35. ⁠CIA Mind Control: The Origin of MK Ultra (Ep 1)

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It's like you've been on something already.

70 micrograms of LSD, man.

Gordon, you just look like a purple, fuzzy-shaped being.

that I'm communing with.

People who only listen to this or other watch it might think that's what I actually look like.

Anyway, that's normal.

You look fuzzier than normal, Gordon.

Okay, great.

We might call it in its new form brain warfare.

The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis.

Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside.

The human mind is the most delicate of instruments.

It's so finely adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside influences, that it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men.

The Soviets are now using brain perversion as one of their main weapons in prosecuting the Cold War.

Some of these techniques are so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.

We in the West are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.

We have have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And that was Friend of the Pod CIA Director Alan Dulles giving a talk which he makes public in April 1953 on the stakes of brain warfare and mind control as seen from the early days of the Cold War.

And that's going to be our subject of this series, isn't it, David?

The sprawling world of CIA mind control programs under the rather wonderful code name MKUltra, in which the CIA, I'm shocked to say, conducted experiments on unwitting Americans to see if there was a way of doing what Alan Dulles was suggesting the Soviets were doing, which was manipulating that malleable human mind.

That's right, Gordon.

We are starting a new series on MK Ultra and the CIA's search in the early days of the Cold War for sort of a pathway into the human psyche to see if it could be controlled, if it could be manipulated, if it could be changed.

And Gordon, we are going to tell this story through the life and times of a very extraordinary chemist.

named Sidney Gottlieb, who was the bureaucratic manager and mastermind of MKUltra, this kind of really sprawling series of projects and experiments and funding for mind control work throughout much of the 1950s.

Including, it has to be said, early use of LSD

and psychotropic drugs, which are going to do strange things to the human brain and which we're going to be learning about.

I haven't quite appreciated the full role of a CIA in hippie culture of of the 1960s that emerges, but I think we'll be looking at that.

And it is also a subject which has got resonances in popular culture because it comes through in all kinds of famous movies, whether it's the Manchurian candidate or the Ipcress Files here in the UK.

But also it kind of resonates through to the modern day, doesn't it?

In terms of this idea that the brain and the human mind is actually the focus of cognitive warfare, of trying to control and manipulate it.

And we should say that Gordon and I, in preparation for this episode, have sampled all manner of substances in order to just get the first-hand research spot on.

Are you currently micro-dosing?

Are you, are you, because I'm not, just in case.

If at any point Gordon just sort of trails off,

you know why.

Or myself, I should say.

So just be on the lookout for that.

So, I mean, this is a story.

It really does have everything, right, Gordon, as you went through that list.

I mean, we have a massive, really abuse of government power, trampling of constitutional rights, CIA dirty tricks in its early years.

We We have a chapter of a story that continues today in this search for mastery of the cognitive battlefield, brain warfare, as Alan Dulles says.

And we have this, I think, really

fascinating perspective on the CIA as kind of the first cartel to bring LSD into the United States, really like patient zero for LSD and LSD culture in the 60s in the states is the central intelligence agency.

But to sort of bound all of this stuff, we're going to, as we said, talk about it through the life and times of Sid Gottlieb.

So maybe we start with him and his life.

You describe him as a bureaucratic manager.

I don't think that does justice

to the character of Sidney Gottlieb, who is straight out of a fictional novel, I think.

Throughout this series, I'm going to refer to Sid Gottlieb in the most anodynamentic terms possible, despite all of the insane adventures that he will have.

So Gordon, you will continue to call me out and try to make him seem more colorful.

So, two books I think just right up front are important to mention on Gottlieb and are really critical to the story we're going to tell.

One of them is Stephen Kinzer's book, Poisoner in Chief, great title.

And the other is John Lyell's book, which is actually coming out here in just a few months, called Project Mind Control.

Both deal with Gottlieb and his work on MK Ultra.

Both are exceptional reads.

Gottlieb,

young Gottlieb, Gordon, he grows up in the Bronx.

He is born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants who left in the early 20th century.

I would say Gottlieb was born in 1918.

His parents are in the garment business.

They own a sweatshop in New York.

He's the youngest of four kids, and he grows up in a really bustling Jewish neighborhood where many of the families are practicing.

Many of them are first-generation immigrants to the United States.

Everybody knows everybody.

And I think you could say the American dream here in this context is real, right?

They are, and Gottlieb is, and this will be a theme through the story, a very patriotic person, someone who kind of, I think, sees America as a country that brought in his parents, gave him a home.

It's going to kind of filter through so much of the story we're going to talk about.

Now, there are a couple bits of his childhood that I think do bear mention for this story.

So Gottlieb is born with clubbed feet.

And for most of his childhood, he really can't walk.

His mom carries him everywhere.

He actually walks for the first time, kind of on his own, but with braces when he's around 12 years old after he's had several operations.

And he's going to have a kind of lifelong limp that's associated with that club foot.

He's going to wear prosthetic shoes for the entirety of his life.

He's also got a stutter that a lot of the time is manageable, but when he's stressed, becomes very pronounced.

So he's harassed at school for the obvious reasons.

And I'm not able to find a picture of young Gottlieb, right?

Like a childhood picture of the man.

Don't know what he looks like, but he's got this stutter and this limp that I think really shapes so much of his early years.

I'm channeling Peter Sellers as Doctor Strangelove, though, in my image of him, but that may be unfair.

But given there's no other pictorial, you know, reference point, that's what I've got for you.

We have our first evidence of Gordon's acid trip here.

His LSD is feeding him wild images of young Sid Gottlieb.

But Gottlieb is very strong-willed.

I think he's very smart.

He perseveres through this.

He reminds me a bit of the long shadow of Klaus Fuchs over our podcast.

He reminds me a little bit of Klaus Fuchs, right?

In that Fuchs was sickly, anemic as a kid, but he ended up having this very sort of strong-willed spirit.

And I think you see that with Gottlieb.

One of the things that I find interesting, though, is he's quite left-wing, isn't he, as a young man.

So for all that kind of patriotic side and loving America, he's not some kind of right-wing, traditional, uber-patriot capitalist guy, is he?

No, I mean, he will join the Young People's Socialist League.

He'll later on tell people pretty openly that he was a socialist in his youth.

I mean, he's growing up in the 20s and 30s.

That's not uncommon.

He's never a member of the Communist Party or anything like that, but he's a young sort of socialist.

And he goes to city college in New York, known as Harvard of the Proletariat, studies German physics.

He takes takes speech courses to work on his stutter.

He's very interested in agricultural biology.

Kind of unclear exactly why, but the field fascinates him from a young age.

And he writes to someone, and this name will be important later, named Ira Baldwin at the University of Wisconsin, who's really kind of a mountain in the field.

And he gets admitted to UW, the University of Wisconsin, and Baldwin starts to take Gottlieb.

under his wing.

He ends up majoring in chemistry.

His senior thesis, by the way, Gordon, was entitled Studies on Ascorbic Acid in Cowpeas.

So CIA man all over him from an early age.

He's moved by conditions he had seen in those sweatshops.

So as we said, he's kind of got the socialist left-leaning bent to him.

And on Baldwin's recommendation, Gottlieb is admitted to graduate school in California, where in 1943 he's going to earn a doctorate in biochemistry.

And in California, Gottlieb's life is changed forever in a couple of ways.

The first one is that he meets the woman who will become his wife, named Margaret Moore.

She's the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary to India.

She's studying to be a preschool teacher.

You'd think they don't seem to have a lot in common.

And yet, they're both, I think, and again, this is going to be a theme of Gottlieb's entire life.

They're very spiritually restless.

So Gottlieb has become estranged from his parents' Judaism.

And Margaret, his soon-to-be wife, has parted ways with her father's and her family's Christianity.

And in both of them, you see this kind of very early desire for understanding, this kind of quest for an almost mystical understanding of the universe and ourselves beyond the bounds of what you'd call maybe ordinary religion.

Which sounds very California, which is where he is.

It's the 40s, so the war is going on, but he's not directly involved in it at that point.

Well, and this is the other, I think, major kind of factor that starts to shape him in this time.

So he marries Margaret when he's 24.

And while they're in California, Gordon, he's rejected by the draft, right?

It's 1943, 1944.

He's denied entrance into the military because of his limp, due to his club foot.

But he really wants to find a way to serve.

You know, again, he's a patriot.

And you think about the psychology of someone who wanted to join, but basically sat on the sidelines while the United States fought the Second World War.

So he's deeply motivated to do something, but he's not able to.

And then in the fall of 43,

they move.

The couple moves.

They're married now.

Tacoma Park, Maryland, which is a D.C.

suburb.

He's researching soil for the Department of Agriculture.

Later, he gets transferred to the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration.

He's developing tests to measure the presence of of drugs in the human body, starting to get a little bit bored.

In 48, he gets a new job at the National Research Council.

He's studying plant diseases and fungicides.

Changes jobs again, becomes a research associate at the University of Maryland.

He's studying the metabolism of fungi.

So you've got this guy who's smart.

He's a wanderlust.

His wife is also a wanderlust.

I think he gets bored easily.

It's fair to say.

You can see by kind of his movement through these jobs in these early years.

And he and his wife start this very,

almost kind of proto-hippie lifestyle in this era.

So they find a rustic cabin near Vienna, Virginia, out on 15 acres.

And it's almost impossible to imagine this now with the sort of sprawl outside of D.C.

But this was a time when Vienna, Virginia was like in the woods.

They got no electricity.

They move in.

They have four kids.

They settle into this family life.

Gottlieb spends a lot of time with his family, seems to have really good relationships with his kids, even as adults.

He milks the goats that they keep.

They're keeping kind of a mini farm out on this compound.

And he's really got kind of no clear path out of this mid-level research on pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals.

So again, he's bored.

He wants to do something else.

And he'll recall in this period of kind of the late 40s that his old mentor from Wisconsin, Ira Baldwin, had guided other students in the program into this exciting and pretty secretive work during the war.

But Gottlieb had been too young to participate in it when he was at Wisconsin.

So, what was Baldwin doing?

To answer that question, we kind of need to take a quick trip into Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan of the war to find out, because

Baldwin is working essentially on the response to the German and Japanese biowarfare programs, toxin programs.

These two countries, Germany and Japan, during the war, had accumulated massive stores of information on both poisons and mind control, which are going to be two areas of Gottlieb's interest and fascination for the rest of his life.

And I guess the key point is that both Japan and Nazi Germany had done some pretty dark things by taking advantage of prisoners to conduct experiments on real people.

I mean, we know, obviously, some of the Nazi stuff is pretty well known, but Japan as well, they'd really been experimenting with what you can do to people under extreme conditions, including the human mind, including with toxins.

And I guess the US and the UK had learnt about it by the end of the war, by this period.

That's right.

So in the camps in Nazi Germany, for example, they'd fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp inmates, in experiments sort of aimed at finding ways you could control the human mind or shatter the psyche.

That kind of experimentation, as you mentioned, you know, you sort of can't do that in theory.

You have to actually do it on people.

It's very dark, but there were senior sort of Nazi scientists who after the war knew more than almost anybody.

about these experiments and sort of the possibilities and limits of controlling the human mind.

And it's a similar story in Japan.

A lot of experiments had been conducted in occupied Manchuria by a group called Unit 731.

I mean, it's a really sort of profoundly disturbing log of experiments that are conducted.

But at the end of the war, Ira Baldwin, this old mentor of Sid Gottliebs, had kind of led the U.S.

answer to Germany and Japan's biowar programs.

Now, chemical warfare, which had caused maybe a million casualties during the First World War, was already very well known and studied.

But biological warfare, which had been banned by the Geneva Protocols in the 20s, was something very new.

And Baldwin had led the work during the war on whether a country could build, at an industrial scale, a massive quantity of deadly germs or toxins.

And he's established what's later going to become the headquarters of the Army's biological warfare labs.

at Dietrich Field in Maryland.

Later, this will become Camp Dietrich.

And scientists there have produced an industrial quantity of sort of anthrax spores.

They bred mosquitoes infected with yellow fever.

And Gordon, this is for you, they've even developed a pigeon bomb, a bird whose feathers were sort of infected with toxic spores.

And for those listening to the pod who are not aware, Gordon is a pigeon fanatic and lover of those noble birds.

And so I'm going to let him address this.

I wasn't aware of the toxic pigeon because I knew that they tried to train pigeons to be guided missiles during the Second World War.

But the toxic spore-laden pigeon is just another sign of how badly treated these birds are.

And it's disappointing.

That's all I'll say, that that was happening in the U.S.

It is.

This is one of many times in these episodes where Gordon Carrera is going to be very disappointed with what's going on.

So maybe there with the toxic pigeon, let's maybe take a break at Camp Dietrich with this sense of what's been going on during the war.

And when we come back, we'll look at the start of the Cold War and how the newly formed CIA gets into the business of mind control.

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Welcome back.

So we're looking at the CIA and mind control.

We've learned a bit about Sid Gottlieb and we've learned a bit about what happened during the Second World War and the kind of early days of thinking about experimenting on people.

But now, David, we're into the start of the Cold War, where the focus really on trying to manipulate people's minds in particular comes into being, doesn't it?

Well, it is in this early period of the Cold War that the CIA starts to think it actually has practical intelligence to suggest that the Soviet Union or kind of a communist front more generally

is making significant advances on mind control techniques.

And there are a number of incidents in the late 40s that seem to add credence to this picture.

And one of the most important is that in February of 1949, the Roman Catholic prelate of Hungary kind of appears at a show trial and confesses to some wild charges, things like having attempted to overthrow the government, steal the royal crown, reestablish the Austro-Hungarian Empire, really nutty stuff.

Apparently, he didn't even recognize his own mother.

And CIA officers watching this trial had focused on the way this guy had behaved.

And he'd confessed to the crime.

He had obviously hadn't committed these crimes.

He's totally disoriented.

He's speaking in kind of a flat monotone.

And it conjures up images for a lot of these CIA guys

of Stalin's show trials a decade before where you had defendants that behaved in insane ways who, you know, admitted to crimes or confessed crimes that they hadn't actually committed.

And the CIA starts to think, well, have these people been drugged or hypnotized?

And you go back to the kind of late 19th century, it was Russians who had pioneered this field of behavioral conditioning.

Pavlov's dog.

Yeah, I'm salivating at the sound of the bell.

And surely the CIA thinks, you know, the Russians have made some recent advances.

This is a pattern, isn't it?

And it's a really interesting pattern in the early Cold War where each side thinks the other side is doing it, whether it's mind control or something else.

And therefore, we better do it.

And I think each side thinks the other has got this kind of possible new technology and therefore they have to push ahead in order to find it.

And mind control definitely is one where the CIA does seem to be convinced that the communists have mastered it somehow because it's the only way in their mind they can explain some of these strange goings on.

It's playground logic, but I guess you'd say it's playground logic because it's deeply embedded in us as humans from a very early age that if you think somebody else might be doing something, even if you cannot fully prove it, oftentimes the safest course of action would be to do that very thing to protect yourself.

And so, you know, the CIA starts to think, well, we need to get something going to counter this.

Now, I would say in the early years of the Korean War, the intensity of the CIA's fears ratchets up even further because you have captured American POWs who will testify that the U.S.

had used bioweapons and germ-infected insect bombs.

Now, none of that's true.

But the CIA wonders essentially the same question that they had with the Roman Catholics or a prelate in Hungary or the show trials, which is why are people confessing to things that they haven't committed?

Now, we're looking at this from the lens of 2025 and decades having passed and we're no longer in kind of the absolute hothouse of the early Cold War years, but no evidence of any of these kind of more elaborate mind control techniques ever emerged.

I mean, it's kind of run-of-the-mill stuff, traditional forms of torture and coercion that elicited these confessions.

But what's so interesting is there's some captured Americans who decide they want to stay in North Korea, and the only explanation is that they've been brainwashed.

It's a really interesting feature that people seem to struggle to believe that people can have changed their views or come to a different set of views unless they were somehow manipulated into do it by some kind of secret program.

And that seems to be a theme which is here.

It gets into that slightly paranoid early Cold War period where you're going to get kind of red scares, a fear that the Soviets are also ahead.

They, you know, they get the bomb in 1949, they're moving ahead scientifically.

So there's a kind of paranoia which you also see, don't you, in this talk about aliens and UFO films are also coming out at this time where people's minds are being taken over and they look like ordinary Americans, but actually they've been taken over by aliens.

And again, it's the idea that people can be brainwashed and taken over.

And that seems to be the only way they can explain some of these things like they're seeing in North Korea.

When, as you said, actually, the evidence is these are just people who are maybe broken down by the pressure of detention often, or that they've come to sometimes these beliefs genuinely.

George Blake famously is a British intelligence officer who gets captured in Korea and ends up, you know, later being discovered to be a communist.

Everyone says, well, he must have been brainwashed when he was captured in Korea.

And actually, the evidence is he just genuinely, ideologically became a communist, but people found it easier to explain it by brainwashing.

It does become a catch-all, I think.

And it is almost impossible, I think, to overstate the paranoia that was felt in particular inside institutions such as the CIA in these early years of the Cold War.

I mean, again, listeners in 2025 will sort of look back on this and almost laugh and say, how did you come to these conclusions?

But what we're describing here, these were not fringe ideas, right, during the early years of the Cold War.

This was the base assessment of the CIA and its leadership that the Soviets, communists more broadly, were absolutely working on and developing very powerful mind control techniques.

And this is where, you know, we talked before the break about Camp Dietrich, this kind of bio-warfare lab.

After the Second World War ends, Now, the U.S.

up until 1949 has a nuclear monopoly.

And so Dietrich is kind of a little bit on the outs here, out of favor, because American policymakers sort of look at bio warfare and say, well, we have nukes.

Why would we need any of this?

And what's very interesting is that this kind of fear of Soviet mind control starts to give the crew at Camp Dietrich a new mission.

And a special operations division is set up to establish really a study of the coercive use of drugs.

You know, could you control someone's mind?

Could you establish a pathway into someone's mind?

with drugs.

And a senior official at Camp Dietrich is going to write a very influential report in the late 40s, which concludes, I'll read it, I am convinced that it is possible by means of the techniques of psychochemical warfare to conquer an enemy without wholesale killing of his people and the mass destruction of his property.

Now, that report is read by the head of the CIA at the time, who then goes to President Truman to authorize drug research and give that job to the CIA.

And Truman agrees.

And we should say the CIA has just been established, hasn't it?

And I mean, as we've talked about in some of of our previous episodes, in some of our original episodes, it's quite a piratical organization at this time.

It's pretty freewheeling.

There's not much in terms of kind of legal or other controls of what it's doing, not much oversight.

It's kind of given a blank check where it means it's kind of unleashed into areas which are perhaps, you know, surprising now, looking back.

It's two years old in 1949 and sort of behaves that way in many respects.

A toddler.

The legal and oversight environment is nothing like what we have today.

And the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, the CIA is established in 47, but this act sort of establishes more of the legislative basis for the agency.

That gave the CIA the ability to spend unvouched funds and freed it from disclosing to Congress who its employees were and what they did.

So the CIA is operating kind of on an island of its own and has now, in the midst of this incredible almost panic about

Soviet intentions,

communist intentions, not only just with mind control, but more broadly.

Mao has won the Chinese Civil War.

You know, in the early 50s, North Korea invades South Korea.

There's the red scare in the states and kind of this rise of McCarthyism and its panic about communists at all levels of government.

And in the middle of this, you give this very, as you said, Gordon, piratical organization the mission to go out and really chart the nexus of mind control and covert operations.

But I think you can see, and again, bring this to Gottlieb for a second.

One of the themes about Sid Gottlieb that is just a feature of his entire life is he is insatiably curious.

And I do think if you're giving somebody like that the mission to go out and understand sort of the promise and perils of mind control and how you might apply that into this kind of brand new world of clandestine operations in the early Cold War.

What patriotic American wouldn't stand up and join that mission?

It depends on what you end up doing, David.

I think that's, as we'll discover, it gets a little bit darker than just simply patriotic Americans doing their, doing their duty.

Because the CIA, I guess, is looking for, when we talk about mind control, it's often more about truth serums, isn't it?

It's about trying to understand how to break people down so that they will talk to you and either give you the truth or understand what the other side might be doing to try and brainwash people.

That seems to be the focus of some of these original programs that the CIA is working on, isn't it?

The original goal is very much

to aid in interrogations, I think we could say.

And they're blending the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism for use on prisoners in interrogations to extract information from unwilling subjects, to study how you might prevent that extraction from occurring on your own people.

And really elusively, but you know, for people like Gottlieb, this is kind of the holy grail is could we control somebody's actions?

Is there a way for us to control the behavior of an individual who does not want to be controlled?

There is a lot of focus in these early years on hypnosis.

The CIA actually found a stage hypnotist in New York who would often have sex with otherwise unwilling women after placing them in a hypnotic trance, or at least this is what he claimed to the CIA.

And the CIA officers don't do that.

I'm clear in saying that, but they do bring these techniques back to the CIA.

They try to hypnotize their secretaries and do things like convince them they're on a beach vacation in Florida.

And there's very mixed results in these hypnotic experiments at CIA.

No one is actually quite sure if it's working or if the secretaries are sort of humoring them.

But there is kind of this dip into this world of could we get somebody who might have access to an office or access to secrets or access to a safe.

Could you hypnotize them and get them to go and collect the secrets for you?

Or could you hypnotize someone to go and kill a foreign leader of a pro-communist country or something like that, right?

These would be the kind of use cases, I think, in Gottlieb's mind and in the CIA's mind in those early years.

Yeah, which of course the hypnotizing to kill a foreign leader becomes, and we'll look at fiction at a later point, but you know, the Manchurian candidate is the famous notion that you could perhaps train people to be hypnotized and then signaled by something and then carry out some dastardly act.

So again, you have this kind of overlap between fact and fiction, which we'll see again and again in this.

And so there seems to be a lot of experimentation at this early days in the 50s on that specifically and trying to work out how to do it.

Well, and Alan Dulles, whose quote you read at the beginning of this episode, he is brought back to the CIA in early 1951.

At that time, he's not yet the director, but he's going to manage the agency's covert operations.

And he'll note, and he kind of said this or alluded to it in the quote, Gordon, is that the problem that the CIA has is that, well, we can't do a lot of this research in the United States.

We cannot or shouldn't be doing a lot of this research on Americans.

And so the locus will kind of shift outside of the States or move outside of the states.

There's a detention center in West Germany called Camp King that the CIA will send teams to.

It becomes kind of a test site for conducting mind control experiments on, you know, defectors or captured prisoners.

It's kind of a CIA black site, you might say.

It's kind of this spacious and elegant villa, but in the basement is this complex of bricked-in storerooms.

It's overseen or managed by CIA officers and a staff doctor named Doc Fischer, who's a German physician who had been former surgeon general of the Nazi Army and a man who had overseen some of those experiments we talked about at concentration camps.

He'd been captured by the Red Army, then taken a professorship in East Germany before he snuck over the border into West Germany.

And he's running with the sort of help of the CIA, this broader network of prisons in the country where they're doing these kind of bluebird experiments to understand basically what we could we get a prisoner to tell us if they don't want to talk.

Yeah, part of that system of using Nazi scientists, which they use in all kinds of areas as well.

And similar things, I think, in Japan as well, where they're running these experiments.

So these are largely outside of the U.S., though, rather than inside of the U.S.

at this point.

That's right.

And I mean, they're doing things like they're subjecting prisoners to hypnosis.

They're doing this also, you mentioned outside the States, they're doing this also in Japan, doing some of these experiments on captured North Korean soldiers, you know, using hypnosis, electroshock, and the goal being to kind of induce violent reactions, put people to sleep, wake them up to see if they can coerce them into providing information that they shouldn't.

And if all of this sounds sort of chaotic and disorganized, it's because it is.

And one of the major problems that Dulles and the CIA have in these in these years of working on Bluebird is that they don't really have the scientific expertise necessary to answer any of the questions that they really want to answer.

Which is where someone like Sid Gottlieb might come in, I guess, at this point.

Someone who is a chemist and a scientist, and as we said, very curious by his background.

That's right.

So Sid Gottlieb applies for a job to the CIA because, as we mentioned earlier, he wants to serve.

He missed the war, I think, in his view.

He's got this very interesting profile for the CIA.

He's a chemist, right?

He's a scientist.

And he's got connections to Ira Baldwin, who helped set up Camp Dietrich.

So Gottlieb applies for a job at the CIA.

He enters on duty on July 13th of 1951.

And thus begins, as Stephen Ginzer says in his book, Poisoner in Chief, the beginning of a career at the bizarre intersection of extreme science and covert action.

And Gottlieb, when he joins, it kind of seems like he was signing up for a new adventure.

You know, again, we have this kind of wanderlust spirit, right?

So, Gottlieb knows they needed a chemist, but that's about it.

And he said he didn't understand anything else they needed.

He would try it for six months and see how it went.

And what quickly ends up happening is that he gets thrust into the kind of technical services staff, which at the time at the CIA is very small.

It's probably a few dozen people.

And this Bluebird project that the TSS staff is involved in is very sprawling, but it's disorganized and lacking complete focus.

And Gottlieb is joining in the early years of the Korean War, where, as we mentioned, the fear of communist brainwashing, in particular coming out of the Korean War, is hitting a fever pitch.

I mean, there's a New Republic headline from this era, communist brainwashing.

Are we prepared?

And you get references to some of these prisoners essentially having been fed or given psychoactive drugs to get them to say anti-American things or to lie about their experiences.

So Gottlieb's kind of entering the CIA in the middle of that fever.

Because no one could understand why anyone would say anything anti-American.

No one could understand.

No one could understand it.

Unless you've been fed psychotropic drugs.

I guess that's the thinking at the time, isn't it?

That's right.

It does 70 plus years later seem borderline insane.

But many of the things that we're going to talk about in these episodes will sound insane, are insane.

And at the time, very, very smart people thought they were absolutely 100% necessary to do, we should say.

So, Gottlieb joins the CIA and a newly formed chemical division, which is a great, a great title.

The chemical division inside the technical services staff is what he joins.

And Gottlieb, we should say, is joining a CIA that in that era was pale, male, and yale for the most part.

And Gottlieb is a fish out of water, right?

We'd argue that he's pale and male, but he's not definitely not Yale.

And he's Jewish, which is a bit out of step for the kind of patricians of the CIA in that era.

He's not Ivy League educated.

He went to city college and then he went to the University of Wisconsin.

So he's kind of this outsider on the inside.

And I mean, even things like he's living out in that cabin.

right in Vienna, Virginia.

He's growing much of his own food and then like bringing it in for lunches.

So it does sort of beg this question of why in the world Alan Dulles picks Gottlieb.

And one theory, which I think is plausible, is that Dulles, and this is true, also had a club foot, which I did not know about Alan Dulles.

He had one operation to fix it, but both Dulles and Gottlieb wore prosthetic shoes for most of their lives.

There would have been like a little bit of a limp.

They probably never talked about this.

I'm going to guess.

I bet there were not many club Clubfoot support groups at CIA at the time, but it becomes a kind of potentially a bond between the two of them.

It's an interesting question, I suppose, because it's hard to understand otherwise, isn't it?

How Gottlieb fits in in that world.

Yeah, but inside the chemical division at that point, there are a very small, you know, handful of people, right?

So he's clearly an expert, right?

Kinzer wrote in his book.

Over the next decade, they would stumble together through undiscovered frontiers.

So the two of them, I think, do hit it off.

And Dulles is going to become a patron of Gottlieb's and promoter of Gottlieb's work for the remainder of Sid Gottlieb's career.

Now, in this period, Bluebird becomes Artichoke.

Now, that takes on a new code name.

Supposedly, Artichokes were Dulles' favorite vegetable.

There's also a theory that it was named for a murderous New York gangster known as the Artichoke King.

It also could have been, yes, really.

But it was changed because at this stage, the CIA was letting the military in on Bluebird, and the Navy already had a Project Bluebird going, so they changed the name.

Now, for reasons that we'll come to later, but will undoubtedly be obvious to many listeners right now, is that little is known about the operations and experiments carried out under Artichoke.

Mysteriously, not many documents have survived.

But the goals of this project are very, very similar.

And Gottlieb will later say, Artichoke was really all about how would we interrogate someone who's hostile and wants to withhold information.

How to break them.

How do you break somebody, right?

I mean, it's really brutal stuff.

The directives to the artichoke teams are, you know, they're carrying out these interrogations in safe houses.

This could be, again, in Germany or Japan.

It could be prisoners.

It could be defectors.

And they had to have bathroom facilities because occasionally the artichoke techniques produced nausea, vomiting, or other conditions, which, quote, quote, made bathroom facilities essential.

And the scope is, again, very broad.

They're looking at new chemicals and drugs.

How do you deliver them?

Things like the effects of like high and low pressure on humans, effect of sound vibrations, ultra-high frequency.

They're also looking at things like bacteria, fungi, poisons, plant cultures that can produce high fevers, electroshock hypnosis.

whether electronically induced sleep could be used as a means for gaining control of an individual.

The agency drew the line, though, Gordon, you'll be pleased to know at lobotomies

as a measure for use in operations.

It drew the line somewhere.

The rest of it, it doesn't sound like torture, though, basically.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically medical torture.

That's what we're talking about.

And by the 1950s, we have artichoke teams that are out in West Germany and France and Japan and South Korea.

Sometimes they would be sent out at the request of a CIA station, a local station, to deal with a prisoner.

At others, they might want to test a new technique or chemical and kind of put out a call if there were available subjects.

And in sometimes, I mean, quite darkly in coded language, there would be messages in these cables about whether body disposal would be required.

So, you kind of see this connection right off the bat before we even get into the much more sprawling world of MKUltra.

That this nexus of kind of mind control and drugs in particular, but also all other manner of kind of coercive techniques.

It's really dark stuff really quickly.

And there with Sydney Gottlieb now inside the CIA at Langley.

Let's stop.

And then next time, we'll look at how this world shifts into the realm of drugs and particularly LSD and its role in trying to control the human mind.

We'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.