Project Mind Control
Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real-life “Manchurian candidate.”
In conjunction with MKULTRA, Gottlieb also plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA in 1973, he tossed his files into an incinerator. As a result, much of what happened under MKULTRA was thought to be lost—until now.
Historian John Lisle has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MKULTRA, straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time, Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally, Lisle highlights the dramatic story of MKULTRA’s victims, from their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice.
The consequences of MKULTRA still reverberate throughout American society. Project Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing of chapters in CIA history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Lisle (The Dirty Tricks Department) offers new insight into the CIA's notorious MKULTRA program in this enthralling account. Lisle gained access to previously unknown depositions (823 pages of material) in five civil rights cases filed against the program and its head, Sidney Gottlieb, by its victims. Among them were prisoners used "as guinea pigs in secret drug experiments," one of whom described "horrible periods of living nightmares" and another who "tried to kill himself by... chewing off his own arm." The depositions, Lisle writes, offer unprecedented access to "the minds of those who perpetrated" the program's "infamous acts," including its mind control experiments involving LSD, in which unwitting victims were dosed with the drug, and which were ultimately intended to create "remote control" assassins. (MKULTRA was also involved in direct assassination attempts, including a plot to poison Patrice Lumumba.) Lisle tracks the program from its origins dosing fellow CIA employees to its sprawling use of frontmen, or "cutouts," to carry out experiments, keeping his narrative concise by sticking close to the depositions (one of Gottlieb's more chilling assertions: "We had no trouble whatsoever recruiting" the cutouts. "I don't remember anybody ever saying, ‘I would rather not work on this'"). Declining to delve into conspiracy (the mind control experiments were not successful, he reassures), Lisle instead pinpoints institutional failures that led to a feedback loop of secrecy. It's a stark portrait of horrifying government abuse.
