- Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer
Behavior modification experiments that were secretly conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the MKULTRA program in the 1950s and 1960s continue to reverberate half a century later. The agency's amoral, instrumental approach to human subject research often involved the exposure of unwitting persons to mind-altering drugs such as LSD and to conditions of extreme stress, leading to at least two documented fatalities.
The public disclosure of the MKULTRA program in the 1970s during Senate investigations of CIA activities and the program's further exploration in John Marks's 1978 book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control had both political and cultural ramifications. The recklessness of the program helped to motivate the creation of new intelligence oversight structures. It also inspired enduring public fascination with and revulsion toward the CIA.
In this new book, the author and journalist Stephen Kinzer seeks to refresh the tale of MKULTRA for a new generation of readers by focusing on Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who led the program with vigor and unrelenting intensity. But any effort to update this story is hampered by the fact that most of the program documents were deliberately destroyed in 1973 at the direction of CIA Director Richard Helms, and most of the principals, including Gottlieb, are long since deceased.
To fill out the narrative, Kinzer therefore makes a problematic choice: he turns to the literature of conspiracy theory and anti-CIA polemic, treating them uncritically as reliable sources. In an early sign that something is amiss in the book, Kinzer reports that in 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles "probably" supplied poison that was produced by Gottlieb to a disgraced CIA officer named James Kronthal, who then used it to commit suicide (p. 70). This startling allegation does not appear in standard CIA histories or biographies of Dulles. So what is Kinzer's source? To a reader's dismay, an endnote indicates that the information comes from a book called Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (p. 292). In other words, it is a source that cannot be taken at face value. Yet Kinzer does not question it.
It is surely possible to discover new information and to develop new perspectives by consulting unconventional and even disreputable sources. But such [End Page 243] materials need to be scrutinized with extreme care and to be evaluated in the light of existing knowledge. Too often here they are simply incorporated into the text at face value.
Kinzer quotes from "one study" that asserts as a fact that CIA doctors performed brutal mind-control experiments on dozens of North Korean prisoners of war and other so-called expendables and then killed the victims and burned their bodies (p. 64). But the "study" turns out to be a book of unsubstantiated allegations by a British writer of sensationalist exposés named Gordon Thomas, whose work is generally held in low regard.
"Many of Thomas's claims in this book seriously challenge the credulity of his loyal readers," investigative journalist H. P. Albarelli wrote in his own book about MKULTRA (which argued controversially that one of the known MKULTRA fatalities, Frank Olson, was actually murdered). "Besides being wrong," Albarelli added, Thomas's allegations are "unsupported by any documentation or cited sources." Writing in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA book reviewer concurred, declaring of the Thomas book that "serious students of intelligence may ignore it without penalty." Oblivious to such criticism, Kinzer relies on Thomas as well as Albarelli, along with a menagerie of other dubious sources.
An assertion attributed innocently to "one history of the CIA" (p. 189) is actually taken from an inflammatory book called Drugs as Weapons against Us: The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Leftists (p. 310).
By uncritically relying on such conspiratorial works...