The gentle and intelligent expression you see on this man’s face runs completely counter to his actual deeds. This is Sidney Gottleib, one of the most powerful CIA officials in history, and he created a vast operation to develop mind-control experiments that involved torture and death — the casualty rates of which remain unknown.
In the 1950s, as the Soviets developed the nuclear bomb and the Americans’ position in Korea weakened, government leaders became alarmed that Communists had developed techniques of psychological mind control. Sidney Gottleib was hired by CIA-director Allen Dulles to start up operation MK40-ULTRA as a countermeasure to this perceived threat, and he ran covert experiments at over 80 institutions in the United States — and horrific projects in US detention centers abroad – to do so.
Electro-shock, forced sleep deprivation, and even the use of the poison gas sarin (which was taught to the project’s operatives by Nazis from WWII) were some of the activities involved in MK40, as Gottleib sought to figure out how he could force people to reveal their innermost thoughts, wipe out their minds (like deleting a hard drive), and replace their mental landscapes with new ones.
Gottleib failed in his mission, but along the way he introduced America to LSD. Hearing about the hallucinogen, he secured $240,000 to buy up the global supply, and then gave the drug without the informed consent and often forcefully to numerous people. In fact, Gottleib inadvertently played a major role in developing the American counter-cultural scene, because people like the poet Allen Ginsberg novelist and Ken Kesey (of _One Flew over the Cuckoos’ Nest_), took LSD through MK40 experiments.
The counter-cultural legacy is sort of whimsical and funny, but many more of the human experimentees suffered harm through their LSD consumption.
In the end, Sidney Gottleib’s supervisor – who had given him a de facto licence to kill – found out he was going to lose his position, and instructed Gottleib to destroy all records of MK40’s activities in 1973. Little testimony remains to document the program’s history, but Gottleib after admitted the project had been a failure.
Source(s): Information in cited article was taken by Stephen Kinzer’s 2019 book, _Poisoner-in-Chief_. NPR Terry Gross “Fresh Air” with Stephen Kinzer “The CIA’s secret quest for mind control: torture, LSD, and a ‘Poisoner-in-Chief'” Sept 9, 2019. Wikipedia.
