!

Title: Poisoner In Chief

Rating: 4 Stars

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom…my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

That, of course, is an excerpt from Col Jessup’s speech from A Few Good Men. As I read the biography of Sidney Gottlieb, Nicholson’s famous speech continued to run through my mind.

Sidney Gottlieb was a trained chemist. He was recruited by the CIA. At the CIA he led the MK-ULTRA program and later took a larger role in the Technical Services Staff where he presided over the development of poisons and trick weapons used by spies in the field.

That very cursory description of his biography hides a nightmare of dark acts. Personally, Gottlieb seemed to be a decent person. He lived simply with his wife and children on a remote farm, growing his own food. In retirement, he went on a multi-year journey where, among other things, he volunteered at a hospital for lepers in India. A lifelong stutterer, he received a masters in speech therapy and helped others overcome their speech difficulties. He worked at a hospice to tend to the dying.

While at the CIA, he committed or commissioned unspeakable acts. These acts were all done in the fight against communism. As a Jewish person in the aftermath of WWII, he probably felt a powerful need to fight evil wherever it exists. In the 1950s, communism seemed to be an existential threat to the West. It seemed to be an implacable force of evil single-mindedly focused on world domination.

Having just fought and won a war against a similar determined foe, the forces of democracy felt that the only way to combat such a foe was to meet evil with evil. The rumors that the North Koreans were attempting mind control over US prisoners of war was enough for Americans to stand up their own mind control experiments. If a relatively few innocent victims had to be sacrificed to prevent communists from taking over our country, then that’s a small price to pay.

To save democracy from this scourge of communism, virtually any action was justified. From the book, there’s a great line about the type of personality attributes that the CIA recruited: “compulsive activism and ethical elasticity”. This led the US to try to bring in Nazi concentration camp doctors under Operation Paperclip to learn about their human experiments. When this failed, Americans went to Germany to learn directly from them. Similarly, instead of being executed for war crimes, the head of Japan’s infamous Unit 731 was recruited by the American to learn about its torturous experiments.

Gottlieb was a perfect example of this implacable drive and flexibility. He became convinced that whichever nation mastered mind control would reign supreme. Manchurian candidates assassins would be unstoppable. Spies would heedlessly spill their secrets. Entire armies of blank slate soldiers with no fear of death would sweep their opponents off the battlefield.

Gottlieb was convinced that the communists were well ahead in this race, so he would stop at nothing to catch up. This fear sparked the rise of the MK-ULTRA program. Under its auspices there were many sub projects trying to find the mind control elixir. Its many projects included the following.

In Europe, people suspected of being spies or communists were imprisoned. They were then endlessly interrogated using drugs. Once the interrogation was completed, the victim would be murdered and the body disposed. Gottlieb witnessed many of these interrogations.

Students at Harvard were dosed with LSD at Harvard. At least one student committed suicide as a result.

At a conference that Gottlieb led, LSD was introduced into the punch without anyone’s consent. One attendee never recovered. A short time later, after telling a CIA officer that he was going to go public, he fell / jumped / was pushed out of a window to his death.

Prisoners in Atlanta were dosed with LSD in exchange for slight sentence reductions. They were given daily doses of LSD for months at a time.

Without anyone’s consent, schizophrenic children were dosed with LSD to determine how they would react.

Mentally handicapped children were fed breakfast cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium.

Black patients at an addiction treatment center in Kentucky were basically treated as prisoners. There, instead of treating their addiction issues, they were treated with psychedelic drugs for experimental purposes.

The CIA ran houses of prostitution. The prostitutes would perform the agreed upon sex act, slip the john a drug, and then try to get them to confess their secrets to them.

The common theme to these operations was the powerlessness of the victims. Children, minorities, prisoners, and addicts were all considered the detritus of society. Horrible things could be done to them with no repercussions.

All of this is horrific. Two more facts make it all the worse. The first fact is that all of the experiments failed. There is no way to wipe a person’s mind and then overlay it with a new set of thoughts. They never even came close to success.

The second fact is that the communists nations were not engaged in mind control. They had no interest in drugs like LSD.

Gottlieb’s acts of evil were attempts to protect America from a nonexistent threat and were, not only futile, but ultimately served to, along with Watergate and the Vietnam War,  dramatically increase distrust of American government in the 1970s.

Are there lessons that we can learn here and apply to the abuses that arose out of 9/11?