Sidney Gottlieb
Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.
A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master's degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA.
He was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion.
[2] Gottlieb graduated from James Monroe High School[citation needed] in 1936, and enrolled in the free City College in NYC.
In order to take the specialized courses he wished to have, he first attended Arkansas Tech University, where he studied botany, organic chemistry, and principles of dairying.
His success at ATU won him admission to the University of Wisconsin, where he was mentored by Ira Baldwin, the assistant dean of the College of Agriculture.
His accomplishments at the university, paired with a glowing recommendation from Baldwin, won him admission to the California Institute of Technology, where he received his Doctorate in Biochemistry in June 1943, writing his thesis on "Studies of Ascorbic Acid in Cowpeas."
In 1948, he found a job at the National Research Council, where he described being "exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens."
These Cold War-era fears also contributed to the CIA expanding its experimental methods over the next two decades, worrying that the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners.
Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni of Princeton University, referencing the new battlefield of "brain warfare" as the battle for controlling the human mind.
He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research, including non-consensual human experiments.
[8] Gottlieb administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything".
Visited in retirement by the son of his late colleague Frank Olson, he was residing in Culpeper, Virginia, where he raised goats, ate yogurt, and advocated for peace and environmentalism.
