Poisoner In Chief
author of All the Shah's Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA's secret medical experiments of the 1950s and '60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturer-the agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace-including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world. Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb's reckless experiments on "expendable" human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats. During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy.
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5recommend
12mentions
8people
2020–2024years
58% recommend42% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Poisoner in Chief was a great read.
- I think the name of the book is Poisoner in Chief, it's a great history of how Gottlieb ran that program and its impacts on society.
- If anyone wants to dig further, Poisoner In Chief by Stephen Kinzer is a "fun" read about Sidney Gottlieb and these programs.
- For anyone who wants a good background "Poisoner in Chief" is a maddening and captivating read that describes much of the CIA's use of LSD: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43565322-poisoner-in-chi...
- I wish people better understood that their advocacy of and for drugs is and was pushed by the CIA to essentially deconstruct and damage a society that would otherwise organize and oppose the will of the ruling class. There is an interesting book that was recently released, The Poisoner in Chief that is a good introduction, even though it seems it is meant to also be a bit of a rehabilitation of a horrible human, Sidney Gottlieb.
- > I wish most of all that CIA would scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA files and declassify them and at least tell us WHY they ran this brothel and secretly drugged Americans with LSD. If we knew their specific reasons why, at least we could then forgive and forget. As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
Poisoner in Chief is a great recent book detailing the CIA's search for mind control via MKUltra and associated projects; well-researched and written.
