It's great to welcome to the program today, Stephen Kinzer, who's an author, journalist,
former New York times chorus
respondent. The newest book is poisoner in chief Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA search for
mind control. Steven, so great to have you on,
good to be with you.
So there are a lot of these buzzwords that will often trigger a lot of conspiratorial
thinking, but that often have a real story behind them that is not as nefarious as some
make it out to be, but still worthy of discussion. So the build the bird group is one that is
often under this umbrella area. 51 is another example, uh, MK ultra. I would also consider
one of those where if you do a cursory internet search, you will find a lot of crazy stuff,
but it is a real program that existed. So where do we start? What's, what's the best
way to kind of start our, our understanding of what this was?
So this is my 10th book and I've tried to devote myself over my career to trying to
figure out a little bit of what goes on behind the facade of, uh, public politics and public
diplomacy that we can see in the course of my research. I've come up with a lot of things
that are surprising and some things that may have shocked some people, but this is the
first time I've been shot. I still can't believe that this project MK ultra was as intense
and horrific as it was. And I can't believe that this unknown figure Sydney Gottlieb actually
existed. So my book is an attempt essentially to write the biography of a guy who in many
ways wasn't there. He was even within the CIA, almost completely unknown in terms of
what he was actually doing. MK ultra was a real program. It lasted for some 10 years.
It was aimed at finding the secret of mind control. And in pursuit of that secret, Sidney
Goglia who became the chief chemist of the CIA, uh, carried out the most extreme experiments
on human subjects that have ever been carried out by any agency or officer of the U S government.
He had concluded that before you could figure out how to insert a new mine into somebody's
brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there. And he spent
10 years working on combinations of drugs, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques
aimed at finding ways to destroy a human mind and a human body in a human soul.
Did this start, uh, sort of in response to the belief that, uh, Russia already had figured
out how to do this and that the U S was behind in a sense, what was the role of the cold
war in, in sort of triggering or fomenting this project?
You can't understand this project without understanding the era. So in the early days
of the cold war, Americans were made to believe that we had this horrific enemy that was plotting
our liquidation day and night. If you bought into that, as most Americans did, it would
seem that any defensive mechanism would be justified. The loss of a few lives or even
a few hundred lives would seem like a a tiny price to pay. Now, there were a couple of
particular incidents that led the CIA to conclude that indeed the communists, as we called them,
I had discovered the secret to mind control. One of them was the trial of the Roman Catholic
prelate of Hungary, cargo woman Senti. Um, he was put on trial by a communist authorities
and, uh, he seemed to be speaking in a monotone with glazed eyes as he confessed to crimes
that he obviously hadn't committed.
Later on, it turned out that he had been coerced with the normal techniques that interrogators
use, like extended isolations and beatings and repeated interrogation. But we didn't
see it that way. The CIA thought, ah, he has been brainwashed and somehow the communists
are controlling what he's saying. The other episode came after the Korean war when it
turned out that not only had a number of American prisoners signed statements denouncing the
United States or even confessing to war crimes, but a number of them decided they wanted to
stay behind and they would rather live under a communist society and then come back to
America. This was interpreted also at the CIA as something that only could have become
possible if they had been brainwashed. So I asked myself a second question though. What
was it that led CIA officers to embrace this fantasy of mind control a and re and misinterpret
these incidents? I think maybe it had to do with the books and stories and movies that
these people had ingested it as they grew up. There are all kinds of Sherlock Holmes
stories and Edgar Allen Poe's stories and movies like Svengali and Gaslight. I think
they created a kind of a fertile mind, uh, in the CIA that led them to be willing to
believe something that even Sydney got leave himself after 10 years of destroying human
lives. Realized it was a myth.
What was the role of, uh, the hallucinogenic LSD and all of this? Was LSD mixed in as possibly
a tool to be used or was it misunderstood and actually had nothing to do with this?
Sydney godly? The director of MK ultra was fascinated with LSD. He and his fellow chemists
believed that it might be, as one of them put it, the key that could unlock the universe.
He thought this might be the mind control drug. He himself by his own account, used
LSD more than 200 times. So in 1953, Sydney godly persuaded the CIA to buy the entire
world's supply of LSD. He brought it from Switzerland to the United States and he used
it for two purposes. One was in horrific experiments in American prisons and it's secret detention
centers around the world. And then there was another piece, he also used it for non-coercive
experiments on volunteers who were actually told that they were taking a psychoactive
substance. And this leads to one of God lives most unexpected legacies. So through a couple
of bogus medical foundations that he established a Gottlieb, sent LSD to dozens of clinics
and hospitals and universities around the country, uh, and paid them to call for volunteers
that would be paid a small amount and take LSD who were among the first people who volunteered.
One of them was Ken Keasy who went onto write one flew over the Cuckoo's nest. He loved
LSD so much did he actually took a job in the hospital in Menlo park, California, so
he could steal the LSD out of the medicine chest and bring it home to his friends. Another
one was the poet Alan Ginsburg, who took it at a CIA sponsored experiment at Stanford.
Of course, not knowing that it was CIA sponsored, another was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for
the grateful dead, who introduced LSD to the other members of the band. So it was through
God leave and MK ultra that LSD leaped out of the laboratory into the general population.
And of course, the irony is the drug that Gottlieb thought might give the CIA the tool
to control people's minds actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion. That was
aimed at destroying everything as the, I believe.
So you mentioned experiments, horrible experiments. What types of things are we talking about?
Godly conducted experiments in the United States and outside the United States. Inside
the U S his favorite subjects were prisoners for obvious reasons. Um, for example, I came
across one experiment that was carried out at the federal prison in Kentucky. Seven African
American inmates were segregated into a cell. And without being told what was happening
to them, we're given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days. So this was a way for godly
to try to figure out if you could destroy a mind with this kind of an overdose. And
actually of course, the answer is yes, you can. Um, abroad God leaves experiments were
even more intense. Um, as he started out on the project, godly as a good scientist asked
himself what research is already out there? Who are the experts that exist on how to destroy
a human mind and the human body?
So the first obvious answer was the Nazi doctors who had worked in the concentration cares
and the CIA hired Nazi doctors. Not only to help design these so-called experiments, but
to help oversee them. Uh, I visited in the course of research for this book, what I think
maybe the very first CIA secret prison. It's in a lovely chalet outside Frankfurt in Germany.
Uh, the young German businessman who now owns that house. It was nice enough to take me
into the basement and he showed me his storage rooms and told me these were the cells where
the CIA scientists and their Nazi partners conducted these extreme experiments, which
were essentially just continuations of the experiments that the Nazis had been carrying
out just a few years ago in the concentration camps right down the road. So who were the
victims in these subjects and these experiments? Um, they were people that the CIA charmingly
described as Expendables.
Um, people who, uh, if they died, nobody would miss so suspected enemy agents who had been
captured refugees who didn't seem to be connected to anybody in East Asia. A number of the subjects
were captured North Korean prisoners of war. People for home, there would be no, as they
called it, disposal problem. And the guy who actually owns this former CIA torture house
told me that, uh, older people in the neighborhood all know what happened in this house. And
in fact, I just found an article in dare Spiegel that German magazines saying this was the
CIA torture house. There were deaths, but the number is unknown. And this guy tells
me these older people around here, I've told me the victims who died, who were experimented
to death were buried in the forests around here in places that are now covered up by
shopping malls and apartment blocks.
So in the limited time we have left two questions. One, what ultimately led to the end of this
program? And number two, at the time the program was going on, I, I presume that it was classified
when was anything public first known about the program.
So MK ultra did not come to a sharp end, petered out in the early 1960s and Sydney godly, uh,
who, although he was his generation's most prolific torturer, um, was also a scientist,
was forced to conclude. In the end that mind control doesn't exist. You cannot persuade
somebody or make somebody commit murder, for example, if that is deeply against committing
murder. It's just a made up fantasy. Gottlieb had to admit this. And uh, that led to the
end of MK ultra after 10 years of laying waste to unknown numbers of human lives. It wasn't
until the mid 1970s. So another 15 years after the program ended that the first pieces of
information began to leak out. That was when a few people, uh, who had been got leaves
victims slowly began to understand what might've happened to them. But on the way out of the
CIA, when he retired in 1973, godly, destroyed almost all of the records of MK ultra. So
in my work putting together this book, I've had to piece together a whole variety of sources.
And at the end of the book, I have a line, which maybe is my favorite line in the book.
I write a, everything in this book is true, but not everything that's true is in this
book. I'm painfully aware that I only discovered a portion of what MK ultra was and who Sidney
Gottlieb was. But a, it's certainly as far as anybody's managed to get up to now,
we have been talking about Stephen Kinzer, his book poisoner in chief Sydney Gottlieb
and the CIA search for mind control. Steven is an author, a journalist, and former New
York
times correspondent. Steven, thank you so much for talking to us about the book. That
was great.