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Sidney Gottlieb was everything you could dream of as a mad scientist in a spy novel, except that he was very real. His most notable feat was to introduce the world to the joys of LSD or Lysergic acid diethylamide. He discovered by accident that the drug developed by Dr Albert Hoffman in 1953, could be used in a Cold War super-secret mind control program, code-named MK-ULTRA. The real 'Manchurian Candidate' in fact. Gottlieb, in something reminiscent of the illegal actions of Nazi doctors in German wartime concentration camps, proceeded in 1958 to initiate a secret series of tests. At least 149 experiments, some 25 involving large doses of LSD were carried out. At first on CIA officers, sometimes unknowingly in drinks, but later deliberately using prisoners, mental patients and prostitutes as human guinea pigs. One of his colleagues, Maj General William Creasey of the US Army's Chemical corps believed that LSD placed in huge quantities in an enemy cities water supply offered a 'humane' alternative to the bomb. He argued that it was 'absurd' when denied the opportunity to test his theory by spraying a cloud of LSD over a US city.
Gottliebs colleague,Dr Frank Olson, suffering from acute depression and paranoia resulting from a 'bad trip', was to jump to his death from an upper floor of New York's Statler Hilton after taking LSD for the first time at the CIA's special facility at Camp Peary. Gottlieb was to stay in charge of MK-ULTRA for twenty years, however he was also involved in a array of other extraordinary schemes, a poisoned handkerchief for an Iraqi agent, a poisoned dart to kill the Congolese leader Lumumba and a whole arsenal of devices to kill Castro. He retired in 1973. The infamous movie character "Dr Strangelove" is reportedly based on Sidney Gottlieb. |
