Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was a Jewish chemist who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MK-ULTRA.
Project MK-ULTRA was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. It began in 1953. MK-ULTRA used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
Sidney Gottlieb was a Jewish chemist who joined the CIA in his early 30s and within two years was appointed by Allen Dulles the designer and head of the agency’s vast and top-secret MK-ULTRA program, which was initiated to explore mind control, human programming, assassination and much more. Gottlieb was an expert in poisons, especially those with psycho-active effects and quickly became known as “The Black Sorcerer” and “The Dirty Trickster”. It was Gottlieb, with virtually unlimited CIA financing who initiated a truly massive program involving psycho-active drugs, psychic driving, the most evil portions of psychiatry and psychology, and a great many lethal poisons, to research and develop “techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything”. Torture, “terminal interrogations” and a sickeningly-wide array of inhuman inflictions, were all part of MK-ULTRA under Gottlieb.
It was Gottlieb who personally overdosed Frank Olson on LSD, and it was Gottlieb’s right-hand man who rendered Olson unconscious and threw him out the 13th-floor window of his hotel room, to rid the CIA of a potential whistle-blower. It was Gottlieb who arranged the cooperation with the similarly-perverted animals at the UK’s Porton Down, where they executed their ‘terminal interrogations’ safely away from American soil, and where Frank Olson witnessed such horrors that he planned to leave the CIA and go public with his knowledge.
It was Gottlieb who traveled to the Congo with poisoned toothpaste which he delivered personally to Larry Devlin, the CIA’s station chief, to administer to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though Devlin managed to kill him by other means. It was Gottlieb, acting through Allen Dulles on orders from US President Eisenhower to “eliminate” Lumumba and thus open the country to American business. It was Gottlieb who hatched hundreds of plans to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, especially including all the poison-related attempts, such as cigars, wet suits and fountain pens. Castro set a Guinness World record for surviving 638 American assassination attempts.
It was Gottlieb who arranged for Iraq’s General Abdul Karim Qassim’s handkerchief to be contaminated with Botulinum in yet another assassination attempt. He developed poisoned chocolates and cigarettes intended for Jamal abd an-Nasir of Egypt. He regularly traveled with his diplomatic bag containing CIA-developed bio-toxins designed to mimic a disease endemic to that area, or with specifically-cultured lethal viruses.
