Stephen Kinzer. (2019). Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Co.

Stephen Kinzer. 2019. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Co.

Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Co, 2019.

Stephen Kinzer. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Co, 2019.

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1. • value: American Politics
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17. • value: human experimentation
18. • value: Political assassinations
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27. • value: project mkultra
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Kinzer, Stephen
   • bioText: Stephen Kinzer is the author of many books, including The True Flag, The Brothers, Overthrow, and All the Shah's Men. An award-winning foreign correspondent, he served as the New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Germany, and Turkey. He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and writes a world affairs column for the Boston Globe. He lives in Boston.
   • name: Stephen Kinzer

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2019-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

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Poisoner in Chief

fullDescription

The bestselling author of All the Shah's Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA's secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and '60s.

The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.
Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb's reckless experiments on "expendable" human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats.
During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy. Only since his death has it become possible to piece together his astonishing career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action. Poisoner in Chief reveals him as a clandestine conjurer on an epic scale.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, author of The Good Spy, and executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography
   • content: "Absolutely riveting. Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief reads like a spy thriller--but his revelations about the macabre career of the CIA's Sidney Gottlieb are deeply disturbing. Kinzer's work underscores once again the narrative power of biography to unearth our collective history."
2. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Review of Books
   • content: "It's an awful story, told fast and well . . . Kinzer has put together a revolting look at the champions of freedom in the USA."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Mike Jay, London Review of Books
   • content: "A bustling narrative that sets MK-Ultra in its institutional framework of federal government, the military and the intelligence services, swerving all the while between madcap farce and grim atrocity."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Larry Getlen, New York Post
   • content: "Stephen Kinzer tells the story of Gottlieb, a chemist obsessed with finding a way to control the human brain, no matter how many innocent minds he destroyed in the process."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Stephen Kinzer takes the unusual approach of making Sidney Gottlieb, MK-Ultra's program manager, the central figure of the story . . . Reflecting on Gottlieb's culpability, Mr. Kinzer is careful to place his story in historical context . . . The reader will have to decide how far to venture into this dark thicket."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 29, 2019
     Journalist Kinzer (The Brothers) delivers a stranger-than-fiction account of the CIA’s efforts in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s at developing mind control and chemical-based espionage methods, and the chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, who spearheaded the effort. Surreal episodes, involving attempts to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out and efforts to create an “acoustic cat” that could be used as a clandestine listening device, sit alongside the extreme medical misdeeds of Gottlieb’s mind-control project, MK-Ultra , which included experimenting on unsuspecting members of his own research group, Chinese and Hungarian refugees, and medical patients. While the book nominally focuses on Gottlieb, he remains something of a cipher throughout, overshadowed by some of the larger-than-life
     characters in his orbit, like the drug-sampling narcotics agent turned agency contractor George Hunter White, who tested the effects of LSD and other drugs on unsuspecting subjects in New York and San Francisco as part of MK-Ultra. Gottlieb’s efforts to reinvent himself in his post-CIA career, becoming a speech therapist at the age of 60, and his unwillingness to revisit his past, even when called to testify before Congress in 1977 after the activities of MK-Ultra came to light, means his motivations are left largely unclear. In the end, “one of the most powerful unknown Americans” remains a mystery, but the nigh-unbelievable efforts he led are vividly and horrifically recreated in this fascinating history.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 9, 2019
     

     Is it best to know ugly truths about the past, especially if they hurt the American notion of democracy? These questions come to the forefront of Kinzer's (All the Shah's Men and The True Flag) exposé about chemist Sidney Gottlieb (1918-99). Kinzer dives into the CIA's dreadful secrets, many of which Gottlieb oversaw--secrets with direct links to the horrors of Nazi experiments--then describes how Gottlieb created the MK-ULTRA program, which devised techniques to break the human mind. These experiments used both unknowing and unwilling participants and occurred at sites in West Germany, Korea, and most disturbingly, the United States. Gottlieb had a particular fascination with LSD as a truth serum, and Kinzer does a thorough job of detailing how LSD affects the brain at the time of use and its aftereffects. This is not a light read and, at times, is infuriating. Exploring how hysteria fueled perverse policy decisions during the Cold War, Kinzer reveals how disturbing the ramifications of these policy decisions can be if left unchecked. VERDICT Highly recommended. This work sheds light on misdeeds done in the name of American democracy and should have wide appeal among general readers.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

     Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 15, 2019
     An accomplished journalist digs into the elusive and deeply troubling story behind the U.S. government's postwar search for the perfect mind-control drug. In this intriguing study, Kinzer (The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, 2017, etc.) shows how U.S. officials drew on the findings of Nazi experiments on human "specimens" during World War II, which were exposed in the Nuremberg Trials, as well as notorious Japanese military trials that injected bacteria into and conducted lab tests on "expendable" humans. The U.S. enlisted many of these perpetrators to beef up postwar intelligence work. With the enemy now the Soviet Union and Red China, the U.S. needed to develop drugs that could be used as weapons of covert action. The 1947 National Security Act created the National Security Council and the CIA, and the new program to study chemical and biological agents was called Bluebird--supposedly to "make prisoners 'sing like a bird.' " In the early 1950s, the program was taken over by Sidney Gottlieb, a Bronx-born scholar of agricultural biology who had been studying pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals at the Department of Agriculture when his academic mentors--e.g., Allen Dulles--lured him to the work of what Kinzer characterizes as "medical torture." This meant dosing unwilling patients with potent drugs like LSD and mescaline in an attempt to find some kind of "truth serum." Eventually renamed MK-ULTRA, the program was run strictly by Gottlieb, "America's mind control czar." The author engagingly examines various facets of this bizarre program, which led to LSD experimentation within the scientists' social circles, resulting in instances of overdose and even suicide. After a decade of research into mind control, Gottlieb and his colleagues were forced to "face their cosmic failure." Ultimately, readers will feel Kinzer's frustration that Gottlieb, after a late-life conversion and being hauled back to Washington, D.C., for two rounds of Senate hearings, maintained his "victimization" and never truly had to answer for the crime of "laying waste to other people's minds and bodies." A valiantly researched study that resurrects a troubling episode in American history.

     COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 9, 2019
     

     Is it best to know ugly truths about the past, especially if they hurt the American notion of democracy? These questions come to the forefront of Kinzer's (All the Shah's Men and The True Flag) expos� about chemist Sidney Gottlieb (1918-99). Kinzer dives into the CIA's dreadful secrets, many of which Gottlieb oversaw--secrets with direct links to the horrors of Nazi experiments--then describes how Gottlieb created the MK-ULTRA program, which devised techniques to break the human mind. These experiments used both unknowing and unwilling participants and occurred at sites in West Germany, Korea, and most disturbingly, the United States. Gottlieb had a particular fascination with LSD as a truth serum, and Kinzer does a thorough job of detailing how LSD affects the brain at the time of use and its aftereffects. This is not a light read and, at times, is infuriating. Exploring how hysteria fueled perverse policy decisions during the Cold War, Kinzer reveals how disturbing the ramifications of these policy decisions can be if left unchecked. VERDICT Highly recommended. This work sheds light on misdeeds done in the name of American democracy and should have wide appeal among general readers.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

     Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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shortDescription

The bestselling author of All the Shah's Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA's secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and '60s.

The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.
Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S....

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Poisoner in Chief Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

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Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

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Henry Holt and Co.

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