Most recent post: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2025-10-30/top-secret-testimony-cias-mkultra-chief-50-years-later
Finding that, I learned something of who Sidney Gottlieb was. Strange.
First, two images from an earlier post on the site. You can follow the link if you do not recognize folks. That way you'll find out.
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| grinning for who they were and what they know and did |
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| An event today triggered search yielding this image, and finding the GWU site. |
Best and brightest, all that. Moving on to Gottlieb's MO - as fleshed out in the second of the two opening links.
The long-secret transcripts of Gottlieb’s testimony to the staff of the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”) were published today by the National Security Archive, 50 years after the historic intelligence oversight hearings, along with a selection of declassified CIA memos and other records concerning MKULTRA and related projects that Gottlieb was asked about during his Senate deposition. The Church Committee transcripts are among the highlights of the Digital National Security Archive collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, published in 2024 by ProQuest. Other documents were found among the recently declassified documents archived in the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room.
Among other things, the recently declassified transcripts from the closed-door hearings held on October 15-18, 1975, shed new light on the bizarre and abusive research projects associated with Gottlieb and the Agency’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), including the administration of mind-altering drugs in situations where, in Gottlieb’s words, “the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.”
At one point, Senate staffers asked Gottlieb about a document indicating that one interrogee had been secretly given a large dose of LSD that induced a “severe classic paranoid reaction” so extreme that he was declared mentally ill by an equally unwitting psychiatrist and was thus “discredited in the eyes of the group with which he had been working.” Gottlieb said that “it had been recognized that this kind of thing might be a need that P-1 [LSD] might help with, to make somebody behave erratically for the purpose of his colleagues losing faith in his ability to act responsibly.”
Other parts of the hearing focused on Gottlieb’s involvement in CIA assassination plots, especially those targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and its support to the activities of other federal agencies through MHCHAOS, the subject of the earlier Rockefeller Commission report. The Committee also asked Gottlieb about his own experiences taking LSD, which he characterized as “disorienting” and “otherworldly.” Gottlieb said that LSD “gave you propioceptions,” which he said meant “perceiving feeling in yourself as opposed to feelings of things outside yourself, like seeing a door as opposed to feeling something inside your own body.”
Details about MKULTRA and related programs first emerged in the mid-1970s alongside revelations about CIA assassination plots and other misdeeds that were exposed in leaks to the media and in official investigations, most notably by the Church and Pike committees and the Rockefeller Commission. In the late-1970s, the CIA’s Victims Task Force reached out to presumed victims of the CIA’s experiments, some of whom later filed lawsuits after learning that the Agency had secretly drugged them or members of their families.
As author Stephen Kinzer wrote in Poisoner in Chief, his 2019 biography of Gottlieb, it was in 1975 that journalists writing about revelations from the Rockefeller Commission “pierced Gottlieb’s shroud of anonymity for the first time” after stories linked him to the death of Army scientist Frank Olson, drug tests on unwitting U.S. citizens, and the destruction of records related to these programs. “Gottlieb was an obvious target” according to Kinzer. His chief bureaucratic ally, Richard Helms, who had been named CIA director in 1966, had been fired two years earlier. MKULTRA “was no longer well regarded.” Perhaps worst of all, “he was tainted by the fact that his Technical Services Division had collaborated with the Watergate burglars.”
But while declassified records and other evidence show that U.S. research into human behavior control and efforts to operationalize these methods extended across multiple U.S. agencies and involved numerous officials, few, if any, were more central to these programs than Gottlieb, who was involved in nearly every aspect of the program, including research, field tests, and the use of these methods in intelligence operations. The declassified evidence also shows that Gottlieb was a key bureaucratic player who signed off on hundreds of MKULTRA subprojects and who developed clandestine relationships with universities, prisons, hospitals, private laboratories, and private foundations that made it difficult to trace the programs back to the Agency.
See, also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb -- https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb
https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/pop-culture/what-was-project-mkultra-inside-the-cia-s-mind-control-experiments-that-may-have-involved-charles-manson/ar-AA1Aw4ZM
There is nothing like an ongoing story that admits thoughts of spin-off happenings.
Charlie Manson, Charlie Kirk, each with his own place in Americana legend. Bless the Charlies.