GROSS: Even Timothy Leary, who turned a lot of people onto LSD and helped guide them through trips, he found out about LSD because of Sidney Gottlieb. And actually, it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended. So CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb, although of course he never knew that name. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MKUltra, by Sidney Gottlieb. Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control. In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. Actually, the MKUltra director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. KINZER: As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MKUltra. Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. So MKUltra was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control. They wanted to be able to have a truth serum that would make prisoners say everything they knew, also an amnesiac that would make people forget what they had done and, most important, a technique or a drug that would allow the CIA to direct agents to carry out acts like sabotage or assassination and then forget who had ordered them to do it, or even that they'd carried out the actions at all. So MKUltra was a project lasting up to 10 years in which the CIA sought to find ways to control the human mind. And seized by this myth, the CIA not only believed that communists had approached or reached this Holy Grail, but that the CIA should also find out a way to do it. We were fed a lot of books and movies about the idea of mind control, that you could hypnotize someone or give someone a drug that would make them do something that otherwise they would never do. This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something cultural that affected everybody that grew up in the early 20th century. STEPHEN KINZER: During the early period of the Cold War, in the late '40s and early 1950s, the CIA became paralyzed with a fear that communists had perfected some kind of a drug or a potion or a technique that would allow them to control human minds. Let's start with, what was the mission of MKUltra? TERRY GROSS: Stephen Kinzer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Kinzer spoke with Terry in September of last year, when "Poisoner In Chief" was released in hardback. Allen Dulles was the CIA director during most of the years MKUltra was in operation. One of Kinzer's previous books was about the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Stephen Kinzer's new book is called "Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control." It's now out in paperback. He also became head of the CIA program that creates high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Gottlieb was also the CIA's chief chemist, creating poisons and innovative ways of surreptitiously administering them. He ran it until it was shut down in the early '60s. The MKUltra program was created by Sidney Gottlieb in 1953. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture.
LSD was just one of the mind-altering drugs that were used in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior. Our guest, journalist Stephen Kinzer, has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. There's a lot more to the CIA experiments with LSD, and some of it is pretty horrifying. You may have heard stories about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD, through which '60s counterculture luminaries like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were first introduced to the drug.
0 kommentar(er)
